Lars Asmundsson

I have taken Social Studies for many years now, and if there is one thing I’ve learned, it’s that history repeats itself. Apparently, iconic sci fi writer Ray Bradbury agrees. In the 1500’s and 1600’s Europeans ventured by to ship to the Americas. They took over the lands that the natives had inhabited for centuries and destroyed their culture. In the Martian Chronicles Earth is in ruins and people want off it, so they  turn to space travel to turn Mars into Earth 2.0. Earthlings leave Earth for Mars and pillage the people and eventually wipe out the great majority of the native Martians. The few remaining Martians flee into the mountains and only come in contact with humans on rare occasion. I think Ray Bradbury is basing the Martian Chronicles off the events that conspired when the european pilgrims settled in America and nearly wiped them out eventually.

The reason Ray Bradbury is writing a story about the interactions between earth and the native martians is because he wrote this book slightly before the space race possibly as a cautionary tale. He wrote this book a couple years before the period of 1955-72 where the U.S and the (then) U.S.S.R tried to be the first to get a rocket into space. He wrote it in 1950 but the book took place in the late 1990’s as a cautionary tale about how settling and conquering foreign lands. I think was a smart approach to the promise of space travel seeing how many people believe in space travel and humans have a knack for destroying other living things.

In conclusion, Ray Bradbury is a literary genius, who not only wrote a fantastic story but also made a compelling argument about the dangers of space travel. I agree with Bradbury when it comes to the promise of future travel to faraway planets and think we should take the explorations very cautiously. I think what people can take away from this book is that many times people get swept up in the promise of exploration that they don’t realize how it can destroy native civilizations. It has happened many a time in history that one or more countries explore and claim a new land peacefully, but, without intending to, conquer all of the native inhabitants in and around the land and, as I said, history has a way of repeating itself.