A sermon by the Rev. Daniel Schatz, delivered at BuxMont Unitarian Universalist Fellowship, February 8, 2004

Sermon:  The Red Planet

-         Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

The Light of Stars

Last August, Geeta and I came home from two weeks in the Canadian Maritimes to a brief visit with my mentor in ministry, Rev. Patience Stoddard.  It had been the first day of school in the small town of Walpole, New Hampshire, and Patience’s daughter had only one homework assignment:  “Look at Mars.”  So, long past sundown, we all went outside with our light jackets and our binoculars and looked up at the red planet, as close to the earth as it had been in sixty thousand years, as vivid as any of us had seen it outside of a telescopic photo.  You could see that it was red.  It burned in the sky like an ember of a dying world.  It looked, for all the universe, inviting.

 Five months later, two Mars rovers are on the surface of the planet sending color photos, geochemical analyses and thousands of pieces of scientific data that may tell us whether there was ever liquid water on Mars and whether the planet might once have supported life.  Even the fossil of an ancient microbe might change our view of the universe forever.

 Mars.  It is the red planet, home to a thousand dreams of lost civilizations and future colonizations – none of which appear likely to come true, but every one of which continues to excite the human imagination.  Only two thousand years ago, Mars was not another world, but a deity, Mars, the god of War.  He was the brutal god, red, perhaps, with anger and with the flush and strain of battle. 

 We don’t find many stories about Mars in our mythology books, because the stories aren’t very interesting.  They are, for the most part, savage – Ovid’s description of the serpent of Mars is of a terrible, poisonous monster, a creature “as huge as the serpent that twines between the two bears in the sky....”  It was perilous to battle the monster, because the one who slew it would in turn become the serpent.  The god Mars was no benevolent deity, even to his friends.

 And yet, since Galileo’s first view through the first telescope, the planet Mars has meant something else – perhaps the home of an alien race, perhaps a planet once like earth, but now dying and drying, a place once flowing with water but now a deserted landscape.  For all our 21^st century acknowledgment that the most sign of life we can ever hope to find on Mars is the remnant of a microbe, I think there are more people than we would like to admit that are hoping the Spirit or Opportunity rover might uncover an ancient artifact of a lost civilization.

 A century after Giovanni Schiaparelli’s observation of canalis or channels on the surface of Mars, I too, when growing up, heard that they were canals, remnants perhaps of an extinct race.  That myth has long been known to be the result of optical illusion, a mistranslation, and bad science however you look at it, but for some reason it persisted so much and so strongly that when Orson Wells produced his radio version of “War of the Worlds,” millions of people actually believed that we were under attack from Martians.

 Perhaps the warlike image hasn’t completely gone away after all.  Nobody ever worries about attacks from Venus.

 It’s Mars that captures the imagination, Mars with its thin atmosphere (too thin, the Mariner 4 spacecraft told disappointed science fiction enthusiasts), Mars with its changeable polar caps, its towering mountains, its sly hints of liquid water somewhere (maybe), its wobbly rotation, its volcano Olympus Mons, the tallest in the solar system; it is Mars that lifts the human spirit into a drive to explore.

 Mars has always excited the human imagination.  From a god of war to the home of little green men to a red ball of ice and mystery, Mars has changed in our minds, but its draw has only grown with the centuries.

 How can we help but be touched with wonder, not only when we think of the scientific possibilities, but when we think of the progress of human science?  We have moved from worshipping the planets as gods to exploring them as frontiers.  The little green men once feared as Martian invaders have been replaced by little metal robots from earth who reach out with tentative grasp into the soil of Mars. 

 This is the moral of one third of all Star Trek episodes –human beings cannot be cooped up.  We have a drive to learn, explore, find ever new horizons of knowledge and spirit.

 It is no accident that the first Martian Rover is called Spirit.

 We may or may not learn more from exploring Mars than we would from any other venture – exploring our own oceans, perhaps, or redoubling our efforts in the science of medicine.  How does one quantify knowledge in any case?  That really isn’t the point.

 What is more important is the spiritual quest for truth.  The more we understand about our universe, the better we understand ourselves.  When Galileo first discovered the phases of Mars, the Western world still believed that Earth was at the center of the universe.  That belief informed everything they were and did.  We were literally self-centered.  It took a scientific revolution to shake us out of that self-centeredness, and that revolution is not yet completely fulfilled.  Whether we look out into the sky or into our own psyches it is with the excitement that comes from the foretaste of new truth waiting to reveal itself.  It is with the wonder that comes from knowing that at any moment we could learn something that would change not only our lives, but all life. 

 In 1926 Annie J. Cannon wrote about classifying stars.  She said that “classifying the stars has helped materially in all studies of the structure of the universe, than which no greater problem is presented to the human mind.  While teaching man his relatively small sphere in creation, it also encourages him by its lessons of the unity of nature, and shows him that his power of comprehension allies him with the great intelligence that encompasses all.”

