What a thrilling concept theoretical physicist/cosmologist Paul Davies entertains: A no-going-back approach to Mars exploration.
A round trip to Mars would be demanding of many resources and put astronauts in twice as much mortal danger (probably more than twice — taking off from barren Mars would be no walk in the park) than if they only had to risk their lives once, on the way over. Therefore: send people to live on Mars until they die.
I would envisage probably four people would go in the first instance. But a one-way mission to Mars would not just be a one-off exercise. They would be trailblazers. It would be the first step to establishing a permanent human presence on another world. Although they would go without the expectation of returning, they would have the expectation that sooner or later they would be joined by others and that this Mars base would grow and eventually become a permanent Mars colony that might take hundreds of years to establish.
Who would be so unhinged, who would have supportive enough underpants, to do such a thing? Well it’s hardly unheard of, argues Davies. Take those who first explored antarctica.
These people often went knowing that there was a high probability that they would not come back, and that if they didn’t come back, they were going to their deaths. I’m not suggesting that going to Mars necessarily means an instant death, but it may mean a premature death, it may mean your life expectancy is shortened by a little bit. But as I said, people attempt that risk in all sorts of other walks of life.
And what I have in mind is not just four miserable people sitting around on the martian surface waiting to die, (laughter) but that they would actually be doing useful job work. Of course, your accommodations would be cramped. People have said to me: it would be horrible living in these conditions. And my answer is, it’s not as bad as Guantanamo Bay.
It’s not as bad as Guantanamo Bay, folks!
How to fund such an ongoing operation, anyway? Selling television rights is one idea Davies reckons would be highly lucritive:
How do we pay for all of this? Given that NASA’s not going to do this, I think that ultimately this would have to be an international collaboration or some sort of commercial venture. Nobody is going to set up a permanent presence on Mars without having some sort of commercial arrangement. The discoveries that would be made by people working on Mars would have to be patented, there would have to be a cash flow that would pay for this. Imagine the TV rights – think of what people pay for football rights – I mean, huge sums of money. So a spectacular like this, a real life soap opera from another planet, I would think would be worth a lot of money. We can have more ambitious ideas about Mars Funds and long-term land titles and so on. Instead of selling worthless bits of land on Earth, with a time scale of some decades for their use, we’d have to extend that to some centuries. But there would be people prepared to do that.
Imagine the psychological pressure — “get good ratings or you’re dead!”. Ok so it would probably never come to that. But I like Davies’ ideas. You can read more of them at astrobio (via neatorama).
This story of such a large-scale challenge appeals to me at the moment especially because I’ve been trying to think of a way to put myself on a career trajectory that could lead to exciting places, even if things to start modestly.
I suppose if I were to try to draw a lesson from the above article it would be that grand challenges sometimes demand immodest beginnings, daring ideas… and balls so massive that only zero-gravity would make them managable.
