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WE are in danger, danger of not realising our dreams. I had attended the 4th European Mars Conference at the Open University in the UK, 2004, and was inspired and impressed by the varied presentations and the visionary goals. Since then, the whole experience and the story of reaching the Martian Grail has been further impressed upon me by two books I had recently read.

The first book, The Arctic Grail (1988), by Pierre Berton, chronicled the explorations of the British Navy in the Eighteenth Century, highlighting the intransigence of the Admiralty in its attempts to conquer the Northwest Passage. The nationalistic approach, the non-adoption of native survival customs, the ill-preparedness for the cold, scurvy and overland-travel even after almost a century of documented successes in those areas by seasoned arctic explorers, was wholly negligent. Some might think that that was a sign of the times. That is true; but NASA is a sign of our times. And things were not looking good.

NASA reminded me of the old Admiralty. Obstinate in its approaches to space travel and not heeding advice and warnings from experienced scientists, technicians and senior astronauts, NASA had rekindled the complacent culture of the Admiralty, both organisations suffering loss of life and folly after folly. Just think of the Challenger and Columbia shuttle disasters, which surely rank with the Franklin Expedition (among other near disasters). With failed robotic Mars expeditions, the cancelled orbital space plane programme, the re-jinked Space Exploration Initiative and the lustreless International Space Station, NASA had failed to recapture the glory days of its moon shots, just as the arctic expeditions were used to employ sailors and to glorify the Empire after Napoleon's defeat.

The parallels are striking. I can only hope that in a century's time, people do not look back at our time and wonder with dismay, what went wrong?

The second book is Friedrich Nietzsche's Thus Spake Zarathustra (2003 translation). In it, the character Zarathustra muses: Mankind still has no goal... if the goal of mankind is still lacking, is not also mankind itself still lacking?'(pg 45). Well, to me the answer must be a resounding 'yes'!

You may be thinking that mankind has goals! Alleviating poverty, eliminating diseases, increasing education, cleaning air, land and sea, and forestalling starvation, etc, are all goals of mankind are they not? Well, no. They are not goals; they are Rights. Everyone has the Right

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