I Want Mars, But Not Like This

Since Curiosity landed, the scientific community has been all kinds of excited about mankind's plan for Mars. While generally, the most reputable organisations are keeping fairly low-key about their plans and expectations beyond learning a few bits of stuff, some people got really excited.

For a while, there was a fair amount of talk about Mars One. And it did seem legitimately cool. And, while it didn't seem likely to happen immediately, it didn't seem all that far-fetched in the long run. It admitted that it was a fairly new project that still required a lot of work and it was backed some really cool people, including Nobel Prize-winning CERN scientists. Who else are you going to trust with your trips to Mars?

And then this happened.

And it broke my heart.

I won't say I had the best hopes in the world for Mars One, but I really did love the idea. I thought that if something like that could really get done, then maybe humanity was finally learning something. It would finally learn to work together, to watch how a society can work when it started over from scratch. It could teach us so much about what we're doing wrong here on Earth and make a huge difference to the way society is run.

And that's on top of all the cool stuff we'd learn about Mars.

Which would have been a lot.

And would in turn have taught us more about the universe, the solar system, our own planet. We could have made so much progress from being there. It is literally a whole other world for us to explore and learn from and utilise.

And even if Mars One didn't work out like it had hoped to, it would have at least made some kind of headway in getting us to Mars. Having a well written plan might have been enough to make a difference to what other organisations are doing about space exploration.

So I feel bad for everyone involved. I'm happy that I missed out on what looked like an incredible opportunity.

I'm aware that, given Lansdorp's response, there is room to give him the benefit of the doubt. But I don't think I want to. I'm sick of putting my faith into people who claim to care about something other than profits.

And what disturbs me is that once people decide this is a scam, they'll start to gradually stop caring about the genuine ventures people want to take. All too often, people make assumptions based on one experience. Or one high-profile story. And it does damage to the enthusiasm behind legitimate enterprises. And it's going to happen now.

I'm still excited about exploring Mars - about exploring all of space. I'm still going to follow Curiosity. And Cassini. And the Voyagers. Because I enjoy learning about the universe. I think it's the most exciting thing there is. Space didn't do anything wrong.

But I'm disappointed in people. And, while that's not new, it still hurts.

I'm Going to Mars!!

It is virtually undisputed that outer space is supremely cool. It is creepy and mysterious and captures the imagination of people across the world. People devote their lives to the study of it, whether in the more abstract and often less accurate joy of science-fiction writing or in the pursuit of answers through hard study and research. It has warranted the creation of NASA, which is one of the most amazing things ever to have come out of America. Outer space is where the secrets of the universe lie; pretty much everything we can learn about Earth has been learned and all the mysteries left to solve are somewhat further afield. The only people who disagree tend to be unimaginative and drab, rather like this idiot, who can’t even structure a sentence properly:

Some dickhead's ignorant opinion, courtesy of Facebook

(I considered ranting for a bit about precisely why this is ignorant and about how beneficial ALL scientific research is, even when it's an accident, but I already did it, here, so I figured I didn't need to do it again.)

Very recently, NASA’s Curiosity Rover landed safely on Mars and has started sending back pictures already. They are amazing. They aren’t the best quality photographs in the world, but they did come from Mars. Obviously, this made me very excited and I enlisted Google and Twitter to take me on a big old nerd binge.

Bas Lansdorp

In doing so, I stumbled across the Mars One Project. It is a private enterprise run by Dutch entrepreneur Bas Lansdorp and its aim is to set up a colony of human beings on Mars over the space of the next few decades. The mission objective is to “establish the first human settlement on Mars by April 2023”. The Mars One team has been working on the plan for it since early 2011 and have the support of a number of “ambassadors”, including the Chairman of the Netherlands Space Society, the co-creator of Big Brother and CERN physicist Prof. Dr. Gerard ‘t Hooft, who was presented with the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1999 for his work on the quantum structure of electroweak interactions.

