I just finished watching the last episode of National Geographic's Mars. I am sorry to see it end, as I thought it was very well done and quite interesting . . . though I imagine it could be seen as confusing with the way that it cut from the story about going to Mars to interviews with various scientists and other folks to bits of NASA footage, etc. Joe watched it with me (pretty raptly) and I always felt the need to tell him, "This is real" or "This is the story." So there's that.
But I found all the parts of the story very exciting, and I hope that they do a season two--which would be very easy in terms of storytelling, as it was left pretty wide open at the end of the series. It was also quite nice to have a couple of glimpses of Andy Weir, the fellow who wrote The Martian.
Aside from the usual benefits of a good tv series, I got two more profound gifts from the show.
The first came from a line delivered in reference to Antartica, from a scientist who worked there: "There are questions we can answer here that we just can`t answer anywhere else." Seems to me that that could be applied to life in general, you know? That the reason for our sojourn here might be that your spirits have to be in the material world in order to gain . . . well, something. Knowledge. Growth. And keeping the whole Antarctica parallel in mind, maybe conditions have to be extremely harsh in order to learn some lessons . . . and so maybe there has to be evil and suffering and etc. It's a big thought.
The second came just from watching people (real people, that is, in several of the documentary sections of the last episode) react to the lift off of a SpaceX rocket, to a moment when it looked like things might be going amiss, and to the final success of the mission. In the first two situations, people looked like they were willing the rocket to succeed . . . with their thoughts, with their prayers, with their whispered words, with their body movements. And then when the mission succeeded, there was an explosion of rejoicing, and I got the distinct impression that everyone felt that they were a part of the success. And not in the sense that each one had played their part in the set-up, but in the sense that their will power had caused the mission to succeed. And then I started thinking about how we do the same thing in regular life: at sports events, for instance. And it suddenly made sense to me that some people feel such fierce loyalty to sports teams. They rejoice because they had a part in the victory. Their will was a part of the victory. In the same way that it has been shown in some cases that prayer has made sick people get better. Now if that's actually true or not, I don't know. There are times when I have no doubt about it. (Usually right after I've watched What the Bleep Do We Know!? or something of like ilk.) But most of the time I feel that we don't have any affect at all on the world around us. That we're just being pushed around by forces beyond our control or understanding.
That's not a bad handout from a tv series, is it.
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