Not much of a big deal was made out of the event, but on Sunday night there was a human achievement of epic proportions. I am not referring to Olympians who could run fast, or jump high, I’m talking about the staggering achievement of gently landing a complex mobile science laboratory, with pinpoint accuracy, on the surface of another planet. The Mars Curiosity Rover exemplifies rational Man at his very best.

Curiosity left this planet 8 months ago and traveled 352 million miles at about 13,000 miles per hour to rendezvous with the red planet. A gentle landing required that many completely new inventions all would work flawlessly the first time they were tried. There would be no possibility of human intervention during landing. The millions of lines of code directing the landing events all had to be written correctly in advance.

I watched the successful landing and had the same feelings I had 8 years ago when a much smaller Rover landed on Mars. I thought again about the relatively trivial things that are considered big news and the relatively meaningless things that capture human emotions. I wrote an essay back then about my counter-cultural views on human achievement – real vs. imagined:

TOUCHDOWN!

It was January 4th [2004] and the Sugar Bowl was on television. I decided that I should watch the game, because, in our culture, “real men” do that sort of thing. Real men do that sort of thing a lot, spending vast amounts of time sitting around spectating. And when they are not watching other men play games with balls, they spend a lot of time talking about it, or listening to other people talk about it on radio and television. The talk is animated and passionate. Superlatives run wild. No statistic is too insignificant to be worthy of note.

Clearly, this is very important stuff. I was feeling somewhat unmanly by my disinterest in it all. Plus, I don’t even drive an SUV. To atone for this, I decided to watch the “national championship” game, along with the people in 15 million other American homes and the 79,000 wildly cheering fans in the Superdome.

It was pretty good football. LSU’s defense did not seem to care that Oklahoma’s quarterback, Jason White, had just won the Heisman trophy. Oklahoma’s offense was going nowhere. When they punted, the announcer gave the kicker’s average hang time, per punt, in tenths of a second. I wanted to know the hang time in thousandths of a second, but there probably wasn’t time to say it because of all the superlatives that need to be fit into every sports broadcast.

LSU’s offense dominated the favored Sooners. The Tigers were overpowering defenders like cornerback Derrick Strait, who, during the regular season, had a hand in 9 takeaways (three interceptions, four fumble recoveries, two forced fumbles). He also registered seven tackles for a loss on the corner blitz! That was awesome, they said. He won the Thorpe and Nagurski awards for phenomenal achievements like that.

After one of the Tiger touchdowns, I channel surfed over to Nova on PBS. They were telling the story of another touchdown that had happened on the previous night. A strange shaped ball had touched down and bounced across the surface of Mars. Its hang time had been almost 6 months and the ball had traveled about 303 million miles since it was thrown from this planet.

There was no egotistical ball carrier strutting around like he had really accomplished something important. There were no crowds cheering in the stands. The ball rolled to a stop on a silent planet. Then the ball opened, like an egg hatching, and the thing inside the ball began to stir. It unfolded its solar panel wings. It prepared to stretch out its 6 legs. It raised its head and looked around. It phoned home.

A projection of human intelligence was sitting on Mars. This achievement was man at his best; confronting an incredibly complex problem, and thinking his way through to a successful conclusion. The Nova documentary showed failure after failure that sent the NASA scientists back to the drawing board. The difficult struggle to think of a way past the problems was well portrayed. That was what made the successful touchdown so exhilarating. It made me proud of my tribe: mankind.

The evening did not turn out as I had expected. My goal had been to join my sports-worshiping culture and watch these teams push each other around on the astroturf. And I did enjoy the game, but after watching the touchdown on Mars and comparing it to the touchdowns in New Orleans, I knew I was still a cultural misfit. I consider spectator sports to be trivial and relatively meaningless entertainment.

I do not understand the overwhelming significance that these games have in the lives of so many people. Most of us played board games, like Monopoly, when we were young. During the games, we pretended that it all mattered. We were emotionally involved. We passed Go, and collected our $200. But when the game ended, we put it away, and we put away any delusions that it mattered at all. In sports games, the delusion that it matters lives and grows.

There appear to be several reasons for this. There is a primitive tribal aspect to human nature. Sports contests are “our tribe” vs. “your tribe”. Our tribe can be our school, our state, our country, or any other entity that lets us identify us vs. them. Games are surrogate battles which allow the excitement of aggression without all the dead bodies. The language of sports overlaps the language of war. If there are two colleges in your state, the game between them will be called the Civil War. Of course we want to be part of the strong tribe, the conquering heroes.

Another reason for devotion to sports teams is a peculiar aspect of human psychology that allows a person to increase his own self esteem by identifying with the accomplishments of others. Psychologists call this BIRGing, short for Basking In Reflected Glory. This allows a big company, like the NBA, to start a franchise business in your town composed of millionaires who are not you, and have nothing really to do with you, and yet, when they win you swell with pride. If they win over all the other tribes, your tribe erupts in a wild celebration. “We won”, you say, apparently unaware that you didn’t even play.

In a balanced life, there is certainly room for entertainment. And watching other people play sports games is not much fun unless you pretend that the outcome matters. But, if the things that athletes can do with balls represents the real glory of man, then we certainly don’t aspire to much as a species.

The real glory of man, the thing that sets us apart, is our rationality. Progress is nothing but a steady display of human intelligence applied to solve human problems. If the problems that face us today are to be solved, it will be our reasoning powers that do it. There is no other way. So I guess the pride I felt when my team, against all odds, carried that ball deep into the enemy territory of Mars, was me basking in reflected glory – the glory of people who can think. It was a truly awesome touchdown.

See a short video on Curiosity landing here.

It’s not often that you get to watch people celebrate a touchdown of actual significance. See it here.