Mars

That planet's been hard to avoid lately. Whenever you look up into the night sky, there it is. To say nothing of the newspapers and the TV. And, for that matter, the internet.

In nearly every way, this is a Good Thing.

On the night of closest approach, Sam rang up to ask where Mars was, having promised to show it to Ollie (who was in bed by then, but was to be woken up for the viewing). Without even trying, I'd been noticing the planet in the sky on and off for the past week or two, and I told her it was hard to miss. She and Toby couldn't find it, and a quick scan from the balcony confirmed that it wasn't up yet. Now, perhaps I should be stripped of my nerd card for not just knowing when Mars would be visible, but I'm nerdy enough to have Starry Night on my powerbook, so I fired it up, scrubbed forward to find the best viewing time and gave appropriate directions. Some time later, Sam called back to say they'd found it and showed Ollie, who I imagine was as enthusiastic as any 5 year old who'd been dragged out of bed in the middle of the night to see a tiny pink dot in the sky.

A Good Thing, as I say. Like the Hale Bopp comet a few years ago, it's inspiring people to look up and out, to get interested, however briefly, in the way the universe works, to get some tiny hint of a sense of perspective. Not that the small scale parochial details of our lives don't matter -- in a very real sense, they are the only things that do -- but having at least an inkling of where all that stands in relation to the vastly bigger picture -- nowhere, pretty much -- is also healthy.

The only tiny, niggling downside is that much of this coverage tends to give the impression of a freak one-off -- that being able to see Mars is something rare and unusual, rather than something we can do quite a lot of the time (albeit from a bit further away).
Posted by matt at August 31, 2003 04:10 AM