“We will not return to the Moon in my lifetime,” declares Charles Bolden, the head of NASA. To do so, he says, would send the agency “back to square one.” But while there is no enthusiasm for returning to the Moon, there is apparently plenty of appetite for colonizing Mars: 78,000 thousand people have already applied to emigrate to Mars, even though they must abandon hope of ever being able to return.
Now, all I have to do is imagine myself being stuck in a place where there are no dentists, and my sense of adventure is at an end. But for real life examples, we need only think of Dr. Jerri Nielson Fitzgerald, who found out she had breast cancer while she was in Antarctica, or Jane Poynter, who cut off the tip of her finger in the biosphere, to have real life examples of what can go wrong. And each woman returned to the normal world for medical treatment as soon she could: Poynter immediately; Fitzgerald after four months, when weather finally made a flight out possible.
In any event, there is no doubt that such a venture will end badly. Moreover, the end will not be quick. It will not be a like a tornado, that does its damage in a matter of minutes, but rather will drag on for decades, with reports coming in of all the untreatable diseases, the suffering that cannot be mitigated, the relentless boredom, and the horror of being abandoned. And they will be abandoned. Oh, supplies will continue to be sent to them, grudgingly, but the folly of the adventure will soon become clear, deterring others from repeating the mistake. More importantly, we will eventually become just as bored with Mars as we now are with the Moon. The networks will quit reporting on the condition of the colonists, because it will no longer be newsworthy.
If, against all reason, we allow ourselves to take this idea of colonizing Mars seriously, we can see that any plans to do so should be preceded by a colonization of the Moon. It would be a good place to practice on, and one could always return to Earth, if need be. But we are not going back to the Moon, because it’s been done now. The Moon is no longer enough for us to play the peacock. Of course, it is clear that if any colonizing is to be done on the Moon, Mars, or anywhere else, it should be done with robots. They can be designed to fit any environment; they do not get sick, but only malfunction; they do not get bored; and they can be abandoned at any time, without any guilt on our part. Unfortunately, if the idea of men on the Moon no longer can give us a feeling of grandeur, robots on the Moon would be even less suited to this purpose.
There is one sense, however, in which the colonization of Mars will not be in vain. It will finally put an end to all this silliness about placing a human footprint on other planets. The future is with robots. Someday, many centuries from now, when robots are in complete control of things, they may begin genetically engineering new life forms, adapted to dangerous tasks and hostile environments as needed, thereby sparing themselves the need to take such risks or suffer the associated hardships. But for right now, it is up to the robots to explore space, and the failed Mars venture will establish this fact for good. All that will be lost, aside from the lives of the hapless colonists, is our pride. We might take some satisfaction in our ability to create the technology needed for robots to supplant us in space, but it won’t be the same, and there is no point in kidding ourselves about it. The good news is that if technology spoils our sense of pride when it comes to space exploration, it may also vitiate the glory of war.
The three principal motives for going to war are material, moral, and vainglorious, which roughly correspond to the three reasons given for the exploration of the New World: gold, God, and glory. In each of these three categories, we can discern the influence of civilization in depleting these motives of some of their strength. Whereas in ancient times, the material advantages of war were to be found in plunder, rape, enslavement, and the acquisition of territory, these spoils of war are now prohibited by international law. Instead, the material motive for war is today couched in terms of access to markets, free shipping lanes, and natural resources.
These laws forbidding those ancient spoils are a sign that we are more moral than we used to be. On the other hand, in some ways we are less so, and that is also a good thing, for it puts a check on the moral justifications for war. The more civilized nations have learned to mistrust their sense of moral superiority, whereas in ancient times, a sense of righteousness could lead to genocidal slaughter. Once God gave the Israelites the Promised Land, they felt justified in killing every man, woman, and child they found living there. By way of contrast, at the onset of our recent war in Iraq, we made it clear that we were only at war with Saddam Hussein and his minions, not with the Iraqi people in general. Instead, we were bringing them freedom, democracy, and other benefits of Western civilization. Things did not work out as planned, and many of them died anyway, but at least we meant well.
As for the vainglorious motive for going to war, that too has been weakened with the advance of civilization. Achilles’ choice to die at Troy and achieve a glory that would live forever, rather than return home and live a long, comfortable, but inglorious life, was openly admired by the Greeks. Even in ancient times, though, the desire for glory was sometimes indirect. Where glory is mentioned in the conquest of Canaan, for instance, it is attributed only to God, though in praising God, of course, the Hebrews were really praising themselves. Today, however, openly acknowledging glory as a motive for going to war would be thought of as strange, if not just a little dangerous. No one ever says, “I am going to enlist so I can go to Afghanistan and gain glory for myself,” although some may fancy themselves warriors, and harbor such thoughts in private. Instead, modern soldiers are supposed to be motivated by a desire to protect and defend our country, which is a moral reason rather than a vainglorious one. Only after the fact, when valor has been exhibited and the war has been won, do we finally allow ourselves to enjoy the pleasures of vainglory, by parading the returning troops and pinning medals on the heroes.
On the other hand, whereas no one mentions glory as a reason for going to war, honor is readily appealed to as a reason to continue a war, long after the reason for that war has been forgotten. Glory and honor are similar in that both satisfy our vanity, our need to have others think well of us. But glory is something you have to earn, something to be acquired by performing heroic deeds. Honor, on the other hand, is something everyone is assumed to have from the outset, and all you can do is lose it. For the sake of peace then, we not only need to continue reducing the lure of glory as a reason for going to war, but we also need some way of reducing the hold that honor has on us when we want to quit.
This is where robots come in. Although cruise missiles and drones may not be robots in the full sense of the word, they are clearly early forms of them. As such, while we all have misgivings about the use of drones to kill our enemies, we must applaud the way they fail to function as heroes. We may have pride in our ability to create such technology, but as drones are deployed at no risk to ourselves, we can achieve no glory with them. As more and more robots enter combat, then pari passu will the glory of war depart. And this will be especially so when the rest of the world catches up with us, and begin using robots of their own. We all enjoy movies in which humans fight against robots, but no one could take much interest in robots fighting robots, where humans are not involved at all: the battlefield would look more like a junkyard than a field of glory.
And when robots retreat, no honor is lost. In the days shortly after September 11, George W. Bush is reported to have said, “When I take action, I'm not going to fire a $2 million missile at a $10 empty tent and hit a camel in the butt.” If only he had. If instead of invading Afghanistan, we had spent a few hundred million dollars kicking some camel butt, and possibly killing some Taliban and al-Qaeda along the way, we not only would have saved a lot of money and spared the lives of our soldiers, but we could have quit whenever we wanted to as well. If, say, in 2003, we had simply stopped deploying missiles at tents in Afghanistan, our cessation of such attacks could not have been construed as cutting and running. American honor would have been preserved.
And so, while we may deplore the way robots will eventually deprive us of a vainglorious conquest of space, we must approve the way they will eventually dispose of the vainglorious benefits of war.