After the usual fussing about position, location, and lighting for the photograph and the flash bulb had popped (they used to do that), the boy’s uncle, a thin man in his early twenties with curly hair and an odd, crooked smile who had just returned from service in Europe, leaned over a steaming pot of boiled coffee resting atop the pot belly and said, “Want to see the rest—and the best?”

“What could be better than my outfit and a Lionel with figure eight layout?” the boy thought. “Uh, sure,” he responded.

His grandfather, Robert, lifted a sheet off a stack of stuff in the far corner of the room; three wood crates, two large, one small, and a small crowbar. The boy pried anxiously at the top of the largest, about one foot square by six feet long, and the lid came open to reveal a box full of wadded up newspaper and what lay hidden beneath the rumpled layers of paper was a brass and bronze assembly that looked something like a big pipe; it was a telescope—but not just any telescope. It was a superbly crafted instrument with a 115mm air spaced objective, F/15 (1725mm f) with a fine threaded screw-type focuser. In the other large crate he found a heavily constructed mahogany tripod with a cast and machined bronze mounting base, while the small box held an alt-azimuth assembly, also beautifully machined, and various other bits and pieces, including three oculars.

So, what has all this to do with Mars? Everything, for me. I was the boy and that night changed the entire course of my life. That night, a night I remember with great clarity, I saw Mars and Saturn as they rose hand-in-hand around midnight and climbed higher and higher until we were forced inside by the bone chilling cold and my mother’s insistence at about 3 a.m. Not that I ever became a professional astronomer, mind you, but I did become an avid amateur who has been watching the sky for a shade less than fifty-six years as I write this.

My heroes changed from Hoppalong Cassidy, Roy Rogers, Gene Autry and the Lone Ranger to Von Braun, Goddard, Einstein, later Hawking, Feynman, and Sagan and my interests, starting from general planetary observation, grew to include asteroids, meteors and—after a chance meeting with Harvey Ninninger and a few sessions with him in the field—meteorites and the study of impact mechanics. All of that naturally extended to include Near Earth Objects (NEOs) and Potentially Hazardous Asteroids (PHAs) in recent years. That brings us to “WHY MARS?”

There are nearly as many arguments revolving around scientific, technical, economic, and sociologic reasons for expanding our horizons to the moon and beyond to Mars as there are stars that can still be seen over the pitifully light polluted Los Angeles basin. Most of them are good, grounded in solid and supportable premises while others, though prompted by an honest pioneering spirit, are utter nonsense. It is interesting to note that, from my perspective, almost all the arguments against such endeavors tend to fall into two categories, inane and shortsighted, but then, perhaps, those who support the colonization of the moon and Mars are missing something.

The argument presented here is both simple and clear, devoid of any complicated or technically rigorous, confusing, convoluted, or esoteric rhetoric aimed at ears not accustomed to the jargon required. We first, however, we need to take a look at a couple of elements to see if the idea of colonizing any extraterrestrial world is, in a word, possible.

Do we currently have in our possession the technology required to engage in such an undertaking and, if we do, is the concept even feasible? The answer to both of these questions is a qualified, yes—qualified because much of what the United States had available has been dismantled, discarded, destroyed, recycled, and in other ways removed from ready access, the Saturn V launch vehicle being one good example. There are others who have, or are close to having what is needed, plus the International Space Station that would help overcome this hurdle.

Feasibility includes gaining international, indeed worldwide support and cooperation, meaning we need also to move beyond the small thinking territory and possession engenders into a universal understanding of what such a project would mean to humanity. Can we do that? I think we can, but it would be the more difficult of the two elements—human nature being as primitive as it is, but, for the sake of brevity, let us assume that both problems can be solved with a minimum of fuss and move on to the reason for “Why Mars.”

We now have adequate reason to believe that Mars has what is required to produce the necessities for supporting a permanent colony and supplying the means for returning the first waves of explorers to Earth, bringing back samples for study and providing much needed advice and information for later colonists to help them survive in the Martian environment. We also know that, with current data and future revelations obtained through a hands-on exploration, Mars can be, at least partly, terraformed to the point of making it possible for colonists to venture outside artificial biospheres in gear less restrictive than full space suits within a few centuries (if not sooner).

