So the Mars rover has found organic compounds in an ancient lakebed. Excellent. Now we can add interplanetary archaeology to our list of distractions from the rot at home.
Forgive me if I do not break out the champagne. The news is, of course, remarkable. It suggests that the building blocks of life were present on Mars billions of years ago, at a time when Earth was itself a primordial soup.
But what strikes me is not the science; it is the cultural response. We greet this discovery with a mixture of awe and indifference, as though finding life’s ingredients on another world were merely another box to tick on a cosmic checklist. We have become a species that marvels at the distant past while ignoring the decay of its own present.
The Victorians, for all their faults, would have seen this as a call to spiritual and intellectual arms. They would have debated its implications for theology, for empire, for the destiny of mankind. Today, we scroll past it on our phones while worrying about the price of milk.
The discovery is a reminder that we are not the centre of the universe, but we have acted as though we are the end of history. The Martian lakebed is a relic of a time when that world had water and, presumably, the potential for life. Now it is a cold, dry desert.
And here on Earth, we are busily turning our own green land into a desert of distraction. I am not a Luddite. I champion exploration.
But I ask: What shall we do with this knowledge? Will it spur a new age of discovery, or will it be filed away as a curiosity while we continue our slow march toward intellectual decadence? The organic compounds on Mars are a mirror.
They show us what was. They should also show us what could be lost. The Fall of Rome did not come with a bang; it came with a whimper, as the barbarians watched the aqueducts crumble and did nothing.
We are the barbarians now, and our aqueducts are the very institutions of reason and wonder. So yes, celebrate the science. But remember: a civilisation that loses its capacity for wonder is already dead.
The Martian mud is a monument to what we might have been. It is a challenge. Will we rise to it?
I suspect not. But I hope to be proven wrong.
