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The Human Fascination With Mars

Buzzle Staff
Why are we as a species so interested in Mars? Across temporal, geographical and cultural lines, Mars has fascinated mankind since the beginning of time. Is it mere curiosity, or does it represent a need more primal?
"Curiosity" - what a perfect name for our new Mars rover. Ever since the famed "seven minutes of terror" as the bot touched down on the red planet, Mars has been a topic of conversation even among groups that normally don't discuss astronomy.
What is our fascination with our neighbor? And a fascination it is - Mars has been the subject of countless books, movies, television shows and even conspiracy theories. Even ancient cultures showed an inordinate amount of interest in our rocky red neighbor - so, why Mars in particular?

Our Closest Neighbor

Well, for one thing, Mars is our closest planetary neighbor. It is very visible in the sky, even with the naked eye.
Yes, the moon is closer, and occupies an even larger part of our collective consciousness, but we don't see it as a planet - Mars is an actual planet, like Earth is a planet - and was thought to harbor life until relatively recently.
The very idea of another planet is fascinating. Think about everything we take for granted about our own - a place to be, firm ground to stick to. That's Mars, too. Sure, Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune and Uranus are much bigger and more impressive, but they are gas giants - no terra firma. Just vapor through and through. No, we like the rocky planets, like Earth.
Why not Venus, our other neighbor? It's rocky, sure - but it's also incredibly violent. Venus has dramatic topography that echoes our grandest canyons and our most regal mountains, but she's incredibly inhospitable - we have a difficult time imagining her to be anything like our beloved Earth.
Mars, on the other hand, seems a quieter, gentler place. We could imagine life there.

It's Much Like Earth

Images from Mars show a red, rocky landscape that looks like it might be in the southwestern U.S. somewhere. Exceedingly familiar.
All it lacks is the water - oh wait, Mars has polar ice caps! Know what other planet has polar ice caps? To a civilization that has grown and flourished on this one single planet, we expect a planet to have polar ice caps.
We expect polar ice caps with dry land in between - Mars delivers. It even has riverbeds where water may have once flowed - could Mars be a picture of what Earth may look like someday?
Truth be told, climatologists tell us that Venus is closer to our own planet's future, with the greenhouse effect and all, but it's still Mars that steals our imagination.

Possible Colonization

Even if you're not a bona fide sci-fi geek, you've probably seen at least one movie that dealt with extraterrestrial colonization.
Someday, it may become necessary - soon enough, relatively speaking, that there are people working on it now. The target? Mars. Think about it - it's close, it's about the same size as Earth, it has similar gravity, and the days are 24.6 hours long. Very, very familiar.
All we need is a way to produce food and water, a way to get past the cold, and a way to get there. Once those bases are covered, it will feel more like living in an extreme Earth climate, and not so much like an entirely different planet at all.

Natural Human Longing

Ever since mankind discovered the existence of other planets, there has been a subtle but universal longing for exploration.
We now know how enormous the galaxy is, the universe... and we still don't know the half of it. We've seen millions of galaxies, and we have yet to find one planet like Earth. Many are close, but always a little off - the closest we've come yet is Mars.
We as a species, with our modern knowledge, now have an instinctual sense of how alone we are in the universe. We long for neighbors, for others. We thought they were on Mars - and how convenient that would have been - but were we relieved or disappointed when it was proven otherwise?
In the whole of the universe that we know, Mars is the closest thing we've found to Earth-like conditions. There's nobody home, but maybe we could move in.
True, it would still be just us, but it's the first step toward reaching ever further out into the universe - and that's man's primary instinct - exploration. That's what Mars represents to us.