I hope you’ll forgive me for being a little Mars-obsessed this week, but I couldn’t resist this gorgeous French short film called Terraform, that sketches a deft and lovely scenario by which we might remake Mars’ environment to be more hospitable to ourselves:

Terraforming and geoengineering are the kinds of things that feel terribly far away, but aren’t as distant as they seem. Through tremendous effort, the U.S. government managed to reclaim some of the Dust Bowl. Israel has massive reforestation efforts underway. Scientists are experimenting with iron fertilization of phytoplankton blooms as a way to sequester carbon in the ocean. We aren’t using solar mirrors or releasing new species into the atmosphere yet, but it’s hard to imagine that as the pressures of global warming increase, we won’t try more expansive means to moderate our environment, avoiding extreme weather and the human catastrophes that result from it.

This dramatic approach to climates and atmospheres, whether Earth’s or another planet’s, would make for epic storytelling and grand, non-disaster storytelling. And it’s incredibly rich ground for science fictional discussions of ethical issues and our attachments to and arrogance about our residence on Earth. In comments at io9, from whence this video came, folks are discussing our willingness to destroy microbial life on Mars to make the atmosphere breathable for humans. Then, there are changes to geography itself: if we felt strongly about the destruction of Buddhas by the Taliban, should we feel equally strongly about changes we might make that would dramatically change key geographical features of the landscape? It all comes down to a central question: does the world belong to us, or us to the world? That answer determines how much we feel the right to change the world around us, and how much we feel an obligation to adapt ourselves to the world we’ve made, and have to live in.

The amazing men and women of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration landed the Curiosity rover on Mars last night. But the piece of writing that perhaps best encapsulates the wild joy at the Jet Propulsion Lab, and the meaning of their accomplishment, was published almost 20 years before, on January 1, 1993. I hope everyone will forgive me quoting Kim Stanley Robinson’s introduction to Red Mars, the first of his masterful trilogy about the colonization of the Red Planet, at length here, because it’s the most powerful meditation on the meaning of Mars that I know, and it’s so strikingly applicable here (and make it worth it by going out and buying the book if my repeated proselytization for it hasn’t convinced you already). Robinson wrote:

Mars was empty before we came. That’s not to say that nothing had ever happened. The planet had accreted, melted, roiled and cooled, leaving a surface scarred by enormous geological features: craters, canyons, volcanoes. But all of that happened in mineral unconsciousness, and unobserved. There were no witnesses—except for us, looking from the planet next door, and that only in the last moment of its long history. We are all the consciousness that Mars has ever had.

Now everybody knows the history of Mars in the human mind: how for all the generations of prehistory it was one of the chief lights in the sky, because of its redness and fluctuating intensity, and the way it stalled in its wandering course through the stars, and sometimes even reversed direction. It seemed to be saying something with all that. So perhaps it is not surprising that all the oldest names for Mars have a peculiar weight on the tongue—Nirgal, Mangala, Auqakuh, Harmakhis—they sound as if they were even older than the ancient languages we find them in, as if they were fossil words from the Ice Age or before. Yes, for thousands of years Mars was a sacred power in human affairs; and its color made it a dangerous power, representing blood, anger, war and the heart.

Then the first telescopes gave us a closer look, and we saw the little orange disk, with its white poles and dark patches spreading and shrinking as the long seasons passed. No improvement in the technology of the telescope ever gave us much more than that; but the best Earthbound images gave Lowell enough blurs to inspire a story, the story we all know, of a dying world and a heroic people, desperately building canals to hold off the final deadly encroachment of the desert.

It was a great story. But then Mariner and Viking sent back their photos, and everything changed. Our knowledge of Mars expanded by magnitudes, we literally knew millions of times more about this planet than we had before. And there before us flew a new world, a world unsuspected.

It seemed, however, to be a world without life. People searched for signs of past or present Martian life, anything from microbes to the doomed canal-builders, or even alien visitors. As you know, no evidence for any of these has ever been found. And so stories have naturally blossomed to fill the gap, just as in Lowell’s time, or in Homer’s, or in the caves or on the savannah—stories of microfossils wrecked by our bio-organisms, of ruins found in dust storms and then lost forever, of Big Man and all his adventures, of the elusive little red people, always glimpsed out of the corner of the eye. And all of these tales are told in an attempt to give Mars life, or to bring it to life. Because we are still those animals who survived the Ice Age, and looked up at the night sky in wonder, and told stories. And Mars has never ceased to be what it was to us from our very beginning—a great sign, a great symbol, a great power.