 The exploration of Mars awakens our curiosity, but it cannot contain it.  Ideally, the possibilities that may await us on Mars will release the pent up passion for truth that has driven so much of human history.  Mars excites us because it awakens our imaginations.

 One hundred years ago the astronomer Maria Mitchell spoke of her work in profoundly spiritual terms.  “We especially need imagination in science,” she said.  “It is not all mathematics, nor all logic, but is somewhat beauty and poetry.”  Reading her words this past week I began to understand why she became a Unitarian.  “Question everything,” she said.  These are words that the great scientists have always taken to heart.  It is vision of science that is not unique to Maria Mitchell, any more than it is unique to Leonardo DaVinci, Johannes Kepler, Richard Feynman or Guo Shoujing, the thirteenth century Chinese astronomer.  It is a vision that permeates all scientific exploration, and extends beyond mere inquiry.  Imagination and poetry are central to the process, because any genuine quest for truth begins with the recognition that what we know is only the smallest part of what we may yet come to understand.  In order to seek truth with fresh eyes, we need to be able to imagine some of the ways in which our universe and our sense of the universe could be different. 

 We need poetry, curiosity and imagination as well as inquiry, whether we are completing the next step in a long series of chemical experiments, classifying quasars, or deepening the spiritual and ethical truth of our hearts.  Maybe one of the reasons the planet Mars awakens us so profoundly is that it reminds us not only how to learn but also how to live with wonder and amazement and a deep yearning for new ways of understanding and being.

 The study of Mars is a spiritual quest as much as it is a scientific one.  It is the symbol of all we may discover about the universe in which we live, a sign of learning and also of hope –hope that even a microbe could give us if it told us that maybe we are not alone in the universe, hope that we may one day find ways to expand the horizons not only of human knowledge but of human living, and the far more important hope that rises in our hearts when we think not as Americans or Europeans or Koreans or anything other than humans from Earth reaching out to another world.

 It’s not that there aren’t problems at home we should be more concerned with than we are  the exploration of Mars.  We all know what they are.  We don’t need to be reminded.  At the same time there are certainly a great many things we should probably be less concerned with than we are with the exploration of other planets.  A recent comic strip depicted the news lead on the day they discover life on Mars.  “In today’s news,” the carefully coiffed anchor was saying, “Life has been discovered on Mars!  But first, we go to the latest on Michael Jackson.”

 Perhaps the excitement many of us feel at the prospect of learning more about another planet can teach us something about the ways we can deal with our earthly problems.  Perhaps in reaching out to other worlds we can teach ourselves how to reach inward to this one.

 About a week after I published the title of this sermon in our newsletter, the exploration of Mars became a hot button political issue, with the President announcing plans to put human beings on Mars within twenty years.  I still don’t know if it’s a good idea or not.  It certainly won’t be if it takes away from all of the other important scientific work we do, like the research performed by Hubble Space Telescope.  Mars is a symbol of the human search for truth and for frontiers outside our world, but it isn’t and shouldn’t be the only direction of our exploration.  It may not even be the most informative.  Although it is a measure of human progress and potential that the Spirit and Opportunity Rovers have landed and begun sending back rich streams of data, it is a symbol of human limitations that of the past four attempts at Martian exploration, these are the only two rovers to have survived the landing.  We may not be ready to send people to another planet.

 We aren’t in any race with other countries or cultures.  I can imagine astronauts placing American flags on Mars, and the prospect disappoints – if there’s one thing a frontier on a distant world should remind us, it is that we are a small planet and we must be united if we are to reach beyond our current limitations successfully.  The idea of an American on Mars excites me not in the least.  The idea of a human being on Mars – once we have learned how to do so safely without sacrifices too great to bear – this is far more intriguing.  If we went about it in the right way, our drive to explore the world outside our own might help us grow up as a species so that we can unite in this one.

 This is an optimistic dream, one that is by no means sure.  No study of Mars or any other planet will by itself lift humanity into a utopian society.  Nevertheless, every small lesson we can begin to learn that humanity is not many but one, and that in reality our planet is tiny, is progress toward the spiritual uplift of all people.

 Just as it is no accident that one of the Martian Rovers is called Spirit, it is also no accident that the other is called Opportunity. 

 Perhaps the landing of these two robotic explorers is our opportunity to reflect not only on what it would mean to all of us if they were to make astonishing discoveries, but also on how we might come together as human beings, diverse but nevertheless together, traveling through space and centuries as neighbors and perhaps one day as friends.

 I saw Mars again a couple of weeks ago, close to the horizon in the evening sky.  Its luster was dimmed, somewhat, by the bright crescent moon, but there it was, so small and distant, yet close enough that we have begun to touch it.  I couldn’t see its redness, and I could only begin to imagine the tiny artificial ambassadors crawling so slowly and intentionally across its rust red surface.  It was a beacon in the sky, a reminder of curiosity and imagination and possibility and wonder.  As the eyes of one planet gazed up into another, it was even a reminder of love.  It looked, for all the universe, inviting.

Do not look at stars as bright spots only –

try to take in the vastness of the universe.

- Maria Mitchell