The first forty astronauts to be sent to Mars will be selected in 2013. They will all have to train for ten years so that they are prepared for their trip. A replica of the Mars One settlement will be built in the desert on Earth to serve as a place for the astronauts to prepare and train as well as to test the equipment. In January 2016, the “supply mission” will be launched, sending 2500 kilograms of food and other supplies in a SpaceX Dragon spacecraft. In 2018, a rover will land on Mars to explore the selected area to find the best spot for habitation. In 2021, two living units, two life supports units, another supply unit and another rover will have arrived on Mars, prepared for the arrival of the astronauts. All “water, oxygen and atmosphere” production will be ready by the beginning of 2022 and the first group of astronauts are due to be launched towards Mars on September 14^th 2022.

The first astronauts will be due to land on Mars in 2023 after an estimated 7-month journey, where the rovers will take them to their new home. More astronauts will be launched in groups of four every two years so that the colony will have reached 20 settlers by 2033. The Mars One team plan to send more hardware up with each additional group so that more and better exploration can take place as well as providing them with updated technology and providing better quality of life.

The plans for the 'settlement' to be built on Mars

Getting back from Mars is a hell of a lot harder than getting to Mars – look at how long it took for us to develop rockets on Earth. The astronauts will not be visiting, but emigrating to Mars, where they will be expected to stay, possibly for the rest of their lives. They will have to leave everything on Earth behind in the attempt to learn more about the red planet. Training for the astronauts before they leave will include staying in simulation bases to see how they cope with being secluded, away from everything they have ever known and loved, and being left with only the other astronauts. They must be extremely intelligent and able to cope in unfamiliar environments, as well as being able to solve any problems that may occur by themselves, especially those in the first team of four who will be alone for two years on a different planet. They must also have a knowledge of engineering, in case anything goes wrong with the technology, as well as the ability to cultivate crops and see to any medical problems. The team at the moment predict that they may well stay there for the rest of their lives, but it does not exclude the possibility that the technology necessary for a return rocket can be sent to Mars after a few years so that astronauts can return if they wish. Considering the state of technology now, and given the amount of time for proliferation between now and when the return rocket will be required, this is not an unreasonable estimate.

The settlement on Mars will include “inflatable components which contain bedrooms, working areas, a living room and a ‘plant production unit’, where they will grow greenery”. Within the settlement, the Mars One website predicts that the astronauts will “lead typical day-to-day lives”. There, their task will be building and researching. They will have to prepare for when the other groups land as well learning about Mars. Their research will include how people and plants respond to life of Mars as well as things like Mars’s geology and biology. Essentially, imagine everything the scientists throughout history have learned about Earth - forty people are going to be sent to do all of that on another planet.

Reading the information offered by the website does seem like they have thought of everything. It does not go into great detail, but it does offer an FAQ page as well as a contact address for anyone with further questions. The page explaining why and how the astronauts will emigrate to Mars is quite cool. They claim to have found a place where there is water ice beneath the surface that can be cultivated to provide hydration for the astronauts. They describe how everything will be powered by solar panels so that they do not need to go to the hassle of building a nuclear reactor for energy. They go to a lot of effort to ensure that people know that they understand what they are undertaking.

The Mars One website has a Sponsorship page, inviting businesses and companies of all sizes to sponsor the project and “play a significant role in creating World History” and “make the next giant leap for mankind”. However, the project will mainly be funded by having the whole thing being as a reality TV show. Suddenly it makes sense that the Big Brother guy is involved; otherwise, he really stuck out as a bit of a loser in amongst all those people with physics doctorates…

From the selection and preparation of the first astronauts, right through the launch of the first rover to the point at which a colony has formed on Mars, everything will be broadcast on television and be made available online for the public to view. The Mars One team insists that there will be no gimmicky bullshit like in most reality TV shows, that the integrity of the mission itself should be more than enough to attract people to watch. I know I would watch, but I’m a nerd, and generally I hate reality TV, so I don’t really know if I’m a good example.

I actually think this is brilliant. I don’t know if it will work. I don’t think that there have been enough critical analyses of the plans by people who have a lot of in-depth knowledge about all the necessary science for me to draw any proper conclusions. I have had a look at the Wikipedia entry for Mars One as well as the one for Prof. Dr. Gerard ‘t Hooft, the most advertised of the team’s “ambassadors”. I have had a very long look at the website and I, with my nerdy but nonetheless layman’s knowledge, think it is pretty awesome, but it only makes sense to remain sceptical before I have a bit more information. They seem very determined that everything go right and well and that all the science be absolutely fool-proof, so that they are taken seriously and so that they don’t end up stranding forty well-meaning astronauts somewhere between Earth and Mars without food or oxygen. It does feel a little bit like that episode of The Simpsons in which Homer went to space, but science is not about feelings – it is about doing research and getting results and using the information gleaned from crazy ventures just like this to make a better world for generations to come.

