Viva the Red Desert!

I am highly scornful of the way that so many people are so willing to throw so many resources into the effort to send a manned spacecraft to Mars. What's on that planet that rates all the expenditure? Quite clearly there's nothing there to loot, pillage, rape, murder, despoil, infect, enslave, wipe out, racially cleanse, or religiously convert. Consequently there would be no opportunity for Europeans, Americans, Asians, or anyone else to repeat the hideously inglorious episodes that followed the several voyages westward of Christopher Columbus.

The machines that have safely made that long trip to the red planet have sent back pictures reporting the bitter truth. Mars has none of Lowell's canals or any other amenity. Instead it is one big desert, period, on which for humans to set foot without massive protection of several kinds would be almost instant death. It would be a long time, if ever, before anyone could go outdoors there in their short sleeves for a leisurely autumn stroll through the woods.

And good for Mars!

I try to picture the situation if instead Mars was Earth's twin -- a beautiful blue planet covered with oceans, forests, an atmosphere, and, most intriguing of all, signs of something called "civilization."

Can you imagine?

For long centuries already, humans would have been peering at that heavenly body while itching to go there and loot, pillage, rape, murder, disease, enslave, and convert.. No sooner would the telescope have been invented than they would have drawn lines on maps and endlessly redrawn them in the act of fighting wars to determine how the spoils would be divvied up, a la the Spanish, the English, the French, and other national groups in Europe as they slobbered over the Western Hemisphere a few hundred years ago.

And meanwhile the more decent humans -- always in short supply despite popular belief -- would have wept rivers of sympathy for what awaits the unsuspecting inhabitants of that matching blue planet, an onslaught that today would be imminent, given a decade, a generation, or a century or two.

It would not be a pretty picture.

--Provided of course that the Martians would not have long since been preparing the same fate for us, while they wait for us to send them devices that they can adapt to bounce back the favor on us.

Somehow that thought does nothing to improve the picture.

So all praise to that all-encompassing deadly red desert!
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