Directory of Lost Causes (By Quentin S. Crisp)

Life on Mars?

First published on Opera Mon 12 Apr, 2004

Speaking of ennui... In 1971, David Bowie sung perhaps the ultimate ballad of ennui, Life on Mars?, in which he lamented in a tremulous voice the fact that, after however many millennia of evolution, all we can boast of as a species are vacuous scenes of 'Sailors fighting in the dancehall', and 'The lawman, beating up the wrong guy', and eventually, in despair, he wails out, "Is there life on Mars?" The implication, of course, is that there's no life worth speaking of down here.




I've been thinking of this song recently because those involved in the space programme, and many others besides, now have a very literal interest in the answer to that question. Both British and American missions have been sent to Mars to try and discover signs of life, although the chances are that those signs will be of microscopic life that died out millennia ago. But what if there is life on Mars? What if the question that Bowie wailed rhetorically over thirty years ago turned out to be yes? Would that in some way alleviate the vacuousness of life back here on Earth?




Thinking about this question I quite naturally remember an interview with Thomas Ligotti that made me chuckle to myself. Thomas Ligotti, for those who don't know, is considered by many to be the greatest living writer of horror and the natural successor to Poe and Lovecraft. Ligotti has stated in interviews that his basic position is that "it's a damned shame that intelligent life ever evolved in the first place." I'm not sure if that's verbatim. Here is the quote that made me chuckle: 'On the subject of intelligent lifeforms existing in other precints of the universe, I just don't care one way or the other. I can't bring myself to feel that it makes any difference. I remember my youngest brother saying something funny about this subject. He's a big sports fan and as a way of expressing his devotion to football he remarked that if an alien landing were being televised on one channel and Monday Night Football was on another channel, he would watch the football game and tape the alien landing. I think that I'd probably watch the alien landing because I'm not a football fan and there aren't any decent tv shows on Monday. I do remember being disheartened to learn that there might exist some form of organic life below the glacial surface of one of the moons of Jupiter. "There goes another perfectly good wasteland pure of the agitations of creaturely existence," I thought to myself in a mood of relative detachment.'




It's not just Mars where scientists are looking for intelligent life, however. Radio telescopes, as I understand, are combing all quarters of space for any signals that could possibly have an artificial source, signifying intelligent life. So far no such signals have been found, which doesn't look good for those hoping to experience any kind of close encounters. One theory put forward as to why no signals have been found, and why we have not received visits from alien ambassadors, is that, quite simply, self-destruction is built into the very concept of civilisation (or intelligent life). That is, complex civilisation requires a vast expenditure of resources to support. Perhaps planetary civilisations automatically collapse in the process of what is known as globalisation. Perhaps no one has EVER got to the stage of interstellar travel and never will do.


If you want further evidence to support this, try reading the New Scientist when you get a chance. It's a good place to keep up to date with environmental developments, too. For instance, I have just been reading that surveys of wildlife suggest we could be on the brink of a great extinction. Such extinctions have happened, as far as we know, five times in the history of Earth. We seem to be headed for the sixth. Needless to say, one of those extinctions was the dinosaurs. Perhaps we will soon be joining them.


All this rather leads me to feel that Ligotti is right, and that, if there's really nowhere for us to go in this universe, then it is just a damned shame that intelligent life ever evolved in the first place. At the moment I can only think of one other way of looking at it... A Daoist way.


Somewhere in some Daoist text there is a passage that says when human beings follow 'the way' the smoke will rise straight up from the chimneys in the villages, and the people there will be happy to live from birth to death never knowing what lies in the next village. Maybe, rather than wasting our resources on space travel and other such attempts at progress, attempts always to get to the next village and the next, we should just be happy in the village where we are. If we survive at all, that might be our best option.