SHORT FEATURE - MY MARTIAN CUTIE (NUMBER 9)

I took a gander at The Martian for Aleteia this week and, like most reviewers out there, I enjoyed it. One thing I didn’t bring up in my piece, though, was the soundtrack which, if you’ve read the book you already know, is comprised entirely of disco music from the 1970s. Yeah, I know, but the playlist does allow for a pretty clever joke as the credits begin to roll, so it’s worth it. But even so, I think they missed an opportunity to include another tune from the early 70s that would have been just perfect…

Alas, it seems more and more unlikely that there were ever any nine-eyed Martian cuties on the surface of the red planet. Thanks to NASA’s recent announcement regarding evidence that liquid water flows intermittently on present-day Mars, however, there is the real possibility that at least some form of microbial life might exist out there somewhere.

Addressing NASA’s discovery in an interview with Vatican Radio, the director of the Vatican Observatory, Brother Guy Consolmagno, mused, “We have no idea whether life is so rare that it never occurs anywhere, or so common that it occurs everywhere, and that’s why we have to look at places life could be to see just how rare or how common it actually is… The important thing is to recognize that the universe is created by God, and however God did it tells us something about God’s personality. If God chose to make a universe where we are the only creatures, that is interesting, that tells us something about God and us. If God creates a universe where life is everywhere, that gives us a different picture of God, but either way, we learn more about who the creator is.”

Personally, it wouldn’t bother me at all if we found out God had created a universe with a nine-eyed Martian cutie in it. At the very least it would mean we shared the same sense of humor.