"The New War of the Worlds": Will America Invade Mars for WMD? Or for Oil?
Jan 09 '04 (Updated Jun 11 '05)
The Bottom Line The following absurd essay results from a busy New Year's, and Jury Duty this week. "Any connection to events and individuals living or dead is purely coincidental":
Early last Sunday morning, I was listening to weekend Talk Show Host John Rothman on San Francisco's 50,000 watt clear-channel KGO-AM Station. Rothman, in honor of the landing of NASA's "Spirit" robotic rover, devoted an hour to the event. For the first time, Man had established combined interactive cybernetic communication from a robotic vehicle on the ground of another planet, and in almost real time, communicated from that vehicle's mother ship in orbit around the planet back here to earth: a superb achievement for Science. In a sense, America, mimicking its actions on Earth, had invaded Mars.
Justly admirable, and much more memorable, at first Martian blush, than our foolishly bellicose preemptive acts on Earth over the last year.
To honor our "invasion of Mars," and thus, perhaps, the real start of exploiting "our" Solar System, certainly a crucial step toward manned exploration, Rothman first played the "Five Year Mission Statement" from STAR TREK. He followed that by introducing Walter Cronkite's Memories of Neil Armstrong's 1969 landing on the Moon, which that trustworthy CBS Anchor began by describing Orson Welles' fanciful Radio adaptation of H.G. Wells' "The War of the Worlds," just 30 years before. By Cronkite's account, six million Americans heard that broadcast, of whom something over a million, tuning in late, believed that the Martians had invaded Welles' choice for "Our Town": Grovers Mills, New Jersey. The result was pandemonium, as the mad million shouted at neighbors, phoned relatives, ran into the streets, packed up their families, and began a frantic drive west to escape the little green men.
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Rothman then broadcast Welles' masterful opening of the radio production, which the million, and those who tuned in even later, had not heard:
ANNOUNCER: The Columbia Broadcasting System and its affiliated stations present Orson Welles and the Mercury Theatre on the Air in The War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells.
(MUSIC: MERCURY THEATRE MUSICAL THEME)
ANNOUNCER: Ladies and gentlemen: the director of the Mercury Theatre and star of these broadcasts, Orson Welles . . .
ORSON WELLES: We know now that in the early years of the twentieth century this world was being watched closely by intelligences greater than man's and yet as mortal as his own. We know now that as human beings busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinized and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinize the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water. With infinite complacence people went to and fro over the earth about their little affairs, serene in the assurance of their dominion over this small spinning fragment of solar driftwood which by chance or design man has inherited out of the dark mystery of Time and Space. Yet across an immense ethereal gulf, minds that to our minds as ours are to the beasts in the jungle, intellects vast, cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes and slowly and surely drew their plans against us. In the thirty-ninth year of the twentieth century came the great disillusionment.
It was near the end of October. Business was better. The war scare was over. More men were back at work. Sales were picking up. On this particular evening, October 30, the Crosley service estimated that thirty-two million people were listening in on radios.
ANNOUNCER: . . .for the next twenty-four hours not much change in temperature. A slight atmospheric disturbance of undetermined origin is reported over Nova Scotia, causing a low pressure area to move down rather rapidly over the northeastern states, bringing a forecast of rain, accompanied by winds of light gale force. Maximum temperature 66; minimum 48. This weather report comes to you from the Government Weather Bureau. . . . We now take you to the Meridian Room in the Hotel Park Plaza in downtown New York, where you will be entertained by the music of Ramón Raquello and his orchestra.
(MUSIC: SPANISH THEME SONG [A TANGO] . . . FADES)
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And in a sense, not "The War of the Worlds," but World War II had begun for Americans.
If Rothman had changed the time to Sunday, January 3, in the Fourth Year of the 21st Century, and reversed who was invading whom ----
Ironic on an evening when Saddam had recently been captured and, it was claimed, our own version of "the little green men" were on the run, that our casualty rate had been cut in half; when Americans were burning Christmas trees and gift wrappings, and the Stock Market was up after three years, but the number of unemployed was still rising slightly; when the President was returning from a Texas vacation to the White House with a plan to send astronauts to the Moon and Mars -- in other words, ready to devote his full attention to winning re-election; when eight of the ten Democratic Presidential Candidates were preparing for final debates before their first electoral test, the Iowa Caucuses, but well over 50% of Americans said they would back the President for re-election; when, on the date Colonel Parker had met Elvis, Britney should, for a lark, drunkenly marry a childhood acquaintance, and . . .
We should invade Mars.
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With that preface, and nothing like the talent for soothsaying of The Great One above, let me make ten predictions for 2004. In the next twelve months:
1. Evidence of life will be found in our surrounding galaxy, perhaps on Mars itself.
2. A new treatment for auto-immune diseases, such as M.S. and Parkinson's, will give hope to millions of longer, more meaningful life and mobility.
3. At least several new "Saviors" will be announced (or announce themselves) in parts of the World distant from each other -- like "The Three Christs of Ypsilanti."
