Empty territories have often seemed to be a prerequisite for the big performances of human progress. Today, the New Worlds which await are not the terrestrial ones of Lewis and Clarke, or Captain Cook and Joseph Banks, but the video-surface of Mars, the Hubble Deep Field. Unlike any on Earth, these terrains seem culturally uncontested, open to any reading anyone might want to project onto them. The desiring imagination alone might be satisfied with visualizations, simulations, virtual realities, even art. Projecting without reflecting, the would-be explorer might forget that the dangers of exploration lie as much in their own disposition as in the new terrain. Less