ISMAIL LAGARDIEN: Getting to Mars past the populists

My father was an unpleasant man. His entire outlook on life, apart from the drudgery of 50 years on a construction site to feed seven hungry children, was shaped by a profoundly austere religiosity.

I remember clearly his remark the day we heard over the wireless that Neil Armstrong had stepped on the moon. “God gave us the earth. I don’t know why they’re messing around in the universe,” he said in kitchen-Afrikaans, interspersed with his de rigueur bits of cussing and colour.

I remembered my father last week when I walked (if I am allowed some literary freedom) past Voltaire’s butchered wives still clutching their infants to their bleeding breasts, the scattered brains and severed limbs in the wake of public protest, viral videos of hijackings and cash-in-transit banditry, images of spasmodic violence against foreigners (“Nigerian drug dealers”), the revelations of the Zondo commission, the rape of a child, and the end-of-empire-type excesses of SA society.

It is really difficult to ignore the shadows in the most beautiful of pictures. But I did last week, briefly, when I thought about humanity’s quest to settle on Mars, and what my father would have said about it. He was apolitical, as so many labourers whose faces are turned to the ground were over the centuries. I’d like to believe he would have said: sort out the problems on Earth before going to Mars. He would have been right, in an almost populist way. You know, the way populists would burn down a medical research laboratory because their headache will not go away, torch a train if it is running late, or burn down a public library because of a leaking faucet.

The quest for Mars, even before humans arrive there in three or four decades from now, can give us greater insight into where we came from, where we may be heading and how we can get to wherever that is. It remains in our hands. Where previously the state drove space exploration, it has increasingly shifted to the private sector.

Witness how superwealthy figures such as Amazon’s Jeff Bezos are at the forefront of space exploration. This raises concern about the common or public good. Someone’s ability to make a lot of money is not a mark of their decency. As one Forbes News commentator reminds us: “Steve Jobs was a major, world-class jerk … a borderline sociopath. If you define that as someone who does evil things and doesn’t feel remorse, the picture of a smirking Steve Jobs does begin to emerge.”

One problem with Jobs, for all his genius, was that he failed to give sufficient credit to the state for providing the financial and institutional basis for many of his accomplishments. The Italian economist Mariana Mazzucato has done a lot of research into what she described as the entrepreneurial state.

“Every major technological change in recent years traces most of its funding back to the state,” she wrote. “The National Institutes of Health [in the US] have spent almost a trillion dollars since their founding on the research that created both the pharmaceutical and the biotech sectors — with venture capitalists only entering biotech once the red carpet was laid down in the 1980s. We pretend that the government was at best just in the background creating the basic conditions [skills, infrastructure, basic science]. But the truth is that the involvement required massive risk-taking along the entire innovation chain: basic research, applied research and early stage financing of companies themselves.” 

Back to Mars. The thrill of us going to Mars cannot be dampened. In terms of extending humanity’s existence — since we’re probably ruining the earth, and stupidity will probably lead to us killing ourselves — the prospect of settling on Mars is exciting. It will not happen in our lifetime, and life on Mars will be physical and mental torture. What does seem certain is that what we will learn from Mars expeditions will advance our scientific knowledge beyond recognition.

The social and environmental benefits of space exploration, with the necessary caveats, require a long essay of its own. If I may use one example, if only to draw attention to water scarcity. We know, already, that the water purification system on the International Space Station has been used to provide clean water in remote parts of the world. 

The problem, of course, is that space exploration is really about tomorrow, but the populists in our ranks have made it clear: why care about tomorrow, people are hungry today. And so ended my brief reverie, and I returned, again, to Voltaire’s Candide. “I must give up [Panglossian]. It is a mania for saying things are well when one is in hell.”

Sadly, my father may have agreed.

• Lagardien is a former executive dean of business and economic sciences at Nelson Mandela University, and has worked for the World Bank and the National Planning Commission.