4. President Bush will push for the building of the largest American embassy in the World (housing three thousand diplomats) in Baghdad, and staging installations for a permanent party of 100,000 troops on three sites in Iraq, while requesting from Congress another $100,000,000,000 in emergency funds to carry on "The War on Terror."
5. As controversy over Administration pre-knowledge of 911 reaches new heights with the report of an Official Committee of Inquiry, Osama bin Laden will be captured alive, in late Summer.
6. The economic recovery will falter in October, with increases in unemployment, reverses in the real estate market, and a large estimate upwards of the deficit and balance of payments, coupled by currency fluctuations in the Dollar. The price of Gold will rise above $600 an ounce.
7. Mad Cow Disease will be seen as a much greater problem medically long term, as it becomes one politically and economically in the short run, amid charges of a cover up on the part of the American Cattle Industry and Agribusiness, which will become a matter of importance to farm states in the Presidential Election.
8. Afghanistan's Government will collapse in tribal warfare in mid-summer, and more American and NATO troops will be needed there to keep open the new pipeline from Uzbekistan to Jakarta in Pakistan, but if Premier Musharif is not assassinated, India and Pakistan will make an historic agreement on the Vail of Kashmir.
9. Bombs, attributed to multiple terrorist forces from Al-Qaeda to Anarchists, will go off in American cities during the early Fall, causing great panic and confusion.
10. Facing a Democrat team of Wes Clark and Hillary Clinton, George W. Bush will be narrowly re-elected President of the United States, but by Christmas, Impeachment proceedings will be in the works against him, as he admits misleading the American People, and that "the war on terror" cannot be won without a re-institution of the Universal Draft.
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Boo!!
Or . . .
As that quintessential, immortal Great American Alfred E. Neuman said: "What . . . me worry?"
Or, as we say now: "BOOBAH!"
Strange it may seem next New Year's Eve to sit within my peaceful study in San Francisco looking back at these predictions begun in my deserted bedroom, with only Tabasca the Cat for company, on Sunday, January 4, 2004. Strange it may be to think back to October 30th, 1938, when it seemed implausible that America would ever invade anyone, certainly not on manufactured evidence, of the kind Adolph Hitler would use the next year to invade Poland. Strange to watch children playing in the streets. Strange to see young people swelling in the cold, damp plazas, shouting once again: "Hell no! We won't go!". Strange to remember pictures of that marvelous machine, a triumph of American, of Human Science raising its peculiar head to peer at the ruddy Martian landscape.
"Strange when I recall the time when I first saw it, bright and clean-cut, hard, and silent, under the dawn of that last great day."
I remain obediently yours,
[Macresarf1]
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UPDATE -- 1/15/04: Lest you think the above piece is entirely off the wall, look at this report carried in PETROLEUM NEWS in February 2001, one month after the *Bush Administration was sworn into office:
North America's Source for Oil and Gas News
February 2001
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Vol. 6, No. 2 Week of February 28, 2001
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"NASA Ames Center Looks at Problem of Drilling on Mars"
by Kristen Nelson
PNA Editor-in-Chief
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If there is life on Mars, it would probably be microorganisms in water deep below the surface of the planet. Dr. Geoffrey Briggs, director, Center for Mars Exploration at the NASA Ames Center, told “Meet Alaska” that NASA is looking at ways to drill on Mars to look for water — and the life it might contain.
Briggs said NASA has been working with Halliburton, Shell, Baker-Hughes and the Los Alamos National Laboratory to identify drilling technologies that might work on Mars.
The first goal, he said, would be “to drill a hole down into the permafrost, maybe 100 meters as a trial of the technology; ultimately we want to go to several kilometers.”
The earliest drilling opportunity would be 2007, and one of the problems will be power. A very power-efficient system might cut out cores a meter at a time, Briggs said, perhaps grinding away at material needed to get the core at a rate of one core a day for hundreds of days.
Deeper drilling, into the multi-kilometer range, might occur as part of a 2014 Mars mission which would put astronauts on the planet to assist.
Los Alamos developed a melting tool intended for use in high-technical geothermal drilling, he said, and that’s one of the things NASA is looking at. The melting tool would also “tend to sterilize the hole on the way down” which would help with the problem of contamination issues.
Halliburton and Baker-Hughes are working on some very advanced systems, Briggs said, some so advanced they aren’t willing to talk much about them. He said the NASA Ames Center relies on working with people in the industry who “really understand the problems and make us face up to the realities …
“We do appreciate,” he said, “that this is a non-trivial activity.”
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[*Until before his election in 2000, Vice President Richard Chaney was CEO of Halliburton Oil Company, America's number one oil services provider. Where there is life, in geological terms, there may be Oil. Little Green Men -- Watch Out!]
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UPDATE: April 18, 2004: It would seem that one half of my last prediction was badly off track, but five or six others are chugging through the timescape of 2004. We shall do a real assessment at midpoint, June 1st; then, in November, and a summing up, at New Year's.
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March 16, 2005: Here is a link to a year-end assessment of how close I came to getting something right --
http://www.epinions.com/content_4254507140
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