Every human action begins in the mind, which sends impulses to the body to carry them out. This applies equally to daily actions, like raising your hand to drink a glass of water, to incredibly complex challenges, such as putting humans into space. Our realities -- our futures -- flow from abstractions in our minds. Sending people to Mars is not a dream, but a realistic goal; going to the Moon was even more ambitious when we began that project, and yet Humanity succeeded in moving people 'out of the cradle', if only for a short time.

The MARS-ICE project is designed to encourage young people -- literally the makers of the future -- to think about the exploration of Mars. I think of the exploration and colonization of Mars not as an opportunity to plant a flag, or only to learn about another planet before heading home to Earth. I think of it as a potentially enormous and important process in human evolution; that of making yet another step outwards, into a new habitat, as hominids have been doing for millions of years. By five million years ago, we were walking...we emerged from one environment to colonize a new one, adapting physically and with our behavior, our culture, to the ground, from trees. By two million years ago we emerged from Africa, on foot, with the simplest of technologies, fire and stone tools. By three thousand years ago we had devised sailing vessels and explored the Pacific; we spread across Arctic hunting whales and living in ingeneous houses built of snow. And less than 50 years ago we stepped on the Moon. We are rooted in adaptation to new environments: humans love to see and explore new landscapes. And, we know that staying put on Earth is not in our best interest: many extinction events have occurred, and are sure occur again at some point. Going to Mars makes sense in at least these two ways. Some say that whever we go, we Humans only cause destruction and that by going to Mars we would only be transporting our imperfections elsewhere. Although this is a great over-simplification, it is painfully obvious that we have damaged our home time and again. This argument -- philosophically and figuratively -- takes us nowhere. We have made mistakes (and we'll continue to make them), but we study them in great deatil and we try to solve our problems; like any child growing up. As an archaeologist I see humans going to Mars as the continuation of an ancient pattern of adaptation to new environments, which is essentially an ancient process of learning and maturation of our species.

Mars exploration can be done as an international venture, encouraging international cooperation, and need not be done at the expense of solving the many problems we face here on Earth. Humanity needs large dreams as well as it needs food and water. Without such dreams, one exists, rather than lives. Without abstraction or symbolism, without building our physical world own world outward from our most distinctive ability -- imagination -- we lose our humanity.

While I wish to encourage students to think about the human exploration of Mars, perhaps it is even more important simply to stimulate imagination. As Carl Sagan often reminded us, it is too often that young people are told to 'stop dreaming!', that 'just thinking' is a waste of time. No, it is from dreams and 'far-fetched' ideas that radical new realities are formed. Ultimately, the goal is to encourage students to let their minds wander, to imagine, and to value their unique human ability to create new worlds from 'nothing but the mind'. Without this, I am convinced, we have nothing.

The assignments in this project, generated by myself and my friend Chuck Sullivan, an Adjunct Professor at Portland Community College, are meant to stimulate high-school students of all nationalities to think creatively about the human exploration of Mars. In part, this is done while monitoring my trek in Iceland as a thought device, a way for students to observe and contemplate wht exploration means for Humanity, in the context of going to Mars.

All of the finished assignments submitted to us will be judged in an international competion meant, again, to stimulate creative thought on Mars exploration. Guidelines for submission are available on the Teacher's Site. Finally, all assignments will be archived on a CD and a website, as well as the expedition report to the Royal Geographical Society's Expedition Advisory Centre as a record of these students' imaginations and plans. Good luck and good imagining!

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