Current Events | Lydia Schoch

For anyone who hasn’t heard this news yet, NASA’s Insight spacecraft is scheduled to land on Mars today. If all goes well, it will dig sixteen feet down and soon begin transmitting data about this planet that no telescope can possible tell. Scientists hope to learn three things from this exploration:

What material the core of Mars is composed of,
What, if any, seismic activity might be happening on this planet and therefore whether the core is solid or liquid,
The temperature of the core.

(Thank you to The Oatmeal for explaining these points in such humorous and vivid detail!)

Once we have the answers to these questions, scientists should able to figure out if Mars is still warm enough to have pockets of liquid water anywhere on it.

Here on Earth, liquid water is one of those things that is necessary in order for life as we know it to exist. If there are martian lakes, ponds, or rivers there that haven’t frozen over or evaporated yet, it’s possible that we could find organisms of some sort in those places.

I can’t tell you how many sci-fi books I’ve read about life being discovered on other planets, mostly on Mars. It’s a trope that the science fiction community has circled back around to over and over again for as long as this genre has existed.

Writing a post about why this mission is important for the sci-fi community would honestly be redundant. We know why we’re excited to see what this mission uncovers about what Mars was like in the past and how habitable it might still be in the present.

Obviously, this would be something that would quickly make it into the history books if or when it ever happens, but today I wanted to talk about why this possibility matters for all writers.

No matter what genre you’re writing in, I think you should pay close attention to how this story develops today and in the future for the following reasons:

We need more books about characters who try over and over again. Not every Mars mission has been successful in the past. In fact, about half of them have failed. I can’t help but to imagine how all of the people who worked on those missions felt when they realized that a faulty piece of equipment, math error, or a technical glitch had prevented their machines from doing the job it was designed to do. To tie this back to writing in general, imagine how a small misstep that your character took or in the opening scene could have equally serious consequences for him or her down the road!
Doing everything right is no guarantee you’ll win. I keep running into stories lately about characters who are triumphant in the end because they followed the rules. While I understand why this sort of plot is popular, I’d sure like to read more examples of characters who face hardships without the plot intending their setbacks to be a lesson for the audience. Sometimes bad things happen to good people -and characters – for reasons that have nothing to do with what they may or may not deserve.
There is such a thing as multiple heroes. If, and hopefully when, we received word today that the Insight has safely landed on Mars and begun performing the tasks it was trained to do, there won’t be one specific person who can take credit for this success. There are dozens of people who worked on designing, building, and programming this machine. This doesn’t even take into account all of the other folks working behind the scenes to support this team as they made all of the necessary preparations to give the Insight the highest probability of success currently possible. The same can be said for many of the imaginary worlds that writers dream up. Very few parts of The Lord of the Rings would have turned out the same way if the only folks trying to bring the One Ring back to Mordor were a few small hobbits!
History can change in an instant. Yes, sometimes things evolve so slowly that it takes years, or even multiple generations, for people to realize that what they were taught growing up is no longer correct. This isn’t always the case, though, and I think that this unfolding news story is an excellent example of how our understanding of science, biology, and cosmology might change in an instant.

I know I’ll be paying close attention to what sort of landing the Insight makes as well as the discoveries it will hopefully be sharing with NASA in the near future. Will you be keeping an eye on this story, too? I hope you will.

Photo by Daniel Schwen.

The whole world is watching you shut down Grand Teton National Park (and every other federally funded monument and national park).

And the Consumer Product Safety Commission.

And WIC.

And a huge percentage of the employees at the Center for Disease Control, the Department of Education, the Food and Drug Administration, the Environmental Protection Agency, the IRS, Head Start, and a whole lot of other agencies.

It’s interesting to me that almost everyone in the Departments of Defence and Homeland Security are essential services but feeding people or cleaning up toxic waste sites is optional.

It’s even more interesting to read that the members of Congress kept their private gym open and their own pay checks flowing while cutting off other people’s income.

Sometimes I wonder if the U.S. has any idea how much of an influence it has on other countries. When I lived in the States I knew very little about what was happening in the rest of the world. With few exceptions I didn’t know anything about the political structures of any countries, what parties were most common in their societies, or how their elections turned out.

I don’t blame the average person living in the States for not being knowledgable about the rest of the world, by the way. When your culture teaches isolationism and your news sites quietly support that notion it’s really hard to know what it is you’re missing or where to begin. I’ve lived here for 8 years and I’m still filling in the missing chunks.

picard-headdesk-main99

It’s different on the other side of the looking glass. Who the average U.S. citizen votes into office has a big impact on the rest of the world, and whether the U.S. realizes it or not everyone else pays close attention when something this big gums up your legislative processes.

Especially when the reason for shutting down the federal government sounds like something out of Star Trek: The Next Generation.

Imagine Captain Picard stumbling onto a planet on the brink of chaos set off not by a natural disaster, war, or unusually virulent epidemic….but because some of the population’s elected officials hated the idea that more people were going to have access to affordable health care so much that they decided to grind the vast majority of their government agencies to a halt until they got their way.

I know this is impractical, but sometimes I wonder if U.S. senators and congresspeople would be less reactive if they were required to live abroad full time for several years before running for office.

Would they still hate the idea of “socialized medicine” if they were rushed to the emergency room at 3 a.m. in Ontario and after a flurry of tests and treatment were only held responsible for paying a $50 ambulance fee?

Could they learn how other societies ensure everyone has appropriate medical care and export some of those tactics to the U.S.?

Is it possible they’d realize that every country has its own political scandals and controversies but that in the vast majority of cases our elected officials don’t shut down the federal government, take back their toys, and stomp home because they didn’t get their way?

Tag Archives: Current Events

Why Writers Should Pay Close Attention to the Insight’s Exploration of Mars

The U.S. Government Shutdown from an Expat’s Perspective

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