Now I know I’m not exactly astronaut material right now – but if Homer Simpson can do it, anyone can. Besides, there is another year before the selection begins and I will be thirty when the first team is launched, so I've got time to prepare. I won’t lie, I have already signed up for some free online study groups beginning in January of next year that focus on biology and other things that may come in handy with my application, but I was already signed up for one about astrobiology and I don’t have much going on during the time of course, so my nerdism probably would have led me to do them anyway.

I would like a bit more information about it, maybe some objective opinions about it from more than a handful of people. I would like to see the specifics of the plans – more details, for instance, about exactly how they expect me not to die. If this project really is as good as the website makes it out be (which it probably won’t be; nothing ever us, but we may as well be hopefully), I would happily sign up. Never mind that my nan doesn’t like me living as far away as London and is such a technophobe that there is no way she will trust the video messaging system, even though I know for a fact that they guys at CERN currently use Skype (Brian Cox did it at Uncaged Monkeys in December 2011; I was there, it was awesome).  Never mind that the minimum age limit is 25. Never mind that it may mean spending most of my life on Mars and much of the time beforehand training and studying to be competent enough to go to Mars. Never mind that if I do spend a lot of time studying and training and then end up not making the final cut that I would have wasted as much as ten years of my life (provided I start working for it now, or at least in the next six months or so) for something I never will do. None of that matters.

This is Mars. The planet. This is a chance to go down in history. This is dangerous and exciting and amazing and unbelievably nerdy. Space exploration is one of the coolest and most incredible things that mankind has achieved and it is all done by amazing nerds, which Hollywood will have you believe are all also total babes. This is not always untrue.

The fact is that Mars is the next thing that mankind has to explore. Maybe we haven’t learned everything there is to learn about the moon or even the Earth, but we will, and why shouldn’t we be heading off to Mars too, so we're there ready to start working when everything else is done? We all know it is going to be awesome, but you don’t have to believe me, because my opinion is only mine and I am obviously not the best spokesperson for this sort of thing.

Rather, believe Carl Sagan:

A Rant: Stupid People

Once upon a time, a bit more than thirty years ago, some nerds, who were brilliant at their job and have greatly benefited mankind, began a project called ENQUIRE. They used it to send each other digital messages from different points on the globe so that they could exchange information and the research they were doing into intensely difficult particle physics could come along a bit more quickly. In 1993, it was announced that the internet would be free to use by anyone. Now, less than 20 years later, it is difficult for some people in the modern generation to imagine how people lived without it. It's general lexis has bled into everyday speech. It has had a huge impact on society and, quite frankly, it was unbelievably generous of those first nerds to allow everyone in the world unlimited access to anything they could possibly want for free. Some of the most intelligent people in the world spent decades working and studying to come up with this and they shared it with the world to do with it what we will, which is why shit like this annoys me:

I am all for freedom of speech but, personally, I try not to comment on things that I don't understand so that I do not confuse or mislead people who trust my judgement; clearly these morons don't want to offer people the same courtesy I do.

And now I could rant a bit more about how intellectually frustrated this barefaced bullshit makes me feel and I could hopelessly bemoan the state of humanity, but I think that this does it well enough for me:

Did you think I was going to shut up about the Higgs? You were wrong.

In this very month, the wonderful nerds at CERN announced the discovery of the elusive Higgs boson particle, for which they have been searching since the construction of the Large Hadron Collider, in order to confirm or debunk the Standard Model of the universe. They found it (more or less). The Standard Model works – the mathematics of it fit our universe in a way that explains it in a rather complex but understandable model. The Higgs boson was the last piece of the puzzle and now we have reasonable evidence that it exists.

At this point, it depresses me that a lot of people now say “So what?”

I heard some innocent person – who was actually trying to defend the expense and effort put into this research – reply “Well, because they were curious. They just wanted to know.”