So, why Mars? Let me drop a few names first, then I’ll explain where this is headed and why: 2001 YB5, 2002 MN, 2002 NT7, 2002 NY46, and 2003 TK2. What was all that? Those are the names of just a smattering of the rocks that have passed Earth recently and have a very small chance of one day landing on us. You see, in reality, the planet on which we live is quite small, minuscule would be a better word, and is hurtling through space at an incredible speed as it goes around the sun and the sun, in turn travels around the center of our galaxy. The rocks previously mentioned are part of our solar system and are gravitationally locked to our star, but their orbits are highly elliptical and that causes them to cross the paths of other planets, most notably Mars, Earth, and Venus.

To make sure there is no misunderstanding it must be said that the risk of being hit by any of the known asteroids and comets is exceedingly low—very close to nil. On the other hand, we have been hit in the past by large objects and it is reasonable to conclude that we will be hit again. When becomes the big question, not if, and it is a question without an answer. We also know that, at this time, we would be unable to do anything about it, even with substantial advance warning. More of these close passers are being identified every day, thanks to active programs intended to find, track, and assess risk factors. Unfortunately, the fact remains that many of these bits and pieces of our early solar system are discovered only after they have gone by, meaning that if any of them were going to become an impactor they would do so with no warning at all. Furthermore, there are many more unknowns than those that have been identified and their orbits defined, so there is much work yet to be done.

To compound this problem, we now know there are drifters in interstellar space that have no place to call home (they are not bound to any specific system) and are incredibly difficult to spot. All right, statistics say that our chances of being hit are vanishingly small, but they are not zero and wherever the one with our name on it comes from—asteroid, comet, or wanderer—does not matter. A word about statistics is appropriate here. Let us look at the simplest of statistics, the heads or tails coin . . . half the time heads and half the time tails, right? Well, in a restrictive sense, yes, but there is a third possibility—some infinitesimal chance that it could land on its edge. Now, here is a nice experiment you can perform. Flip a coin exactly fifty times. Keep a record of the heads, tails, and edge landings—but not just the landings, also record when they occur during your experiment.

I just did this experiment three times and came up with heads sixty percent, tails forty percent, and no edges. Now, any mathematician, if he is worth his sigma, will tell you that the sample size plays a large part in the ideal results and that is true in the application of theory, but in the real world I got sixty percent heads and if the experiment were to have dragged on through the night I would have thousands of tosses for my sample, there would still be a discrepancy, and you could legitimately say that the statistics are wrong, even though theoretically they are correct. A couple of years ago I did that very thing with a group of students (thirty of them) all keeping a record just as suggested here for one hundred iterations of fifty throws each and the results showed a minimum difference of fifty-two heads to forty-eight tails and a maximum of eighty-four heads to sixteen tails out of a sample of one hundred fifty thousand. There were no edge landings recorded. We looked at the records to see if there was any pattern to groupings and did not find one. In one case we found a set of twenty-one consecutive tosses that came up tails followed by twenty-nine tosses resulting in heads. The fact that there were no edge landings recorded does not rule out that possibility, either.

What can we learn from this? We can come to the simple conclusion that, though statistics work well statistically, they do not necessarily give us reality and it is this application to the real world that produces the occasional big winners in casinos where the odds (statistics) are greatly in favor of the house. The groupings tell us that certain things cannot be predicted with any accuracy when it comes to when something is going to happen during a series of random events. Statistically it can be said that we are struck by a fifteen-kilometer asteroid X times in Y million years and that subtracting the number of years elapsed since the last recorded event from Y will give us the number of years remaining until the next strike. That this type of thinking is patently ridiculous goes without saying, but it is the predominant thinking applied to such statistics by the average man and those who would rather not think the unthinkable.

The truth is, we could be struck by that fifteen-kilometer asteroid, comet, or wanderer during the time you are reading this or that it may never happen again in the sun’s remaining lifetime. What is important here is that the stakes in this game are high and the odds are not in our favor—our species is on the line and we are merely waiting for a cosmic rolling of the dice. I must point out that I am not a doomsayer nor an alarmist—just pragmatic and prudent. I believe with all my heart that we, as a species, are worth preserving, even with our shortcomings and primitive behavior, and that the best way to increase our statistical odds of survival is to spread out so that, should the unthinkable occur, we are not all sitting in the target area. If, on the other hand, the disaster of disasters does not happen, we will have satisfied our natural curiosity to see what lies beyond the horizon, benefited from the technology required to reach out into the unknown, and hopefully we will have learned the greatest lesson of them all—that we all live on and in an insignificant place in space and that our prejudices and egos pale in the immense, mysterious, gleaming reality that surrounds us. That is “Why Mars?” to me.