Letters from the Desert

Returning to 'civilization'

This is the last of my ‘letters from the desert.’ Yesterday morning I arrived back in the UK. After spending the best part of six weeks, travelling through the desert, I had become accustomed to empty, treeless spaces. Looking down on England as we descended on Heathrow, I could saw trees everywhere, lining roads, parks and stately homes. I saw lawns, woods, the familiar rows of houses dissected by major and minor roads, factories, football stadiums, and all the paraphernalia of an advanced modern society where nature has been comprehensively subjugated, ordered and domesticated.

But the desert was still very much on my mind, and so even though I am writing these lines from my study, I can still, figuratively-speaking, describe what follows as a letter ‘from’ the desert. I also wanted to thank some of the readers of this newsletter for the very kind words that accompanied their financial pledges. I’m not planning to make this newsletter subscriber-only for the time being, though I may decide to do that at some time in the future. But I don’t want anybody to think that I take their pledges for granted. Writers need a certain kind of reader, just as readers need a certain kind of writer, and I feel that I must be doing something right when I read these messages of support.

I hope we can stick together, as we try to navigate these wild and very-far-from-uplifting times without allowing ourselves to be crushed by them. We may not always agree on everything, nor do we have to, but I’m grateful for your presence, your comments and your attention.

LIFE ON MARS?

I’ve never had much interest in space travel. As a boy, I wasn’t enamoured with rockets, space dogs or moon landings. Cosmonauts and astronauts left me equally cold. I regarded the space race as a vainglorious waste of resources and an extension of the Cold War, and I didn’t really care who got there first.

I regarded Mars with the same indifference. I didn’t feel the allure or the fascination, and I didn’t share the urgency to get there or know what was up there. Like the girl with the mousy hair in David Bowie’s song, the Red Planet seemed to me to be a godawful small affair, and nothing I have ever heard about it has made me change my mind.

But here in the Atacama, it’s difficult not to think about Mars. This is partly because so much of the surface of the desert looks like Mars, or at least a more beguiling and attractive version of it. As Oliver Morton observes in Mapping Mars: Science, Imagination and the Birth of World:

The Martian surface looks like one great big Atacama, except worse. It is not only arid and frozen, but bathed in harsh ultraviolet radiation; the Martian atmosphere, lacking oxygen, necessarily lacks an ozone layer.

This is true, and for decades the similarities between the Atacama and the Red Planet have attracted scientists to the desert. In 2003, the NASA Ames Research Center began its ‘Life in the Atacama’ project, which used the desert as a testing ground for robotic Rovers to be used on Mars. In 2017, NASA scientists conducted field research in the desert under the auspices of the Atacama Rover Astrobiology Drilling Studies (ARADS) program, in an attempt to detect microbial life that might also be found in the Atacama, and possibly on Mars.

For the record, I’m not opposed to any of this. I have no objection to scientists looking for life in the desert. Nor do I dismiss the significance of Mars as an object of scientific study. It’s an interesting place, even though there are other places that are also interesting, and certainly - in my humble opinion - more worth visiting, right here on Earth.

But when it comes to the fantasy of Mars colonisation, I reach for my revolver. And I’m particularly repulsed by the new impetus that these fantasies have attained in a historical period, when humanity is facing so many problems that threaten its survival, and the survival of so much life that humanity has become indirectly responsible for.

I have a special loathing for the ‘Mars or bust’ urgency associated with the richest man in the history of humanity, who also happens to be one of the worst individuals that contemporary human society as to offer. As many people will already know, Elon Musk (for it is of him I speak) is obsessed with Mars. Peering at the Red Planet through a haze of ketamine and weed, this ‘visionary’ has had a dream: to transform humanity into an ‘interplanetary species’ and establish a colony on Mars within ‘20-30 years’, with a population of one million.

Because Musk is a rich man, his proclamations are often greeted with a quasi-religious awe, but before we go into that, let’s consider the following: According to the World Wildlife Fund’s 2024 Living Planet Report, there has been a 73 decline in the average size of monitored global wildlife since 1970. 73 percent. In 55 years. And what has caused this? The WWF cites:

Habitat loss and degradation and overharvesting, driven primarily by our global food system are the dominant threats to wildlife populations around the world, followed by invasive species, disease and climate change.

Speaking of climate change, this month a report published in the journal Nature Communications, warned that humanity may be approaching a ‘point of no return’ comparable to the 250 million-year-old ‘massive extinction event’, which caused a 90 percent loss of life on Earth. Also this month, a report by the National Drought Mitigation Center and the UN Convention to Combat Desertification says that since 2023, the world has experienced some of the largest and most destructive droughts in recorded history, and that more than 90 million people in Eastern and Southern Africa are at risk of acute hunger.

‘Point of no return’ warnings like this come and go, and in the world of disinformation and misinformation that too many of us inhabit, they tend to be ignored or played down or dismissed as some sort of wokeist ‘scam.’ But the real scammers are the billionaires who are now transforming space into their playpen, and presenting Mars as some kind of bolthole to escape from problems that we should be solving.

