AMERICAN NOTES: Approaching Infinity

There stood Viking, an alien on Mars' Chryse Planitia (golden plains), its sophisticated cameras sending sharply defined photographs across 212 million miles to earth. And hardly anybody was watching. Sure, the crowd at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., erupted with unscientific enthusiasm. But as the first photos came in, television screens across the U.S. were flickering with Barbara Walters reruns, old movies and game shows. There was excitement, but nothing remotely comparable to the electric thrill of Neil Armstrong's message from the moon: "Houston—the Eagle has landed!"

TV later gave Mars considerable play, but not enough to satisfy everybody. "It's downright disgusting," said University of Louisville Scientist J. Richard Keefe. "Talk about being blase about space exploration—this was just incredible."

Eventually, the establishment of this beachhead on the farther shores of space will surely be seen as a fantastic breakthrough (see SPACE). For now, perhaps people were disappointed at the absence of little green men and exotic vegetation. Maybe, without a space-suited man traipsing awkwardly around the planet, the event was too impersonal for many people. Or possibly the whole spectacular venture—an eleven-month voyage through the void, a robot responding to commands from nearly a quarter of a billion miles away, a perfect performance—was just too intimidating to most mortals: almost like trying to grasp the concept of infinity.