I'll close with a little, a couple of kind of sci-fi-ish
or, at least, futuristic pieces.
And I'll close with one of those.
And thanks, everybody, for being here in this lovely autumn
night.
I just come from a place where, at this time of day,
it would be 50 so this is great.
So this is called "The Rabbit on Mars."
"Do other animals tell jokes?
Perhaps the play of young animals,
in which they practice what will later
become life-enhancing skills, the stalk, the pounce,
the thrashing, is not so unlike what human beings do
in attempting to learn what they will
need to survive in the future.
Of course, we live and direct our lives so much in the mind,
so much in the richness and folly
and, yes, beauty of what our minds
can create that our play often takes the form of jokes,
a linguistic version of play.
One of my recent favorites was The Rabbit on Mars.
Nasa has landed two rovers, research-gathering devices--
this was before Curiosity went up--
on our neighboring planet, the one with soil
so bloody with iron that it was named for the Roman God of war.
How much more benign is our view?
Let's do some geologic study of the soil
and find out what it's really made of
and whether any lifeforms might once have inhabited the place.
Might, miraculous to say, have blown loose in a cosmic wind
and drifted here to our spinning globe
ceding everything we know, including
the great and troubling argument between religion and science.
The two research devices are named Spirit and Opportunity
as if the project were intended, at last,
to create a team from these often opposing forces.
It has been an awe inspiring experience to watch these
little emissaries of our curiosity make their journey
through space and land like bouncing balls in a place
so far away, we cannot imagine the distance,
though we can cross it.
Then release themselves from their protective shells
in response to messages beamed from Earth.
Errors in the software?
No problem.
New instructions were beamed from home base
and the little brain reconfigured.
The Rover, rolling off its platform,
drilling into Martian rock, sending snapshots
instantly back home through space.
The scientists and engineers have
worked in collaboration as musical and passionate
as a Symphony Orchestra to accomplish this.
And their joy is beautiful to behold.
How the knowledge will be used by opportunity,
if you will forgive my appropriating these names
and returning them to their earthbound meanings,
remains a cautionary tale.
No green-thinking poet could celebrate
transporting the culture of obsessive consumerism
to another planet.
That's how the knowledge will be used
by Spirit that draws me to the curious phenomenon
of the rabbit on Mars.
Along with the panoramic images of rusty soil and rock
circulating on the internet, that collective unconscious
of the technological that hovers over the surface of Earth,
came a fuzzy, imprecise image of an object
that appears to have very long erect and pointed ears--
just Google the rabbit on Mars.
It's very unimpressive, but who knows?
What makes an internet joke work--
It was graced with the caption, "a rabbit on Mars."
It is hardly the first time that human beings
have projected their imaginations out into space.
It isn't even the first time that the projections have
taken the form of a rabbit.
The Maya saw a leaping rabbit, a special pet
of the moon goddess, where Americans
see the man in the moon.
And Japanese moon gazers see a rabbit making a rice cake.
Of course, everyone got the joke that there
are no Martian bunnies hopping up
to welcome our team of digital explorers.
It turned out that the rabbit photographed by Spirit
was a tatter of the protective balloon that
had helped cushion the spacecraft's
landing, a momentary illusion, though,
it struck the imagination with silly and pleasurable force.
Spirit, of course, will be struck when and if science
finds life on other planets.
And many astronomers and evolutionary biologists
agree that it's really a matter of when,
not if, now that we know planets are not
an entirely exceptional phenomenon in the universe.
And therefore, the conditions suitable for life
may not be limited to those on Earth.
How far we have come from War of the Worlds
as our scientific instruments have extended
our eyes into far space, altering our picture of what
we will find there so that we can now imagine
the extraterrestrial, not as a mechanical warrior sent
to conquer our planet, but as a benign, fuzzy,
harmless, and familiar creature, a vegetarian,
an animal said to deliver baskets of candies
to children at Easter time.
Is the appeal of this image an instruction
to ourselves meant to calm us?
To assuage the fears that our sense
of ourselves and our world may soon be sent reeling?
What will it mean, even if all we find out there
are microbes living in ice?
Will our God be their God?
Will life itself become God?
Will we be humbled into a greater reverence and hunger
for knowledge as people were by the Copernican revolution?
Or will life become a dime-a-dozen happenstance
to be owned, manipulated, destroyed, and devoured
with an attitude of dismissal, even greater
than we've accomplished here on our gorgeous home planet?
How could we know what rearrangement
our spirits will undergo when such knowledge comes to us?
What better guide for us, if only in play,
than the animals, who have been with us
as the matter of our genes and the spirit of our imaginations,
who live with us as our teachers and companions and neighbors.
The animals, who were our first gods
in the childhood of humanity."
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]