Spaceman Steve's Story
I was born in 1959. It was the Space Age. We were taking our first steps into space and onto another world. Probes were finally showing us the other planets in our solar system. It was of a time of exploration, the likes of which humanity had not seen for hundreds of years. But the pace of modern life is relentless. Somehow, the space age ended. We've had an age of inflation, a post-cold war era, an information age and a dot com blip. These eras come so quickly and they end without warning. I just assumed the era I grew up in would continue. I thought that we, as a species, would continue to reach out and explore the universe. It is true that space research is still going on. But, I don't think anyone would call this the Space Age. Understanding the universe is not consuming any nation. We don't all come together to witness great historic events of exploration. It seems like we aren't so interested in doing these great things anymore.
This isn't the sort of world I thought I would grow up in. And it isn't the sort of world I really want to live in. So, I wondered what I could do about it. I've always read about science. It started when I was a kid. I read lots of what Isaac Asimov wrote and then moved up to the magazine Scientific American. After I got out of college, I supported myself as a programmer. From time to time, I would still read the sort of science books that are in neighborhood bookstores, but I wanted to know more. Eventually, I started reading college text books and was surprised at how readable they were - at least the ones by British authors.
One day I was poking around a NASA web site and happened to find the National Space Science Data Center. It's a web store that sells (mostly to scientists) CDs filled with data from planetary probes. I had just read a book on Venus, so I ordered a couple of CDs with radar data of Venus for US$10 a piece. The CDs don't really contain images, they just have the raw data in NASA own data format. When they arrived, I figured out the file format and wrote a program that would create images one at a time and display them on my computer screen. I still remember how excited I was when I finally got my program working right and I saw my first image from Venus. I enjoyed this so much I bought more CDs. When they arrived, I made some popcorn and sat in front of my computer and watched images of Venus appear.
It dawned on me that the experience I was having was pretty much identical to what I would be having if I was on a real spaceship going around the real Venus. The atmosphere of Venus is so full of clouds that you can't see the surface from orbit. The best way to look through the clouds is to use a radar. So, if I were on a spaceship, it would need a fancy radar system that imaged the surface and displayed the pictures on a view screen. And there I was, sitting in front of a CRT, watching radar images of another world. Instead of a spaceship I had a computer. Instead of a planet, I had a CDs full of sensor data. Although I, sadly, will never get to orbit Venus or Mars in a spaceship, I can orbit them in a simulator. Since I will never have a real spaceship made of steel and rocket engines, I built a simulator - a spaceship made of silicon.
Exploring another world starts out exciting. But, like just about else, the excitement wears off. The problem I had was I didn't know enough to make sense of the pictures I was looking at. I could recognize volcanoes and impact craters. But I also knew that scientists had already spent years studying these images and they would spend many years more. Always finding new insights and better understanding the other planets in our solar system, they come to understand Earth better. They also come to understand what other solar systems might hold. If I wanted to spend time exploring other planets, I needed to know more about how planets worked. So, I got some more college text books and subscribed to a research journal. I was very surprised that learning this stuff wasn't very hard. Like you, I was born and raised on a terrestrial planet and already knew a lot about them. Like you, I had heard of all the major topics in the field (processes such as volcanism and erosion, features such as mountains and rivers) and I just needed a little background to tie together everything I had already picked up from living on Earth.
And that's all you need as well. You probably know more about geology and geophysics then any other field of science. There is not an important concept you need to explore another planet that you have not heard of. It is all pretty familiar and requires almost no knowledge of mathematics.
I think I can tell you a lot of what you need to know to explore a planet. And if some little green men or the Starship Enterprise come by looking for crew, you will be prepared. With some software I have written you can even begin your own journey. If you want to begin a great adventure of planetary exploration, you don't have to wait until the 23rd century. You don't have to invent warp drive. You don't have to become an astronaut. Everything you need is already in your hands.