WATER ON MARS

Ho Hum. NASA scientists announced that they have found water on Mars. Of course there is water on Mars. We knew that. Should they discover a thigh bone……well that would be news.

TRANSIENT

I cannot tell
whether the humming bird
that frequents my feeder
is the same one,
or whether it is one of many,
making one last stop
on its way to heaven.

ARRIVAL - A SHORT STORY

     In a little farming community in Eastern Estonia, a five minute walk from the famed Puhitsa Convent, lived an eighteen year-old girl with her grandparents, Joosep and Kadri Kallade, who took over her care when her parents developed pneumonia and died within hours of each other.   Her name was Lilisi. She was beautiful, devout and simple. Lilisi  tended the family garden and in bad weather she knitted sweaters for the tourist trade. She had long, blonde hair and her skin had a creamy texture. If she had admirers, they were not in evidence. Young men were scarce in that region of Europe.

   

Working in the garden, Lilisi  sometimes disappeared from the scene. Her grandparents were unconcerned. She usually headed for the near-by copse which had a running stream, many birds and rich natural growth. They gathered that she had lain down somewhere and gone to sleep.

   

On one occasion she was gone for an unusually long time and Joosep and Kadri began to worry. Lilisi finally emerged  from the woods looking disheveled and upset. She had obviously been frightened and had been crying. Lilisi told her grandparents a strange tale. She said  she had been abducted by beings who appeared to be human, taken aboard a strange vehicle and  whisked away into the sky and taken to an odd location. She found herself in a room, lying on a bed surrounded by men in white coats. She had been sedated and was unable to speak or struggle. She said the men drew blood,  poked and probed, even in regions she considered private.

   

Joosep and Kadri were skeptical. They told her she had probably fallen asleep in  the forest and had experienced a bad dream. They advised her to speak no more of the experience and to try to forget it.

   

Events took a new turn a  few months later when Lilisi had all the signs of a growing pregnancy. She continued working in the garden plot for a few months until finally Kadri took her into total seclusion. On an April day she delivered Lilisi of twins, a boy and a girl. Hours later she told her, “ We cannot keep them, you know.You must take them to the Convent. They will find good homes for them.”

   

Crestfallen, Lilisi had to agree. The babies were beautiful, but she could see no other alternative. The family was  very poor and had few resources  for their their upbringing. Privately, Joosep told Kadri, “ She was raped in the forest. Who knows what to expect of these two. To the convent.....without delay.”

   

That same evening Lilisi parted with the twins.Weeping quietly, she bundled them into a carrying basket. In silence the twins gazed up at her with green eyes. She walked the short distance to the Convent, stumbling in the dark over the uneven terrain. It was a warm evening. Stars shined bright overhead and a thin sliver of a moon  appeared low in the western sky.

   

She set the basket down at the gate, rang the bell and retreated into the darkness, watching from a short distance as the gate opened and a figure looked down, then looked about, then picked up the basket and disappeared within.

POETRY

       A funny thing about writing poetry; it can be a real struggle, especially if rhyming is your thing. If you aren’t careful, the result can be inane, even banal, purely in the interest of rhyming. In any case, if it is a struggle, one should let it go, to incubate for a while. Then one day the words will flow, musically, rapidly, carrying the full message, end to end, without correction.

       The following poem was posted on yourdailypoem.com on September 8, 2015.

EVENING PRAYER

Grateful I escaped, 
Once more,
A hurricane,
A tornado,

An Earthquake,
A flooding,
A lightning strike,
A snake bite,
A tsunami,
A grandmother’s wrath. 

WHY GO TO MARS?

Author’s Note: Trill is a ficticious female acquaintance who makes it possible to write in what for me is a comfortable style.

