Matters of outer space and distant galaxies don’t interest me much. What I do find captivating is space exploration itself, as in the technology and organisation and cleverness that go into it. It’s been a good week.

The rover itself, Curiosity, could probably eyeball and tell you what you had for breakfast on your 18th birthday- Mark Anthony Falzon

NASA’s latest Mars coup would make Ernst Stavro Blofeld go green. The rover itself, Curiosity, could probably eyeball and tell you what you had for breakfast on your 18th birthday. But to park it in one piece in an exact spot some scores of millions of miles from Earth and to do it sitting at a laptop, is jaw-dropping.

My hair is not long and grey. Nor do I normally wear blue overalls. That means I should probably leave my marvel at that.

Still, I suppose there’s no harm in sharing a few random thoughts. First, space and its conquest. It seems that the thing that makes it possible to overcome huge distances is miniaturisation, madly enough. Think modern computers and the internet and such.

There are other exquisite contradictions. On the one hand NASA comes along and tells us, months in advance, that the rover will land on Mars at precisely x hour y minute z second. But this is also an age when a flight from Malta to Trapani usually means hours hacking away at your credit card (‘airport shopping’ it’s called) and at least two, or 10, missed buses. The only reason I can think of, emptiness, is so predictable.

And while ‘we’ (well...) can land a university on Mars, we still seem to find it impossible to move basic medicines over relatively short distances here on Earth. Which reminds us that space, as in our experience of it, is not linear. Rather it comes in a patchwork of compressions and quiet stretches, rather like currents in a fast-moving stream.

My second point is actually a question. In this as in similar cases, all the talk is of ‘human endeavour’. The name of the rover itself implies that there is something about it which unites us – we may not all be Leonardos but curiosity in some form and measure is supposedly a universal attribute.

There are two senses in which the Mars mission claims to be a human endeavour.

The first is as banal as it is correct. The mission is ‘human’ inasmuch as it was developed by humans rather than, say, bats or gorillas or algae. It is human because it pertains to a hairless biped with a reversible thumb, in other words.

But there’s another, more consequential and complicated sense which goes as follows. The rover on Mars is in some way or other the cumulative result of thousands of years of human thought and action. What’s more, these last two are essentially a collective effort which will also have a bearing on our future, collectively.

This I think is what Neil Armstrong meant by those famous first words.

What this would mean is that somehow, by some long and circuitous route, a part of me (and of every other human) is up there laser-zapping rocks. The photo I took of the festa in Vittoriosa the other day, the egg I boiled for breakfast this morning, and so on, are as much part of the collective human adventure as the Curiosity rover.

The thought is heartwarming. Or rather it was, until I decided to click about the net looking for clues as to my contribution to the mission in question.

I’d like to think I’m not entirely scientifically illiterate. Even so, the ‘radioisotope thermoelectric generator’, ‘laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy’, and ‘phenolic impregnated carbon ablator’ had me trumped.

It’s not so much the technical nature of the whole thing that left me clueless – one hardly expects anything less of what is quite literally rocket science.

It’s more that I felt like an alien species – a bit like a monkey sneaking into the library in Cambridge at night to peruse Isaac Newton’s lecture notes. The point is that the whole endeavour begins to seem rather less human and infinitely less collective.

None of which is, I think, irrelevant. For one, it raises the issue of how civilisation is structured. Is it really a collective and continuous whole, or is it rather an archipelago of largely-disconnected islands of thought and specialisation? Or is it perhaps a matter of a modular arrangement, rather like a Swiss Army Knife? To what extent and in what ways do we share, if at all?

That connects in turn to the notion of relevance. Every time a new rector is elected at university, academics who study things like the anthropology of fireworks or Horace’s poetics (the sort of people one might come across in the Academy of Lagado) hope and pray that he or she belongs to the ‘human endeavour’ school.

That way their work will be considered relevant and somehow consequential, because knowledge is an integrated whole. The problem is that blessed phenolic ablator, which does make one wonder if that belief is more social contract than anything else.

My last musing has to do with nationalism. There was a fair bit of fawning at the post-landing conference, truth be told.

Some examples: “Long live American curiosity!”, “If anyone has been harbouring doubts about American leadership in space there’s a one-ton piece of American ingenuity sitting on the surface of Mars right now”, and the Louis XIV-like “Continuing America’s leadership here on Earth and throughout the solar system”.

I suppose the hyperboles had a lot to do with scientists egging on the exchequer to give them more money. The more reasonable view is that the Mars mission brought together a team of individuals and firms irrespective of the pictures on their passports. As someone said in the press conference, “tonight there are at least four countries who are on Mars... and they’re on Mars because they went with the US”.

What we have here is an incorporative type of nationalism. The type of nationalism we’re familiar with is different. That’s based for the most part on fantasies of exclusivity of territory, culture, and ethnicity.

There’s nothing necessarily wrong with models of community (of which nationalism is one). But it seems to me that the most successful are those that incorporate and organise, rather than isolate and fetishise, difference.

Allowing for some choreography, it was clear at the post-landing conference that fantasies of racial and/or ethnic exclusivity are positively Jurassic.

I read on the BBC the other day that many people have said that the first pictures of Mars reminded them of familiar territory here on Earth. Conspiracy theories aside, I can see the point.

mafalzon@hotmail.com