In Robinson’s vision, we sent the first colonizing mission to Mars in 2026. President Obama’s FY 2013 budget proposes cutting NASA’s planetary science budget from $1.5 billion to $1.2 billion and ending the U.S. partnership with the E.U. to send probes to Mars on two planned missions in 2016 and 2018—this year, the Jet Propulsion Lab’s open house was marked by a bake sale to call attention to the proposed cuts. What the scientists at JPL did last night was a critical part of our future in space not simply because they did something extremely difficult that will advance our understanding of the planet that’s fascinated so many of us so deeply and for so long, but because they helped keep the dream alive at all, reminding of what it’s like to watch the future arrive, and how cheap it is to purchase in comparison to what we spend to maintain conflicts and policies that mire us in the past.

I know Kyle Buchanan is being sort of snarky in this post about why Mars movies have such a dismal track record at the box office, but I think there’s a tie between this sort of sentiment and our conversation from earlier in the week about the need for thoughtful science fiction. He writes:

Why are audiences so turned off by our planetary neighbor? They don’t seem to have the same hang-ups about the moon, which has factored into big hits like Transformers: Dark of the Moon and Apollo 13 (as well as critically acclaimed movies like Moon), but that rock is movie-ready: Stories set there simply have to be told in romantic black-and-white. Meanwhile, setting your movie on red, red Mars is like staring into a Virtual Boy for two hours, and who wants that? (Evidently not John Carter director Andrew Stanton, whose Mars is more tan than red.) It helps, too, that the moon is such an ever-present presence in our lives, as well as a place that Americans have actually been. If NASA can’t motivate an administration to send a man to Mars, why should the average moviegoer get worked up about it?

Why should the average moviegoer get worked up over Mars movies if there’s absolutely no rationale for a movie to be set there? I have a fuller review of Disney’s sci-fi blockbuster John Carter coming tomorrow, but there is zero reason the events of that movie need to take place on Mars, which I assume is only the setting because Edgar Rice Burroughs, who wrote the books on which the movie is based thought it was cool. Ditto on pretty much every other movie with a tie to Mars—it’s a little further away from the Moon, and we haven’t had human contact with it, so it’s easy to project ideas of wacky things onto it. But that doesn’t mean those wacky aliens or evil forces derive anything interesting or significant from the fact that they come from or are based on Mars.

By contrast, Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy works because there are very specific reasons for the characters to be going to Mars—an international consortium has decided it can viably made habitable (as a way to make it potentially mineable and a population escape hatch for Earth)—and a great deal of the novel’s plot is drawn from Mars-specific forces. The amount of radiation the characters are getting both drives them close together in protected habitats and encourages the experimentation that leads to a treatment to reverse aging. The religion that develops on Mars, the areophany, is specific to the planet. The political and philosophical debates are directly tied to how people feel about Mars’ geography and geological history. It’s really a shame that we can get an infinite number of failed and hugely spectacles set on Mars, but we can’t make a series or a television show out of a fully-realized, very smart Martian adventure that (other than some special effects work to show the Martian gravity) could be made pretty darn cheap.

I’m all for big, expansive science fiction movies that put humans on other planets, and there’s a lot of interesting stuff in Meredith Woerner’s piece on Wall-E director Andrew Stanton’s hugely ambitious adaptation of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ A Princess of Mars, now titled John Carter. But there’s one question that her set visit doesn’t answer. Is John Carter going to be a former Confederate soldier like he is in Burroughs’ original?

The Disney summary of the plot suggests he’s mustered out of an unnamed military conflict, and I wonder if they just might leave it vague. There’s obviously a strong connection between the Civil War and Westerns — the frontier gives folks a chance to refight lost wars. And while it could be convenient, from a plot perspective, to explain that a human who has ended up on a strange planet would be good at organizing an alien insurgency because he developed his skills in a specific, analogous conflict. But it’s probably better to make it almost any other conflict than the Civil War. The Confederacy doesn’t get retroactive points just because fighting in it helps someone achieve justice for another species down the road.