Mission to Mars: Most Boring Ride of My Life

Back in 1991, I was lucky enough to visit Disney Land with my family and experience the “magic”. However, not all of the rides lived up to the hype. One attraction, in particular, left a mental scar on my youth, and that ride was called “Mission to Mars“. It was lame, it was boring, and it was probably the first ride I had ever been on where I immediately wanted OFF THE RIDE. To call it a ride is an insult to all other proper rides on the planet.

It started out in a cavernous room to watch some animatronics that weren’t even Chucky Cheese cool. Then, they herded the room full of people into yet another room where you sat in a chair that didn’t move and barely vibrated, then forced to watch a movie, which was probably a vintage sixties high school science film, talk about the “advances in space travel”. The room resembled the worst planetarium I have ever seen, and in fact, a planetarium show would have been 1000 times better.

Unlucky Privilege

Unfortunately, according to Wikipedia, I was unlucky enough to be at the park while it was still active, as it was decommissioned in 1992. I still wonder how it persisted as an active attraction into the nineties. It was horribly dated, and the only person who wanted to go on it was (no surprise) my grandmother, because the sign indicated it was safe for everyone. No thrills, guaranteed!

I am still emotionally scarred from being forced onto that colossal waste of time, when I could have been queueing up instead to go on Space Mountain AGAIN.

Future Mission to Mars

I read an article in The Guardian about the first Russian woman astronaut, Valentina Tereshkova, and how she wanted to add her name to the growing list of people who are vying for a spot on the one-way trip to Mars planned for 2023. Commendable because at 76, instead of settling down like most in their silver years are wont to do, she is looking for another adventure. The idea of a potentially suicidal one-way mission to Mars might be scary to most, but luckily, there are plenty of people who still seek adventure through exploration. A trip of no return is the most plausible idea, and in fact is the most likely to succeed.

If science fiction has taught us anything, it is that for the colonization of a nearby planet to succeed, there must exist an initial group that goes there to live under the harshest conditions and settle the landscape. Unfortunately, I don’t believe we will have made any advances in terraforming within the next decade, so major changes are unlikely, but they could, with proper planning and supplies, establish a foundation for what could become the beginning of a habitation of our closest neighbor.

It is an exciting prospect, but one that I fear with every step we take as a human coalition into the beyond, it is one step further away from the concerns that plague us here on this planet now. I wonder if many, many years from now, we look back at this time and mark 2023 as the year when the abandonment of the Earth began.

Update: The Abandonment of Earth, Postponed Indefinitely

I wrote this in 2013 and wondered whether we would someday mark 2023 as the year humanity began abandoning Earth. Sadly, we did not. Mars One, the outfit hawking those one-way tickets, never launched so much as a toolbox. It went bankrupt in 2019 and dissolved, after MIT ran the numbers and concluded the first colonists would suffocate within two months. What I had taken for a space program turned out to be a reality-TV pitch with a CGI budget and 200,000 hopefuls who paid for the privilege of applying.

Which, in hindsight, tracks. Mars has been oversold in every era of my life. Disney strapped me into a barely-vibrating chair, called it a voyage to another planet, and kept the thing running for decades past its expiration. Twenty years later, a Dutch company strapped the same fantasy to a broadcast deal and called it colonization. Same planet, same overpromise, same letdown. The most boring ride of my life was simply the first of many. The Red Planet remains, to this day, all hype and no thrust.