Blues For A Red Planet

PUP Laboratory High School, Santa Mesa - It was past 2 in the afternoon and most of the classes had already ended. On a balmy sunny day, most of the Fourth Year students would congregate near the basketball court, on a lone Mango tree they used to call "Punong Bastos." I don't know how that innocent tree exactly got its nickname, but I've heard that those who gather under its sickly branches would talk about their perversion in between Basketball games the whole afternoon.

In those juvenile years, I was a geek. Instead of watching the other guys dunk and do alley-ups in the basketball court, I scurry past the other students in hopes of getting out of the campus first. I was not alone in this endeavor, I have a geek friend, who we'd call "Techzone" for the lack of a better name for him.

Now Techzone was not only a geek, he had a brilliant and creative mind to boot. At a tender age of 15, he was able to assemble a small robotic crawler using wires and dynamos he bought from a hardware store. We would rush past the other students who would talk about their petty crushes and shallow angst all the time. Instead of wasting ours on teenage issues, we talked about the future and how we wished to live long enough to be part of it.

Techzone and I were into Science Fiction. We would talk about Babylon 5 and all those spaceships that left us teary-eyed whenever we see them on television. Our endless blabber would not stop there. Soon, our conversations would shift from fantasy to something closer to reality by delving into subjects like space exploration and planetary colonization.

The Astro Physicists at Nasa talked about how to send rockets into space at a cheaper price, while the capitalists talked of how to make money out of space. We on the other hand, drowned our thoughts of human settlements scattered throughout the Solar System. We thought that such step was vital, especially to our own survival. This was the time when Armageddon and Deep Impact was shown on theaters and the image of an asteroid hitting Earth was the stuffs of nightmare to us then.

At some point, we attempted to go further and talk about Interstellar Travel. However, we found such topic too advanced for our dreamy minds. I graduated in high school an astronomer, but the moment I stepped into the university, I became as image conscious like everyone in my clique.

Techzone on the other hand, would go into college full of spark and bright ideas inside his head. Four years after we parted, he became a master programmer in one of the biggest outsourcing company in the country.

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The story of Techzone and my geeky past was inspired by several Front-Page newspaper photos I saw at a newsstand this afternoon. What caught my attention was the picture of a human object floating in mid-air with peach sky and barren desert of a desolate planet as backdrop. According to Wikipedia, a US spacecraft had successfully landed on Mars.

I honestly thought that the news would only create minor ripples, considering the troubles we face everyday. Yet, despite the woes of humanity - from rising oil prices to global warming, I was fascinated at how the media greeted the news with much sensation it evoked a sense of hope, awe and wonder to those who were too weary to hear the concerns of the earth.

I do not know what Techzone's feelings were after hearing the news. I am not even sure if he even bothered to read about the Mars Landing on the news today. Surely, the achievement was something that should be celebrated by scientists and space geeks around the world. It was, after all, last 2003 when we were able to land an object on Mars.

As for me, the news stirred some almost forgotten memories of Techzone, and how he was able to catch my attention and appreciate his passion that nobody in school would find interesting. It was him, who had let me take a peek on his telescope to see the rings of Jupiter and the craters of the Moon. It was also him who engaged me in those visionary conversations on our long walks from classroom to the Jeepney stop. Those conversations would awaken my fascination with space and would become the direct cause of my love affair with the stars.

I hope that he still remembers, and feels the same elation and optimism after hearing the news on Phoenix.

Because as life dwells deeper and deeper on earthly concerns, the heavens have become farther and farther to reach. Many don't even appreciate the blue sky anymore.

The stars are for dreamers. And when the world rejoices, even if it was a machine and not a monkey who made the journey to the planets,

It's like humanity was able to transcend the sordidness of its existence and for a brief moment,

able to bask in the glory of ascension.

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"Human beings have a demonstrated talent for self-deception when their emotions are stirred, and there are few notions more stirring than the idea of a neighboring planet inhabited by intelligent beings.

The power of Lowell's idea may, just possibly, make it a kind of premonition. His canal network was built by Martians. Even this maybe an accurate prophecy: If the planet ever is terraformed, it will be done by human beings whose permanent residence and planetary affiliation is Mars. The Martians will be us."

- Carl Sagan, Blues for a Red Planet, Cosmos