My Dear Trill,
        

         Odd that while I am thinking about why we should be planning to visit and eventually colonize Mars, you would question me on the same subject. Sooner or later, I should have expected this question from you, and I’m glad you asked, because the lure of adventure beyond our planet, into the solar system and even into interstellar space, prompted, in part, by the success of the Apollo mission, continues. A common cry when the Apollo program ended was: “On to Mars.” But when the estimated cost of such a journey was upwards of a hundred billion dollars, Congressional enthusiasm for the venture cooled. Moreover, the technical challenges far surpassed those that were needed to go to the moon.

         A single problem may prevent any such mission in the near future. One round trip by an astronaut to Mars may cause exposure to cosmic rays equivalent to the total permissible for an entire career. It is a serious problem because brain damage is the main effect, and that could jeopardize the success of a mission where ability to make judgments is a primary requirement. The physics for cosmic ray shielding is simply not known as yet. Earth is fortunate. A strong magnetic field diverts galactic cosmic rays and harmful ones from the sun to the poles.
       Reasons for going to Mars persist. Among them is that humans are born to explore, and examples are cited in Earth’s history ranging from Alexander the Great’s foray to the East with his armies as far as India, the Lewis and Clarke expedition, exploring the west on the North American continent, Livingston in Africa, and lately the Apollo mission to place man on the moon. If one were to look for missions that parallels a journey to Mars for its duration, the sailing of HMS Beagle, from 1831 to 1836 to chart the southern waters under Captain Fitzroy, might be cited. This was the second sailing mission for the ship, on which Charles Darwin was a passenger. The difference was that the ship was able to make stops for supplies and refurbishment. A trip to Mars would have no such luxury. Similarly, the duration of the Lewis and Clark expedition, just over 2 years, in the early 1800’s, the explorers living off the land.

          Other reasons, rather specious, is that in a few million years the sun will expand and engulf Earth and humans must be prepared to move to a planet more distant from the sun. Or that a predictable event will threaten all life on Earth. This could be caused, for example, by collision with a large asteroid, which has occurred in the past. We therefore must move some humans away, to another planet, to preserve the species.This assumes that humans are the only species worth saving, which is arguable. Even Noah saw the value in preserving as many species as the Ark could accommodate.

         Ample water supply is one of the largest consumables for a successful settlement, History of new settlements on Earth tells us that settlers made certain that water was nearby. A future where water is conserved by recycling urine, sweat, wash water, and expelled moisture content from breathing, is bleak indeed, especially if the process follows a likely law of diminishing return. Supplying water by rocket from Earth is possible but a preposterous notion. Scientists are quite certain that subterranean water exists on Mars.

        Supposing a group of would-be colonists were fortunate enough to land in a region close to a under- ground aquifer..... say about thirty feet underground. Initially, a comparable event on Earth would be similar to landing in the middle of the Gobi Desert, where access to a large deposit of local water could change everything.
         For the fun of it, let’s look at the problems associated with getting water from an aquifer to a faucet in a Mars colony structure. To begin, if you drove a pipe down , say thirty feet to the water, you couldn’t pump it with a surface pump as the atmospheric pressure can lift water only 2.4 inches on Mars, versus 33 feet on Earth. With temperatures varying from 70 deg. Fahrenheit to -225 degrees Fahrenheit, freezing avoidance measures would be necessary.

        On Earth, you would call up a well driller, who would promptly appear with his Diesel powered drill rig and a truckload of steel casing for lining the drill hole. On completion of the well hole an electric motor powered pump would be mounted either at the surface, or lowered into the water, depending upon the depth of the well hole. Freezing problems, if any, are easily managed.

        To get water on Mars, significant effort and equipment, designed to function in the Martian envi- ronment, would be required. It is conceivable that well drilling equipment could be transported and erected on Mars. Presumably a drilling rig would be electrically powered, the source of energy being fuel cells or nuclear. Casings to line the drill hole could be of carbon composite to save weight and reduce the need for handling equipment. Transporting steel pipe to Mars borders on the unimaginable. An electric motor driven pump and discharge line would then be lowered down the well casing to submerge the pump in the acquifer.