As the astrophysicist Adam Becker, the author of More Everything Forever: AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley’s Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity, put it, these are men who ‘think that money is some sort of metric that tells you how worthwhile somebody is and how smart they are, and that if somebody else has less money, that means that you don’t have to listen to them.’

The great problem that 21st century society has, is that too many people are listening to them, and oohing and aahing at their cosmic antics like spectators at a Cirque du Soleil spectacle. As one CNBC reporter gushingly declared: ‘In Musk’s view, going to Mars is tantamount to preserving humanity and escaping the ever-growing threats to Earth, including natural disasters and warfare.’

There are several problems with the Great Man’s ‘view.’ Firstly, a species that trashes a planet with an abundance of natural resources that no other known planet possesses, is unlikely to prosper on Mars, and is more likely to reproduce the same damaging behaviour that it is supposedly escaping from. Secondly, the ‘threats’ that Musk is concerned with are to some extent the consequence of unbridled capitalism and militarism that men like him have facilitated and actively profited from.

In March this year, a report in the New York Times claimed that 3 million people could die of sickness and starvation within a year, as a result of foreign aid cuts overseen by Musk’s DOGE agency.

And we should believe that this ‘visionary’ wants to ‘save humanity?’ Come on.

By presenting these ‘threats’ as inevitable and unstoppable, the Musks of this world suck in resources that could be spent elsewhere and condemn us to abandoning humanity. They distract attention from the collective effort required to eliminate and mitigate these threats, and they encourage what is in effect a gross dereliction of duty.

And this brings me back to the desert. Over the last 6 weeks, I have often asked myself what I was doing in the Atacama. At first sight, the reasons were obvious, I wanted to immerse myself in the desert and gather material for a book about this amazing place. In researching and writing about the Atacama, I have often found myself thinking about time. Jung once wrote of a journey through the Sahara, that 'The deeper we penetrated into the Sahara, the more time slowed down for me; it even threatened to move backward.'

I found something similar in the Atacama. This is perhaps a feature of deserts: On the one hand the absence of distractions immerses you in the immediate present. At the same time, the desert provides constant evidence of older time spans that preceded humanity and will also succeed us. Looking at the fantastic rock formations and empty spaces of the Atacama, I felt conscious of a world that is so much older than I could ever mentally encapsulate.

Looking up at the night sky, I imagined the new born stars and pieces of dead planets that astronomical telescopes in the Atacama have identified for, some of which are millions of years old. I didn’t feel overwhelmed by these vast time scales. As brief as a human lifespan is in comparison, I didn’t feel paltry or insignificant. Walking along the burial grounds of the Chinchorro, I thought of the mummified remains that had once reminded each generation of the constant presence of their ancestors - and also of the future which awaited them.

We don’t have that certainty, in our febrile global society. Too often we live as if humanity had just got here, as if our cities and highways have always been here. Living in a world of constant distractions, cosseted by machines and inventions and computer screens and our systems of knowledge, we too easily inhabit an endless present, with no connection to what came before and what comes next.

Even in the supposedly ‘barren’ desert, I felt, as I have often felt in the Pyrenees, the Himalayas, the Peak District, and so many of the magical places that I have been fortunate enough to visit in my brief time on Earth, that there is no better planet than this one, and that it remains our urgent collective responsibility to preserve these spaces and the abundance of life that they contain.

But to do that, we need to be aware that our fleeting present is part of the Earth’s deep past and also of its future. We will learn nothing of this from the likes Elon Musk, Richard Branson or Jared Isaacman.

I spent my last day in the Atacama in Yungay, where NASA carried out some of its ARADS drilling trials for the Mars rovers. This was the ‘hyper-arid core’ of the Atacama, where temperatures can reach 40 degrees and 50 degrees below earth. Yet even here, in this dead zone, of nitrate ghost towns, abandoned railway stations and forgotten cemeteries, scientists from NASA and the University of Antofagasta have discovered microorganisms that have adapted to extreme desert conditions.

And even in Yungay, water has flowed - the last time was only a few years ago. The desert still bears its traces, and trees and shrubs still grow. And walking across the hardened soil, I was, as I was so often, mesmerised by the beauty of the desert, and fascinated by the human communities that have come and gone there and the historical and economic forces that brought them into being.

Because this was the Atacama, a desert on the fringes of the modern world, which was also a mirror of that world, where it was possible to see the forces that have placed our world in jeopardy and also the life forms which have improbably managed to thrive here, and which will continue to survive even if we don’t.

And if some scientists see Yungay as an ‘analogue’ to Mars, I saw its severe, desolate beauty as something else: another reminder that this great Earth remains our common home and that it is our collective duty to save it, not only for ourselves, but for those who come after us.

If we cannot find a way to prevent further devastation, and reverse some of the damage we have already caused, then perhaps we may deserve Mars after all. But until then it is up to each of us to preserve these wild places, even if we never see them, and allow what Wallace Stegner called the ‘geography of hope’ to guide us to a better future.

And if I scrape away at all the reasons that brought me to the Atacama, that is the one which still stands out.

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