End of the Little Rover That Could

[Lighthawk]

A memorial very few people will ever see? Nah. Might not be the first trip out, but eventually they'll bring at least one of them back for the general public to gander at.

[Graham Kennedy]

I don't know what these rovers mass, but surely it's not more than a twenty or so kilos. By the time we're sending people to Mars on any sort of routine basis that wouldn't be a lot to bring back.

I do wonder how people will feel about this. Would we bring the leftover hardware of the Apollo missions back to Earth? Recover and return the Voyager and Pioneer probes (apart from the one Klaa will blow up, obviously)?

And if we do... when the time comes that there are colonies on the Moon and Mars, what will those people make of it? Will they see it as Earth plundering their history, much as the Egyptians had so much of their history shipped off to Europe? If we do ship these things back, it may not be too long until there are campaigns to have them returned.

[Tsukiyumi]

And if we do... when the time comes that there are colonies on the Moon and Mars, what will those people make of it? Will they see it as Earth plundering their history, much as the Egyptians had so much of their history shipped off to Europe? If we do ship these things back, it may not be too long until there are campaigns to have them returned.

The Great Rover Campaign of 2214?

[Graham Kennedy]

Why not? There are still movements going to return things from western museums to their place of origin even today.

[Mikey]

And if we do... when the time comes that there are colonies on the Moon and Mars, what will those people make of it? Will they see it as Earth plundering their history, much as the Egyptians had so much of their history shipped off to Europe? If we do ship these things back, it may not be too long until there are campaigns to have them returned.

There's an important distinction. Whatever Carter et. al. took from Egypt was native to Egypt. The Mars rover came from Earth and was employed by Earth. A better example is colonial antiquities in the U.S. The things that are considered to be heritage pieces of the early U.S. are the ones that are from the colonies, not from Great Britain. That's not to say that British antiquities don't have historical relevance, just that they aren't considered to be heirlooms of the U.S. as an independent nation.

[Graham Kennedy]

Yes, an excellent point. We could certainly claim that "hey, they're ours!' Legally I'd think it would depend on exactly when things happened. Would we be shipping these things back before or after the people there regarded themselves as a new independent nation? Even before the declaration of independence, I doubt the American colonists would have taken kindly to the Brits showing up to strip the place of everything they had shipped out there.

Still, legalities aside I think it would be a bit small of us to do that. If there really were a population on the moon or Mars, growing from a scientific outpost into a genuine colony, those people would be forging a new culture. Having a history, monuments, etc would be an important part of that.

Earth, in contrast is already a treasure house of antiquities and monuments of every kind. In practical terms, they would need it a whole lot more than we would.

[Mikey]

That's a whole different point, and one with which I agree. I'd think there was some poetic justice in, if the Rover were to be displayed as an antiquity anywhere, letting it be displayed on Mars.