Anselmian God Walking on Mars

Anselmian God

Walking on Mars was, beyond a shadow of a doubt, the most astonishing experience of my life. There are few -- very few -- experiences so powerful, where the emotions are felt so deeply, that the experience is impossible to describe. I will attempt to do so anyway, because it is something that I can only wish everybody would have the opportunity to experience. Then again, if everybody got to walk on Mars, it would be no more special an experience that walking down a city street.

But Mars is not like a city street precisely because of how unique the experience is. Everything about the experience is special. You are first informed that you have been selected to do this, immediately knowing that your name - among all the men who have ever lived -- will be one of the most remembered. I did not have much time to think about things like that. It was a job, of course, and I was going there as a scientist before all other reasons. It took six years of preparation before we were ready to launch. I'd been in space before, but when we broke out of Earth's orbit, the fact that I would be gone for over a year really hit the pit of my stomach. The earth became a speck of light, and I don't think I could ever really describe that feeling of intense loneliness that set in around that time. My work kept me busy, but as I got farther away, communication became more difficult. When Mars came into view, however, I cried. I didn't really plan on that. I didn't really know what else to do. It was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen, red, barren, dusty.

Landing was exactly as it had been in training. I had practiced in the deserts of Nevada, and on simulators. It was smooth and easy. I had to gather data for about ten hours, and run systems checks, before I was to go explore the neighborhood. They had me land in a place called Meridiani Planum, which was one of the parts of Mars that was once covered by water. I was supposed to land within a few hundred meters of the Mars rover Opportunity. My first mission out of the landing pod, however, was just going to be for basic observation, and I spent a three hours setting everything up for that.

I was struggling. I had not felt gravity in six months. My body hardly knew what to do. Nothing worked as well as it should have, with my body I mean, and I was actually kind of worried about getting out of the Rover. Those moon guys didn't spend six months in zero gravity before they landed -- I was the first to go through this. But of course, I had such an incredible amount of adrenaline. I WAS on MARS! It was the coolest thing anybody had ever done, and I took a couple of moments to think about that before getting back to my job as a scientist.