August 28, 2003
It looks good
I missed it last night. I looked for it outside the window of my study just after I'd finished walking the dogs betwen 6.30 and 7.00pm But it was too overcast to see much. It is winter in Adelaide and it has been cold and wet.
Mars made its closest pass of Earth in over 59,000 years last night. Of couse it did not look like that in Adelaide. It would have looked more like a bright light on an aircraft flying across the city.
I cannot help thinking of Heidegger's reaction when he first saw a photo of the earth taken by astronauts in space. It shocked him. He realized that a new possibility had opened up. Human beings could colonize space. They could pollute, lay waste to, and destroy the earth that was their home, then desert it for residing on other planets in the solar system.
There was no need to develop a dwelling ethos to counter a technocratic mode of being that treats the earth less as place of dwelling and more a quarry from which resources have to be extracted and refused dumped.
You can find more about Mars at NASA. It's a technocratic world that is being created and you can see space exploration less as Christopher Columbus, Captain Cook or Charles Darwin and more an attempt to recreate the world anew. There is sense here of a technological will preparing Mars for human habitation through massive terraforming techniques.