On Monday morning (European time) NASA's Curiousity rover will (hopefully) touch down on the surface of Mars and begin its robotic, semi-autonomous exploration of the Red Planet. I bascially want to say that this is awesome and should be something that excites every Socialist and progressive out there.
There are those that criticise the Space Programme as either (i) a massive waste of money (ii) an imperial hang-up from the Cold War aimed at increasing national prestige. While (ii) is definitely true and (i) can be a useful propaganda point in the right context, its not acceptable (not to mention undialectical) to simply write off space exploration on this basis. Worse still is those who write off space exploration per se and see it as some sort of geekery/impossible abstraction. The second group in particular can sound plausible by arguing that sorting out Humanity's ills on Earth has to be the first step before we even start thinking about anything else.
To those people, I think there is a very simple reply - we have to offer a vision of wholly different existence for humanity in order to balance the vision offered by the current Capitalist society. This isn't an argument for lemonade seas and utopian socialism but it is an argument that we should point out the possible and the likely in future human development. Gene therapies that stop and reduce ageing, the colonisationation of our solar system, artificial intelligence (though I personally think artificial conciousness is a longer way off), cures for cancer, clean power generation, a freely accessible information net, etc, are all things within our power now or within near sight, if society was organised more logically.
As Engels pointed out at Marx's graveside "mankind must
first of all eat, drink, have shelter and clothing, before it can pursue
politics, science, art, religion." So, arguments about food distribution and the equal sharing of the neccessities of life are still key when it comes to condemning the heartless anarchy of the system and highlighting what the possible alternative is. But we want both bread and roses, so we can't ignore the immediate future of socialist society on Earth - that would, undeniably, involve space travel, colonisations of other worlds, even terraforming them. To give this up is to produce an austere vision of the future socialist society.
That is why I think all socialists should be hoping that the Curiosity rover lands successfully and all those who want to see a real exploration of the cosmos should be picking up their Communist Manifestos.
