Jeepers! I hope most people didn’t think I was saying…

we have “no good reason to go to Mars“.

My point in writing this was not to say “Going to Mars is a waste of time” but to say, “Trusting the alliance between Big News, Big Science, and Big Government to actually give you factual scientific reportage is a waste of time.” The article was an unpaid advertisement for NASA, full of hype, inconsequence, and disinformation designed to gin up excitement for a Mars expedition by people who are highly invested in doing so, both to save their jobs as NASA and to sell beer and shampoo for the paper.

That doesn’t mean I oppose going to Mars. I think it would be cool and I think it would be even cooler if they found some microbial critters–a discovery as profound as the wheel. Of course, we still couldn’t be sure the critters were properly Martian. They might be hitchhikers on a rock blasted into space by a Terran meteor strike. But still: very cool!

I do think that dreams of Martian colonization are a waste of time: a holdover from the Scientistic Eschatological Vision that still grips our civilization as it casts about for some alternative to the Second Coming as the anchor of hope for the future. Other such false eschatologies include Transhumanism (sort of a vision of the Resurrection for socially unskilled geeks whose promise is pretty much summed up in this fine song by Jonathan Coulton):

Past eschatologies have included the Triumph of the Proletariat and the Final Victory of the Master Race. Current ones include the Triumph of Democratic Capitalism and the End to Evil. Once you lose hope in the actual source of Hope (namely, God incarnate) you don’t hope in nothing, you hope in anything–including Man’s Unstoppable March to the Stars.

But it ain’t gonna happen. We’ll go. We pick up some rocks. We’ll dig around in the dirt and see if there are critters there. We’ll come home. Eventually it will dawn on our civilization that this planet is it until the Eschaton. If we continue to reject the hope of the Eschaton, abandon the sin of Presumption that lies behind all the false eschatologies and see things on this planet get suckier, we’ll have only one other alternative to True Hope: Presumption’s twin sin of Despair.

Of course, our Tradition tells us that we will never fully give up on Presumption. It’s what will make the rise of Antichrist possible. Nothing like being told “you shall be like God” to buck up the pride of those who refuse the Hope God offers. But the offer of Hope, thank God, will remain till That Day when both presumption and despair are defeated and the Hope of the Nations returns at long last.

Then, in our glorified bodies, maybe it will finally be possible to really undertake the exploration of the New Heaven and the New Earth. I wonder what that will be like.