A READER'S RESPONSE TO "BOLDLY GO WHERE NO MAN HAS GONE BEFORE - BUT HOW?"
Does Man's Destiny Lie Out Among the Stars?
In response to my last post - “BOLDLY GO WHERE NO MAN HAS GONE BEFORE - BUT HOW?” - the same friend I addressed in that earlier post responded with this:
“Obfuscation. Mars is in reach. If man can render Phoenix inhabitable, so he can do on Mars. One step at a time.”
Here is my rejoinder:
Obfuscation? How did I obfuscate?
Phoenix, Arizona like Mars?
Not hardly. In terms of their existential fundamentals, Phoenix and Mars are not remotely comparable. At its worst, Phoenix - a bit sweaty in the summer - in every way is vastly more hospitable to human life than Mars... What more did man do to make Phoenix more pleasantly habitable than find some water - not that scarce - and invent air conditioning? No space suits needed to go outside or air-tight bubble habitats to live in. The terraforming task on Mars would be on a vastly greater scale - realistically an infinitely greater scale - and orders of magnitude more difficult than anything required to moderate and make livable any of Earth’s most extreme climates.
And even if it were possible and feasible to eke out some sort of marginal existence on Mars - and I think realistically (rather than hypothetically) it is hardly possible and definitely not feasible - why would you want to?
What would be the point? Life is short and resources are scarce. With a beautiful, luxuriant, bountiful, richly supplied, divinely engineered habitat here on Earth that is perfectly suited to our needs, why spend billions of dollars and years of precious time traveling to a dusty, dry, cold, poisonous world where, unprotected, you’d be dead in seconds and, realistically, the best we could ever hope for is to dig a hole and live like rats in a bubble?
Yes, Mars is within reach, as I acknowledged earlier, and, lest I be accused of being a Luddite, I believe the onward march of science and technology is inexorable. Whether the resulting increasing power is used to good ends or bad depends entirely on the intellectual, moral and spiritual character of those into whose hands the power is placed. Sadly, history seems to demonstrate that where the advance of science and technology facilitates the increase of destructive power it is invariably used to destructive ends, usually by unregenerate, evil men.
Strange it seems that, as history so richly attests, God gave man a natural brain that, unless governed by an intellectually, morally and spiritual enlightened spirit, is inexorably going to give him the power to destroy himself - which, once the power in his hands is great enough, he almost certainly will do - unless his animalistic nature is somehow transformed.
In the beginning, mankind clubbed each other to death, then, with the progress of science, shot arrows and threw spears, then shot bullets, then fired cannons and dropped bombs, then dropped really big bombs. In the beginning, killing was hard work. Now all it takes is the push of a button, the squirt of a syringe or the puff of an aerosol. The whole of mankind is now at risk - and the unregenerate Natural Man, more powerful than ever in history, is raging up and down in the Earth.
Nevertheless, I am not opposed to going out to the Red Planet to have a look. A mountaineer George Mallory "because it is there" sort of thing. But who, having scaled Mount Everest, as Mallory did, would choose to stay up there at the cold, miserable, airless summit and try to live? A quick look around, and then back down to God’s green earth…
I think, as suggested in my post, that some people indulge themselves in this sort of sci-fi fantasy - eternal life as a digital being inside an indestructible machine and never-ending adventures roaming the cosmos - as a means to escape the inexorable reality and glaringly obvious purpose of our existence - our confrontation with good and evil and our being eternally sorted out by how we respond to that confrontation - what we freely choose to make of ourselves in that great conflict.
Believe it or not, there actually are seemingly intelligent men and women who anticipate and even depend upon the development of technology that will enable the digitization of human intelligence and personality and the downloading of that digitized information into self-repairing robotic machines that can “live” forever. All, of course, without having to address the inconvenient issues of God, right and wrong, good and evil. We don’t need Jesus or God. We can resurrect ourselves, live forever and do exactly as we please.
Though the two technologies employed are radically different, it occurs to me that this modern-day Godless mindset, intended to exalt man - the Natural Man - by his own means while circumventing the moral and spiritual aspects of life - sticking a finger in God’s eye - is exactly the same as that of the ancient people of Babel, who, rejecting God’s way of righting wrong - the strenuous, demanding discipline a loving divine Father imposes upon his precious children (Book of Mormon, Mosiah 3:19) for their ultimate, eternal welfare (see also Hebrews 12:7-11) - sought by means of their own worldly ingenuity to find their own way to heaven - in their case by building a tower. The outcome for those people - the frustration of their Godless ambitions and the shattering of their society - was not what they anticipated and will likely be mirrored in the fate of our own arrogant, Godless generation.
The hard and unforgiving reality is that wherever we might go - to the summit of Mt. Everest or down a rathole on Mars - we can never escape the absolute purpose of our existence - the confrontation of good vs. evil, right vs. wrong. We can never escape the test God has designed for us. Thinking otherwise is to fail the test, simply deluding ourselves. The great Juggernaut of God's purpose will role on... We can hitch a ride on top and be carried where the wisdom, love and mercy of God will take us - a glorious place and condition of things that “eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither has it entered into the heart of man” - or suicidally throw ourselves under its wheels and be crushed…
For a wise and loving purpose God, our Friend, has marooned us here on this beautiful, hospitable planet in a distant corner of the universe, walled us in by the incontrovertible laws of physics, and provided us everything we need to live out our days as we go about the business of sorting ourselves out in relation to good and evil - proving to ourselves the stuff we are made of - and thereby charting our course into eternity.
In effect, God says to each one of us what he said to Cain:
"Why art thou wroth, and why is thy countenance fallen? If thou doest well, shalt thou not be accepted? And if thou doest not well, sin lieth at the door." - Genesis 4:6-7
Wherever we are, we either confront the Natural Man (again, Mosiah 3:19) and, by the generous, divinely orchestrated means provided - the Atonement of Jesus Christ - get the better of him, or he gets the better of us and we eternally settle for something less.
Blowing away all the smoke and sophistry, life boils down to just that.
You can run, but you can't hide...
Right vs. wrong, truth vs. lies, reality vs. fantasy, order vs. chaos, law vs. lawlessness, justice vs. injustice, patriotism vs. treason, light vs. darkness, good vs. evil, happiness vs. misery, God vs. the Godless…
You pick…
If you can be fooled, you will be…
These are the times that try men’s souls…
Torquemada