Mars. Please? #mars @roddymcdowall @npr @MSTK3info #twilightzone

National Public Radio on the internet has an article today about getting people onto Mars.  I clicked on it because this weekend, we watched Laserblast on Mystery Science Theater 3000, in which appeared the inimitable Roddy McDowall.  After the closing credits of Laserblast (in which they misspelled McDowall's name), we flipped on over to an episode of The Twilight Zone, in which McDowall played the sole survivor in the crash-landing of Earth's first humanned mission to Mars  (Twilight Zone, season 1, episode 25, "People Are Alike All Over."  This episode is based on the short story "Brothers Beyond the Void" by Paul Fairman in Fantastic Adventures March, 1952, and was also included in August Derleth's anthology Worlds of Tomorrow.)

And let me tell you what... after perusing the web article about the science fact of humans visiting Mars, I think I'll be sticking to the science fiction of humans visiting Mars. 

For one thing, why aren't our governments getting off of their fat-cat rear ends and getting us out into the solar system?  The article quotes President Obama as saying that we'll work toward a mission that gets people into orbit around Mars and then get them back home, and that a Mars landing would follow sometime after that.  Well I say, heck with that, if we're going to get people that close to the red planet, then make it a landing mission.  How much of a bummer would it be to be the astronaut that got into orbit around Mars, but didn't land?

For a second thing, enough with the robots.  Yes, we can send robots into space and out to the other planets.  And we have.  Remember the Viking lander in 19-freaking-76?  We put a robot on Mars 38 years ago.  Time for humans to follow.

And finally, who are these people commenting on the NPR website in general, and this article in particular?  Most of them have a hard time stringing two words together , and when they do, they are all like, "We shouldn't go to Mars!" and "Why would we want to go to Mars?" and "There's no movie theater on Mars so no one in their right mind would want to live there?"  (I'm not even making this one up.)  I guess I've bought into the stereotype that NPR listeners and PBS viewers trend toward the more intellectually curious of our society.  But if these comments are representative of the intellectually curious in our country, then I weep for the future.

NPR article at Mars or Bust: Putting Humans on the Red Planet.