If you followed the path of Spirit to Mars—and most of us didn't, being too concerned with life, and death, here on earth—it seems almost impossible that the space vehicle managed not only to make it across all those millions of miles of emptiness, but that it managed to land almost exactly where its designers had planned for it to come down. It's even better than shooting a pea out of a cannon 15 or 20 miles and expecting it to land in a teacup somewhere at the end of the flight.

Getting the lander onto the surface of Mars was even more amazing. A kind of Rube Goldberg system did this. In part, this is because the atmosphere of Mars is a lot less dense than that of our earth, and hence it is less likely to slow an incoming missile down much.

But there is friction even in Mars' thin "air," and so it was necessary to put a heat shield on the incoming end of the lander. This helped to slow the lander down to something less than the 10,000 miles an hour that it had been traveling. Then a parachute popped out. This slowed it even more. Finally, retro rockets acted as a final brake and then a bunch of balloons deployed around the lander and it bounced a couple of times and finally came to rest on the floor of a huge impact crater.

Why all this didn't shake the lander apart is a testament to its design. Instead, it popped open and began the laborious process of extending its solar panels, opening its various cameras and beginning a long list of experiments, including sampling the Martian soil.

Like all the other vehicles men have sent to Mars so far (two-thirds of which have failed to work), Spirit's purpose is to try to find a clue, any clue, which might prove that life is or was present on the planet. So far none has been discovered and the outlook for success isn't very promising. The view from the lander and from previous earth probes is bleak.

Mars, like the moon, is apparently without water, is vast plains of red dust and rocks and pocked by impact and volcanic craters like those on the moon. The slim hope that life still exists on Mars or might have existed in the past lies in features which look as if they could only have been formed by flowing water.

Mars does have ice caps, although whether they really contain ice is uncertain. But there don't seem to be any even faint remains of life in any form anywhere. And Mars is the only planet in the solar system other than the Earth where there's even a chance that life exists or existed. All the other planets are either too hot or too cold, without atmospheres containing oxygen. They are either chunks of rock or collections of gas in which life would instantly perish.

So I think of Spirit sitting in lonely splendor, swiveling its "eyes" (really our eyes) about in search of something, anything that might look like living matter, or failing that, living water, millions of miles from the Earth which gave it form and substance.

Like the golf ball the late Alan Shepherd, one of the Apollo astronauts, left on the moon, it is destined to remain pretty much where it is for eternity. Oh, I know, it will rove around its landing site in search of new sights, but it is not likely to go very far. It won't be long before it will join the rest of the debris we have scattered across Mars, the moon and, ultimately, the far reaches of the solar system, inanimate, a testimony to a search which is likely in the end to fail.

Call me a pessimist, but I don't think man is likely ever to find any other signs of life, intelligent or otherwise, in the universe. Life requires such a delicate balance of water and air, temperature and a complicated cycle of life, death and replenishment that the places where it might be found are few and far between.

Because the universe presumably is all governed by the same set of rules and made of the same elements, it is, of course, possible that somewhere life might evolve as it has on our planet. It is possible, but it also is not very likely.

If not solitary and as lonely as Spirit sitting somewhere near the center of a very large, but empty crater, life in the universe seems to be sparse and intelligent life even rarer.

We could take that as an imperial right to rule. We also could take that realization as a warning of how fragile is our place in the universe.

But we don't. Instead, collectively we keep seeking to prove that we are not alone in the vast assemblage of novae, black holes, stars, galaxies and interstellar dust.

We don't want to be alone. We want proof that we are more than we seem to be. And so we keep sending Spirits as far as we can fling them in an effort to find ourselves all over again.

It's foolish and yet at the same time it's heroic. It's like shaking our puny fists at God.

Carl Heintze is a frequent contributor to the Campbell Reporter. He can be reached at carlheintze@juno.com.