Well, you’d have guns on your orbiter, maybe, but probably not on your Mars landing craft. Every ounce you land is one more ounce of rocks and samples you couldn’t bring back. Of course, most of these movies probably pre-date the concept of the separate lander.
Well, they’re usually depending on some fanciful drive system that we haven’t worked out yet, anyway. So they often handwave away all kinds of things, like walking space, or walking in a spaceship.
And even if the local fauna isn’t interested in eating you, you might be interested in eating it.
The best middle ground I’ve heard against having a firearm for emergencies on a spacecraft is: stow the damn thing outside. That’s at least going to minimize problems that arise from accidents, and you can get it to it easily if you’re alive when you land.
Or you could fashion a rudimentary lathe.
Even more to the point, Red Planet - the first Mars juvenile - had gun-carry as a front-and-center issue. It was toned down slightly in first publication (and restored around 1990), but a major sub-plot of the book was basically 2nd Amendment rights and how they are used to fight evil dictatorships.
Then, of course, there was the irreplaceable Gun Without A Bang ([del]Silverberg?[/del] Sheckley.)
Sheckley. And it’s a ray gun in his case. It has a good point, but it’s not obvious that animals would necessarily associate the bang with the deadliness of the gun. Still, it explains why you’d want to have your probably quiet ray gun make a noise*
*The folks at Pandemonium Games think the same way. The laser guns in their Rifts games can be equipped with an audible noise to give them the visceral impact.
You bring a gun because you need some way to take out the guy who goes mad with space paranoia and threatens the safety of the rest of the crew/mission.
Of course, if the guy who goes mad with space paranoia is the one who gets to the gun first, all bets are off.
The HEL MD (High Energy Laser Mobile Demonstrator) engineers at Boeing concur. The reasoning in this case is that without sound effects, you might well not notice that the autonomous weapon platform has engaged targets, because its output is both silent and invisible.
When we were planning the Apollo missions, we knew that there was nothing on Luna larger than a microbe. In the context of the 1950s movies, those mission planners were expecting to find life. So it was reasonable to plan for the possibility that such life might include large predators. (Or even large herbivores. The deadliest animal in Africa is an herbivore.)
The Bambi-is-good, guns-are-evil view of nature is a quite recent phenomenon, and was not widespread in the 1950s.
Yeah, with the ever present specter of Space Madness, I say leave the guns locked in the safe, with only one key, which only the ship’s doctor has access to.
There is absolutely no chance that you will find the ship’s doctor inexplicably murdered halfway through the voyage.
[Elwood]I hate Moon Nazis.[/Elwood]
Woody Woodpecker, IIRC.
Guns don’t just ‘go off’. They are inanimate objects. If you’re worried about an accident, you might want to ponder being surrounded by hypergolic explosives that are just a button-press away.
As for ‘no conceivable use’…
That sounds pretty useful to me. Or were these Canal Maggots just peaceful creatures that were misunderstood and posed no threat?
The one thing you missed mentioning about all these stories is that they pre-date our modern understanding of Mars as having no life. In most of the ‘Mars has Guns!’ books, Mars has local threats and perhaps unknown threats. These people were explorers of a planet that harbored life of unknown types and hostility. I think I’d take a gun.
Right. Because when that book was written, we knew Mars was a barren, lifeless place. I fail to see the point you’re making.
Matt Damon…psssh.
Actually, people on Mars had guns because Mars in that book had incredibly dangerous fauna that can and would kill an unarmed person. That’s why even young people were trained to carry and shoot. ‘Water Seekers’ in particular sound like fast-moving reptiles that will hunt and kill people on sight.
The 2nd amendment arguments were there as well, and the people may have found their extensive gun ownership valuable when the authorities tried to subjugate them, but that wasn’t why they had the guns in the first place. Guns were very necessary to their survival.
Yeah. I’m not ordinarily the most gun-happy of people, but if some yellow-eyed native’s shooting bees at me, I want to be able to return fire.
I wouldn’t argue, but people in Westerns carried guns because of grizzly bears, too.
It’s not like the “armed revolutionaries” part of the story just wandered in from nowhere…
Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you Edgar Rice Burroughs radium pistols of Mars.
No, Heinlein clearly was working a 2nd amendment article into the story. You could even surmise that the existence of the dangerous fauna was a plot device he needed to be able to make sure to put guns into the story.
In any event, the point is that the presence of guns in that story makes total sense given the environment he is describing, whereas in ‘The Martian’ there is no need for guns because the astronauts do not face any threats that a gun would protect them from.
Still not understanding the point of the OP. Old stories about Mars had guns in them, and new stories don’t? Or taking guns to Mars is an old-fashioned idea? Or guns are bad, and the fact that even Mars stories had guns back in the day shows how ubiquitous they were? Or what?
So if you’re going to a new planet that’s totally unknown, it makes no sense to bring along something to defend yourself if it turns out bad things are waiting for you?
It seems to me that if I were heading to Mars, and our best scientists said, “There is life there, but we have no idea if it will be cuddly or murderous”, my first question would be, “okay, so how do I protect myself if it turns out they like to kill things like me?” Ignorance of the threat is no excuse to leave yourself utterly incapable of dealing with one if it arises.
Maybe some kind of tazer would be useful, in case one of the members of the crew goes mad. Like the General in Conquest of Space, since we are referencing 1950s scifi.
You probably don’t want to fire a projectile weapon inside a pressurised spaceship or hab.
Your link didn’t work, until I fixed it.
It doesn’t lead to anything NSFW, so I’m leaving it fixed, because now that I’ve read that article I want EVERYONE to be able to see it.