The Spiritual Significance of Mars
The news and the night sky are dominated by Mars. At a distance of only 34.6 million miles, the Red Planet is now closer to Earth than at any time in the past 55,000 years — that is, at any time in human history. And it is this point that is significant. Human beings have been around for hundreds of thousands of years. But our history — that is, our self-conscious reflection on our past and contemplation of our future — only started in earnest some ten millennia ago. It was only when we devised ways to keep records, to write, to communicate with one another across time and space, that we were able truly to realize our human potential.
Human history is the proud story of the conquest of nature. If evolution does not adapt other animals to their environment, they go extinct. We humans survive by changing, by altering our environment, by creating the means of our survival and prosperity. We must discover how to plant food, how to make clothing and shelters and how to manufacture medicines to cure our ailments. And the tool that allowed us to go from thatched huts and horse-drawn carts to skyscrapers, planes and rockets is the human mind.
The mind is not only our tool of survival but the glorious instrument that allows us to understand the world around us — to discover, for example, that Mars is not a war god wandering the sky but a world not unlike our own.
At the end of the nineteenth century, from his observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona, Percival Lowell opened the public mind to Mars. He believed that he saw canals on the planet's surface and speculated that an advanced civilization had built them to bring water from the Martian polar caps to the cities in the dry, dying desert. Lowell was wrong. There were no canals and no advanced civilizations. With probes and landers launched to Mars, we now know that if there's life on the Red Planet it is probably microbial, not micro. Still, even if only fossils of primitive, extinct life are discovered on a now-dead planet, we will know that where conditions that could support life arise - liquid water, moderate temperatures - so likely will life. This will imply that planets orbiting many of the distant stars we see in the night sky likely are teeming with life — some of it no doubt intelligent.
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