Los primeros habitantes humanos de Marte, se encontraban en perpetua discusión entre terraformar Marte o no, y en caso afirmativo, cuanto. Sax Russell, un físico, es quien dio este decisivo, y hermoso, discurso a sus compañeros.

The beauty of Mars exists in the human mind. without the human presence it is just a concatenation of atoms, no different than any other random speck of matter in the universe. It’s we who understand it, and we who give it meaning. All our centuries of looking up at the night sky and watching it wander through the stars. All those nighs of watching it through the telescopes, looking at a tiny disk trying to see canals in the albedo changes. All those dumb sci-fi novels with their monsters and maidens and dying civilizations. And all the scientists who studied the data, or got us here. That’s what makes Mars Beautiful. Not the basalt and the oxides.

Now that we are here, it isn’t enough to just hide under ten meters of soil and study the rock. That’s science, yes, and needed sciente too. But science is more than that. Science is part of a larger human enterprise, and that enterprise includes going to the stars, adapting to other planets, adapting them to us. Science is creation. The lack of life here, and the lack of any finging in fifty years of the SETI program, indicates that life is rare, and intelligent life even rarer. And yet the whole meaning of the universe, its beauty, is cotained in the consciousness of intelligent life. We are the consciousness of the universe, and our job is to spread that around, to go look at things, to live everywhere we can. It’s too dangerous to keep the consciousness of the universe on only one planet, it could be wiped out. And so now we’re on two, three if you count the moon. And we can change this one to make it safer to live on. Changing it won’t destroy it. Reading its past might get harder, but the beauty of it won’t go away. If there are lakes, of forests, or glaciers, how does that diminish Mars’s beauty? I don’t think it does. I think it onlyl enhances it. It adds life, the most beautiful system of all. But nothing life can do will bring Tharsis down, or fill Marineris. Mars will always remain Mars, different from Earth, colder and wilder. But it can be Mars and ours at the same time. And it will be. There is this about the human mind; if it can be done, it will be done. We can transform Mars and build it like you would build a cathedral, as a monument to humanity and the universe both. We can do it, so we will do it. So, we might as well start.

-Sax Russell. (Kim Stanley Robinson – Red Mars)

El libro es de 5 estrellas, aún no lo termino pero estoy en eso, y sumamente recomendable, buena ciencia ficción, muy ligera y entretenida, con pasajes tan sublimes como el que acaban de leer. Ya saben donde conseguir la Trilogía de Marte, y ya pondré la reseña correspondiente.