The Rabbit on Mars
Alison Hawthorne Deming
Do other animals tell jokes? Perhaps the play of young animals in which they practice what will later become life-enhancing skills—the stalk, the pounce, the thrashing—is not so unlike what human beings do in attempting to learn what they will need to survive in the future. Of course, we live and direct our lives so much in the mind, so much in the richness and folly and, yes, beauty, of what our minds can create, that our play often takes the form of jokes, a linguistic version of play. One of my recent favorites was the Rabbit on Mars. In 2004 the National Aeronautics and Space Administration landed two rovers, research-gathering devices, on our neighboring planet, the one with soil so bloody with iron that it was named after the Roman god of war. How much more benign is our view: Let’s do some geologic study of the soil and find out what it’s really made of and whether any forms of life might once have inhabited the place, might (miraculous to say!) have blown loose in a cosmic wind and drifted here to our spinning globe, seeding everything we know, including the great and troubling argument between religion and science.
The two research devices are named Spirit and Opportunity, as if the project were intended, at last, to create a team from these often opposing forces. It has been an awe-inspiring experience to watch these little emissaries of our curiosity make their journey through space and land like bouncing balls in a place so far away we cannot imagine the distance—though we can cross it—then release themselves from their protective shells in response to messages beamed from Earth. Errors in the software? No problem—new instructions are beamed from home-base, and the little brain is reconfigured, the rover rolling off its platform, drilling into Martian rock, sending snapshots back home through space. The scientists and engineers have worked in a collaboration as musical and passionate as a symphony orchestra to accomplish this, and their joy is beautiful to behold. How the knowledge will be used by Opportunity, if you will forgive my appropriating these names and returning them to their Earth-bound meanings, remains a cautionary tale. No green-thinking poet could celebrate transporting the culture of obsessive consumerism to another planet. It is how the knowledge will be used by Spirit that draws me to the curious phenomenon of the Rabbit on Mars.
Along with the panoramic images of barren rusty soil and rock circulating on the internet—that collective unconscious of the technological that hovers over the surface of Earth—came a fuzzy image of an object that appears to have very long, erect and pointed ears. It was graced with the caption, “A Rabbit on Mars?” It is hardly the first time that human beings have projected their imaginations out into space. It isn’t even the first time that the projections have taken the form of a rabbit. The Maya saw a leaping rabbit, the special pet of the moon goddess, where Americans see the man-in-the-moon, and Japanese moongazers see a rabbit making a rice cake. Of course, everyone got the joke: There are no Martian bunnies hopping up to welcome our team of digital explorers. It turned out the rabbit image taken by Spirit was a tatter of the protective balloon that had helped cushion the spacecraft’s landing. A momentary illusion, though it struck the imagination with silly and pleasurable force. Spirit, of course, will be struck when and if science finds life on other planets. And many astronomers and evolutionary biologists agree that it really is a matter of when, not if, now that we know planets are not an entirely exceptional phenomenon in the universe, and therefore the conditions suitable for life may not be limited to those on Earth. How far we have come from “War of the Worlds,” as our scientific instruments have extended our eyes into far space. These eyes have altered our picture of what we will find there, so that we can now imagine the extraterrestrial not as mechanical warrior sent to conquer our planet, but as a benign, fuzzy, harmless and familiar creature, a vegetarian, an animal said to deliver baskets of candies to children at Easter time.
Is the appeal of this image an instruction to ourselves? Can it calm us, to assuage the fears that our sense of our selves and our world may soon be sent reeling? What will it mean, even if all we find out there are microbes living in ice? Will our God be their God? Will Life itself become our God? Will we be humbled into a greater reverence and hunger for knowledge, as people were by the Copernican Revolution? Will life become a dime-a-dozen happenstance to be owned, manipulated, destroyed and devoured with an attitude of dismissal even greater than we’ve accomplished here on our gorgeous home planet? How could we know what rearrangement our spirits will undergo when such knowledge comes to us? What better guide for us—if only in play—than the animals who have been with us from the start, real and imagined, the animals who live in us as the matter of our genes and the spirit of our imaginations, who live with us as our teachers and companions and neighbors, the animals who were our first gods in the childhood of humanity.