            Running a pipeline from the well to the settlement has its own set of problems, mainly to prevent freezing. Insulation will not be enough, and burying the pipeline could be ineffective. Possibly something could be learned from the utilities management in far north Earth cities like Vladivostok or Fairbanks, Alaska.

          Could children be born and raised in the Martisn environment? The answer is that nobody knows. Without cosmic ray shielding.... probably not. A second open question is what kind of human would be produced, growing up in a gravity field 38% of Earth’s gravity? Is the human body shaped and sized to a significant degree by the strength of Earth’s gravity? How could you know, other than conducting an unthinkable experiment with newborns aboard the International Space Station?

           I could go on, but it is just as well to conclude with these thoughts: I think you can see that there are no serious driving forces for colonizing Mars or even visiting it. Robots are capable of exploring, providing video coverage, sampling, analyzing and transmission of information at an acceptabe cost. With advancements in artificial intelligence, they will be able to make decisions. That is about the most that would be expected of human explorers, at enormous cost for crew accomodations, crew training, ultra large launch vehicles, Mars surface accomodations and exploration vehicles and return rockets......some of it at high risk to human life. The cost could be prohibitive. The problems are nearly insurmountable. There is little visible payoff that cannot be obtained robotically, and success is doubtful, just as many settlements on Earth have failed and had to be abandoned.
       Just think, Trill. Ten European settlements failed in North America before Jamestown! 

PEOPLE AND BORDERS

Author’s note. Trill is a fictional female acquaintance who makes it possible for me to write in what is for me a comfortable style, on a variety of subjects

My Dear Trill,
    Sooner or later, the issue of legal and illegal immigration and migration was bound to come up, wasn’t it? It is quite an interesting subject, and has implications that people have only begun to imagine.There is no stopping it. You can build the highest, impregnable wall  along a nation’s border and people will tunnel under it. In some regions, like the southern border of Europe. the terrain is such that a wall to keep out immigrants is unthinkable.
    There is more to it, however, than the movement of people to find a better life. That has been going on for thousands of years. Earth is beginning to undergo a big change as scientists forecast a warming trend, caused largely by human activity, that correlates with the increased concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Carbon dioxide traps heat from the sun, and the consequences are rising Earth temperatures, melting of the polar ice, and significant rise in ocean levels. The predicted rise is many feet, which will inundate large land areas and affect a hundred-sixty million people in twenty countries. 
     There is a word of Greek origin, Diaspora, which in general means movement of bodies of people from one place to another, for any one of a number of reasons. They may be expelled from a region, or, like the wildebeests in the African grasslands, move to where food is more abundant, or, as in the  modern world, because opportunities exist for a better life, because homelands have become uninhabitable, or simply expelled from a region due to religious or other ideological differences.
    Examples of Diaspora over history are the Spartan exile of the Messenians in the third and fourth centuries BC, expulsion of Jews from Judea, African slave trade, settlement of the Americas and Australia, and  more recently to the present, refugees from Vietnam, movement North from Africa into Europe and from Mexico into the United States and migration of Jews from Europe and Asia to Israel.
    Where will one hundred sixty million people go?  If you have a globe handy, southern movement is not likely in large numbers.. Africa and South America taper off  into a limited area. Australia and New Zealand cannot accommodate a large influx of people. But look north and you see large areas that are virtually uninhabited that will become more inviting as the climate warms. Siberia, Canada. Alaska, and Norway, Sweden and Finland comprise about ten per cent of Earth’s land area.
    But will they be welcomed? Will the migrations be preplanned and agreed to by the participants and proceed in an orderly manner or will there be border wars, starvation, panics, massacres at the  border, that have time and again been demonstrated to be typical of hegemonic human behavior?
    Earth is evermore rapidly transitioning into a new era, for better or worse. Considering the age of Earth, it seems unusual and somewhat unsettling to witness huge changes within your own lifetime. It is fascinating and not a mystery as to the causes. Attempts will be made to reverse, or at least slow the process, but the  day-to-day needs and desires of a burgeoning and largely heedless population may well negate all such corrective  efforts.