Looking at Mars

Punya Mishra
August 27, 2003

If you get a moment, step outside tonight and look up at the sky. There you will find a bright red dot, the planet Mars, the closest it has even been in 60,000 years.

As you look up think about what 60,000 years means. As it turns out archeologists and paleontologists currently believe that 60,000 years ago was the worst time in the history of the human species. The Earth was in the middle of an ice-age. Sheets of ice covered most of the northern parts of the world but in Africa it was causing a very different problem. The immense sheets of ice sucked up most of the moisture in the atmosphere leading to a severe and widespread drought.

The first humans suffered greatly due to this drought. Some estimates put the number of survivors to be as low as 2000 people.

So what did they do? They migrated. They moved out of Africa into what is today the Middle East. On to Europe and Asia and the Americas.

In 2500 generations (that’s about all it takes to span 60,000 years) we have gone from that small band of 2000 to over six billion spread out over every nook and cranny of our planet. We have even set foot on our nearest celestial neighbor, the moon.

Every war we can think of, every invention, every piece of poetry and art, everything in recorded history (and much more that was never recorded), everything happened after this moment.

Think about it, every Hindu, Christian, Muslim, Jew, Hottentot and Eskimo; every Caucasian, every Pacific Islander and every child dying of AIDS in Africa, every terrorist and every victim, Mother Theresa and Bin Laden, me and you, all come from that band of 2000. We are all cousins separated by, at most, a couple of thousand generations.

Think about that as you look up at the sky tonight. The last time human eyes saw Mars this close was 60,000 years ago, as a starving, nearly extinct band of men, women and children began a long uncertain trek towards the future. Towards us.

Note: A month of so after writing the piece above I came across a poem by John Updike in the New York Times Book Review on the same topic. Interestingly, Updike takes a similar yet different perspective. While I went back 60,000 years, Updike goes forward into the future, settng up an interesting counter-point to my piece.

Mars as Bright as Venus
John Updike

O brown star burning in the east,
elliptic orbits bring you close;
as close as this no eye has seen
since sixty thousand years ago.

Men saw, but did not understand,
The sky a depthless spatter then;
goddess of love and god of war
were inklings in the gut for them.

Small dry red planet, when you loom
again,this world will be much changed:
our loves and wars,at rest, as one,
and all our atoms rearranged.