Mars Captivates the Imagination

I joined the Planetary Society many years ago and continue getting its newsletter, which is now full of actual images taken on other planets. It was founded by Carl Sagan who also wrote Cosmos.

Sagan's words and ideas were like pure poetry to me and made me crave to know more about space and the universe. Carl Sagan is now dead and the Planetary Society has a new leader, Bill Nye, "the Science guy" who I loved to watch on a TV show that sought to reach young people.

Here is the link to the Planetary Society webpage where you can read about and see for yourself what is going on in space. 

I found all of the Star Trek series on television to be engrossing, and liked the way episodes presented ethical challenges and moral dilemmas every week.

My all-time favorite science fiction literary work is the trilogy about terraforming Mars. Red Mars, Green Mars and Blue Mars is a saga about a few hundred colonists from Earth over centuries that follow their arrival, survival and construction of a new world on that planet. The three books were written by Kim Stanley Robinson and published between 1992 and 1996.

Around the time I was reading this trilogy, I went on my own vision quest, which involved preparing for a solo swim across the mouth of the Potomac River, raising funds to bestow upon environmental groups at the finish of my swim and reading all about that river.

For some unknown reason when setting out to make this happen, I wrote some lines upon a state road map that showed where my crossing was to occur. I kept that map in my car under the sun visor. Often when having to stop at a red light while driving, I would take out the map with those lines written across the water and visualize my swim.

Sometime after successfully making the crossing, I let those lines lead a poem I wrote called "On swimming an estuary" reprinted here. I believe we will some day step upon Mars and wholeheartedly support that endeavor because we have always been and need to be explorers.