The
captain is a bit more subdued today. He’s
still very much a jittery talker, needing to fill any silence with sound, but his
stream-of-consciousness rambling is more introspective and less helter-skelter,
more contemplative. He tells us that, while
this is the first successful mission to Mars, previous expeditions dropped
their habitation modules here, even though their astronauts weren’t so lucky;
as a result, automated systems have been nurturing greenhouses here for years,
and ample plant life has been quietly growing in protective modules all over the
planet. So really, the captain and his
crew may be the first humans on Mars,
but they’re not the first earthlings.
He also
gets to thinking about the long history of animal contribution to space voyages,
from the chimps to the stick insects. Some seem to have been doomed to failure from
the first – as if one could hope a cat would deign to follow orders. Others seem to have been inscrutably pointless;
what exactly does one aim to achieve by sending a tortoise into space?
I suppose
he’s earned himself a bit of contemplation.
The initial steps on our neighboring planet have been difficult ones,
fraught with peril and not without some tragedy. Now that the immediate stressors and dangers
have put their feet up for a few minutes, he might as well have a bit of quiet
time with his thoughts.
Better
take it while he can – by episode’s ends, there’s another massive, perplexing,
potentially worldview-shattering issue to be addressed. Until tomorrow!
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