And, to some extent, that is true, but that response could be said of any and all science and it strips it down into its absolute barest motive. There is no doubting that curiosity is at the base of every scientific experiment, every theory and deep in the heart of every person who has ever been interested in anything even remotely scientific. But to say that all of CERN and everything it has achieved has been only to satisfy the curiosity of a handful of nerds is to massively devalue all that it has done and all the benefits it has bestowed upon civilisation.

If you ask any random person on the street what CERN has achieved in its lifetime, they probably will not be able to give you an answer, unless by some tiny chance you asked someone as nerdy as I am. You might get someone moaning about how much it cost. But that is relative and, when you think about what it actually has achieved, you realise that all the money gone into it is actually piss in the ocean.

The science budget in most western countries is miniscule when you think about how much governments waste on other rubbish. Take, for instance, the now quite famous government spending chart from The Guardian in 2008, which shows quite clearly how more than £620.6 billion was divided between all the things for which the government wanted to pay. All money put towards science came under the heading “Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills”, which received, of all that money, only £3.3 billion. That £3.3 billion includes all medical research, space exploration, developments in technology and engineering as well as things like arts and humanities that need money to flourish and come under the same heading. That tiny fraction of government funds is not a lot of money, especially when you consider that science pays for itself sooner or later. The Apollo programme, for example, paid for itself fourteen times over. That means that for every $1 that the American government invested in the project, it put $14 back into the economy. On average, the American government earns 700% profit on money put towards NASA. Research in quantum physics led us to a better understanding of the way our world works; scientists exploited that to create the transistor, which is the building block of pretty much all modern technology, including phones, radios and computers. Pretty much any development in the understanding of how our universe works will lead to more improvements like this in our lives.

CERN has been around since the 1950s and the LHC was built between 1998 and 2008. Everyone – particularly those who have seen either my FaceBook page or Twitter feed – knows its most recent news, but many more of its achievements seem to have been completely forgot. The progressive achievements in particle physics are numerous; between 1973 and 2012 they found far more than just the Higgs boson. In 1984, two CERN physicists were awarded a Nobel Prize for their work there and the discovery of the W and Z bosons. And to anyone who says that now that the Higgs has been found that the LHC is now worthless and no more than a blight on the Swiss landscape, you’re wrong. It is now being used to study dark matter, one of the most mysterious things in physics, and could tell us more about the universe than any discovery in the history of science if its work in the future is half as successful as it has been so far.

The fact is that there are loads of things going on at CERN, but the discovery of the Higgs boson particle is the only one that has really been publicised because of the massive machine it took to find it. The real problem with these achievements is that they only really have relevance to those who know how to use them, those physicists who care about finding the answers and confirming models of the universe. But these are quite a small minority of the people; most people will happily take advantage of all these developments without really caring how or why it works. But that is not to say that these findings do not have a huge impact on your life.

I can guarantee that everyone reading this has used – in fact is using right now – the biggest thing to come out of CERN. I would very much like to dither for a while and let you squirm or maybe get a bit defensive and insist that of course you have not used this thing that is so popular because of course you would know that it comes from CERN if it was that amazing and that big a part of your life. But, actually, it is pretty amazing and you definitely use it.

A project called ENQUIRE was born in CERN in the late 1980s. It was based on the concept of hypertext and was designed so that researchers could share information from different parts of the word. In 1993, the World Wide Web became free and available to everyone and anyone.

No matter what else it does, CERN will always be the birthplace of the Internet. Think of all the money that has been saved and made because of the Internet, both by independent business, people and even governments and huge corporations. Think of everything that is on the Internet that otherwise humanity would not have. Forget the spam and the porn and the whining teenagrs complaining on FaceBook about how much they hate life even though they are luckier than any other generation. Think about how easy it is to share information, or to start up a business. Forget that without YouTube there would be no Justin Bieber and remember that without YouTube there would be no TED talks. Think about having a forum for your opinion and your thoughts no matter who you are or what you think. Think about a freedom of debate and a simple and easy way to connect with people just like you, no matter where they are in the world. Think about having global news at your fingertips whenever you want it and think about how seeing a silly reblogged meme face can make your whole day.

Think about the hypocrisy of some nutter blogging or tweeting about how the LHC is unnecessary and CERN is a waste of money and effort.

Now thank CERN for providing you with such an incredible gift given free to the rest of mankind and stop calling it the ‘God particle’.