Curiosity’s Value: Of Mars and Buried Treasure

When NASA put together the rover that last night ended up on Mars, they knew what they were doing by calling it Curiosity. Some things are best justified by appealing to our sense of adventure and our hunger for new knowledge. Because whatever it is they find up there, it won’t be a cure for cancer or a cache of cash. It won’t be anything that can be satisfactorily explained to the strictly “pragmatic,” whose so-called pragmatism encompasses strictly the advancement of a life barely worth living in the first place. We might find some indigenous life up there, or we might not. Most likely of all, we’ll probably just find something ineffably wonderful and strange, suggesting as it does the potentials for life beyond the stratosphere’s envelope. And that would be enough.

Shaun Whitehead knows what I mean–here’s someone who knows what exploration’s supposed to be about. He’s this British-explorer guy who’s looking for buried pirate-treasure, and even though his mission, at face-value, is the very epitome of exploration at its crassest, Thompson does not take his mission at face-value. Like Curiosity, he’ll be using means of search and detection that have not been employed previously. He might find his treasure, or he might not. But he knows that the thing we call treasure is really just a portion of the thing that’s treasure for real. “This is a scientific survey,” he said, “including archaeological, geological and biodiversity aspects. Unlike previous trips, we are not going to dig vast holes or do anything destructive at all. The real treasure of the island is its natural beauty. Anything else we find there is simply a bonus.”