Emphasis mine, of course.
Make no mistake: every moment is a choice, a choice between this world and that one, between heavens teeming with life and a lonely machine grinding across red stone, between staying at home with tea and raspberry cookies and ruling Mars with a hand like grace.
Catherynne M. Valente, from the stunning Lightspeed: Year One.
Over the weekend I finished reading Mary Roach’s Packing For Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void. I highly recommend it. I have a lot of passages bookmarked, including bits about hibernation and fatal wind speeds, but I thought this was the best.
The tougher questions is not “Is Mars possible?” but “Is Mars worth it?” An outside estimate of the cost of a manned mission to Mars is roughly the cost of the Iraq war to date: $500 billion. Is it similarly hard to justify? What good will come of sending humans to Mars, especially when robotic landers can do a lot of the science just as well, if not as fast? I could parrot the NASA Public Affairs Office and spit out a long list of products and technologies spawned by aerospace innovations over the decades. Instead, I defer to the sentiments of Benjamin Franklin. Upon the occasion of history’s first manned flights – in the 1780s, aboard the Montgolfier brothers’ hot-air balloons – someone asked Franklin what use he saw in such frivolity. “What use,” he replied, “is a newborn baby?”
From Surface Detail by Iain M. Banks, emphasis mine:
It was a truism that as a scientific society progressed, its ships gradually ceased to be strictly utilitarian designs in which almost every part was in some way vital to the running of the craft. Normally they went through an intermediate stage where the overall conception was still limited by the necessities imposed by the environment in which the vessels travelled but within which there was considerable opportunity for the designers, crew and passengers/inhabitants to fashion them pretty much as they please, before – usually some centuries after the gross vulgarity of rocket power – simple space travel became so mature a technology it was almost trivial. At this point, practically anything not messily joined to lots of other important stuff could be quite easily turned into a space-capable craft able to transport humans – or any other species spectacularly maladapted to hard vacuum and the somewhat industrial radiation environment generally associated with it – to (at the very least) different parts of the same stellar system.
Now I want you to think about how almost everyone (in the US) has a so-called smartphone, how even teenagers take this technology for granted, how that technology has become “almost trivial.” And then think about our inability to travel to different parts of the same stellar system.