The pandemic has made grocery shopping a bit of an ordeal. Even with looser COVID-19 restrictions, we have to plan for an entire week.
We have to figure out the hours each store is open, when they’ll let our particular age group in, and how those hours coincide with our own schedules. And we have to factor in the additional time to stand in line before entering the store.
Masks are recommended, sometimes required. Limits on the number of customers allowed in a store at a time mean stink eyes are cast our way when we shop with the tykes, which means we have to arrange for somebody to look after the kids.
Besides, kids don’t appreciate today’s store-entry lineups or physical-distancing requirements. The resulting whining, whingeing and acting up result in more stink eyes.
And once we’re inside a store, we have to follow traffic directions and enact our two-metre force fields.
We navigate around the lady who parks her cart in the middle of the aisle while she ponders the goods on display. We make way for the guy on his phone obliviously pushing past other customers.
We dodge the girlfriends rolling their carts side by side and catching up as if they haven’t seen each other in person in four months.
But no judging, right?
After returning home from one particularly crowded grocery ordeal, I found an email in my inbox: “Looking for One Acre of Land on Mars? Don’t snooze on this deal.”
Well, I wasn’t actually — looking or snoozing — even after several hours of stink-eyed people-dodging. But Mars is on my mind.
It is now positioned in our sky almost directly opposite the Sun, which means many hours of potential viewing at night. And this Tuesday, it will be at its closest position to Earth in two years, making it appear bigger and brighter than it has since 2003.
With that in mind, this so-amazing offer was an acre (0.4 hectares) of land on the Red Planet for just $12 – down from the usual astronomical price of $35.
James Douglas probably paid more for the land he purchased from Vancouver Island First Nations in the 1850s.
Living as far away as Mars would certainly comply with physical-distancing requirements. It would mean no more lining up to enter grocery stores. It would mean an end to strangers breaking through our two-metre force fields with possible viruses and germs.
It would also mean no more food as we know it.
The skill set for Mars differs from what Nature Boy and I have acquired. We’d need not just the spirit of our pioneering ancestors, but the technological jerry-rigging know-how of a Matt Damon movie character.
Besides fundamental issues like radiation and water, transportation would be a problem. If you think bus service on the island is getting bad — thanks to COVID-19, transit service across the region is down, daily service north of Campbell River is discontinued, and ferry capacity and service were reduced for months — that’s nothing compared to getting to, from, and around another planet.
During the last decade, NASA and other space agencies have proposed human missions to Mars, and the U.S. Congress even approved one proposal for a crewed mission to orbit Mars by the mid-2030s — which was cancelled in 2017.
Regardless, we’d be waiting a good long time at the bus stop for a ride to the Red Planet.
And were transportation available, physical distancing from crew and other passengers would be unlikely during a seven-month space journey. If an infectious disease like COVID-19 broke out on board, we’d have fewer options than those passengers aboard the Diamond Princess cruise ship this spring, when the COVID-19 pandemic began.
So, despite the offer, we’ll give this amazing deal a pass. We’ll opt instead for minding occupancy limits at the grocery store during the day and gazing up at the uncrowded space between the planets and stars at night.
We may even point out Mars and say to each other: “Yeah, we could have owned a piece of that.”
