Martian Values

Recently, I passed someone with a sports team t-shirt that said, "No Mercy! No Wimps!" Merely winning wasn't enough; they want their favorite sportsball team to beat the stuffing out of their opponents and dance in the scattered viscera.

To the best of my memory, the tough-guy, win-at-any-cost shirts and slogans started with actual athletic apparel and associated commercials. Then that "Fear This", trash-talking attitude spread to marketing for sports teams, cars, gyms, and energy drinks. (BTW, the person wearing the "No Wimps" shirt didn't look as if they could even jog half a block without inviting a coronary event.) Worse than that, though, is that this sneering has crept into and corroded politics, entertainment, and our whole cultural landscape. I've seen the poison of that no-compromises attitude sever friendships and render civil discussion nearly impossible.

On Mars, we won't be able to sustain ourselves with any sort of lingering divisions. A with-me-or-against me attitude will literally raise the risk of getting the settlers killed. Each person's contribution will be critical. Via the oft-derided planned TV show, audiences on Earth will see the Mars One colonists valuing trust, mutual support, and collaboration above self-glorification and trumped-up antagonism. I hope and believe that seeing Martian values in action will encourage folks on Earth to stop and assess the way they treat one another, and to turn away from pointless division and aggressive sloganeering as a substitute for substantive accomplishment.

Mars? Why not colonize the Moon first?

When I first talk about Mars One's settlement plans with people for the first time, almost invariably the question will be asked, "Why not settle on the Moon first? It's so much closer?" It's a question that also pops up on Twitter, Facebook, and blog comments all the time.

And they're right: the Moon is closer. But that is about the only thing to recommend it as a permanent settlement prospect for humans.

So let's take a quick 'n' dirty look at the two sites, from a permanent-settlement persective...

Water. Mars has it in the soil pretty much everywhere, to varying degrees of concentration. Mars One is looking at low-elevation areas about half-way between the equator and the north pole, on the hunch (and Viking 2 data) that the water concentrations will be highest there (but without getting into the permanently frozen polar caps which lots of water, but not so much sunlight). In these areas, evidence leads to the conclusion that the soil holds water concentrations of 3% to 18%.
Luna has been shown to have 0.1% water by mass in its soil. Some permanently darkened craters near the Moon's north pole which are hypothesized to contain significant amounts of frozen water-ice. But mining this would put a settlement in inconvenient spots. And those permanently shadowed craters are among the coldest places in the solar system. Working there would not be easy.

Energy. Because Mars has a day-night cycle that almost exactly matches that of Earth, Mars One plans to rely solely on solar cells to power its habitats. The only plausible alternative is to use nuclear power. There is no existing portable nuclear power plant that is light and small enough to be landed on Mars. And the Mars One people are smart enough to know that talking about launching a large nuclear power source would cause a huge outcry on Earth and face all sorts of regulatory hurdles. Both the engineering and the litigation would drive up costs considerably. Luna's day-night cycle is 28 Earth days long: each lunar day is 14 Earth days long, as is each lunar night. This makes relying solely on solar power impractical for a lunar settlement. To try to do so would require building, launching, and landing huge, heavy batteries to store sufficient power to carry the settlement through the two-week long night. So that leaves the launching and landing of a nuclear power source as the lunar settlement's only option. Good luck with that.

Food. Okay, having the Earth close by does make it easier to ship food to the moon. But just ask the ISS astronauts: how satisfying is it to live on pre-packaged meals for months (or in the lunar colony's case, years)? It sure would be nice to grow most of your own food. Last year, results were published from an experiment to grow plants in simulated Martian, Lunar, and Terran soils. (Okay, the Terran soil wasn't simulated.) In a single sentence: Mars soil does pretty good (better than some of the Terran soil types); moon dirt sucks. So on the moon, you'd have to pay a lot of money just to get some good dirt. Surely there won't be a PR problem with that.

Temperatures. Everyone talks about how cold Mars is. And it is cold: ranging from -180°F to -65°F in the mid-latitude, non-polar regions Mars One is looking to settle in. But that's nothing compared to Luna, where temperatures swing from -387°F at night up to 253°F during the day.

Radiation. Neither the moon nor Mars have a magnetic field to ward off most of the solar and cosmic radiation coming their way. But Mars does have an atmosphere that helps reduce the radiation a bit. And being further from the sun than the moon is, the density of radiation Mars gets is less than what Luna does. Building on either place, your best bet is build or bury your habitat beneath a lot of dirt.

Location, Location, Location. The moon's proximity offers only one real feature that Mars does not: the possibility of returning to Earth. A settlement on Luna would allow people to do 6- or 12-month stints there, and then return to their regular lives. Such relatively short stays on Luna should allow their hearts, muscles, and bones to return to normal after some recuperation period, just as the ISS astronauts' do.
However, in my experience most people think about the (relative) closeness of the Moon in terms of being able to rescue people in the event of some emergency. But retrieving people quickly is not a realistic prospect because that requires having a very large, very expensive rocket sitting in a very large, very expensive building being maintained for months or years by a host of very expensive (but not necessarily large) technicians, just on the off chance that something goes wrong at the Lunar settlement. Even getting emergency supplies or equipment to the Moon on short notice requires having a stand-by rocket available and maintained. This sort of costly expenditure is one that neither governments nor private companies will sustain for any protracted length of time, even with human lives at risk. With Mars One, the settlers and those on Earth know from the get-go that returning or emergency supplies are impossible. No one is misled or given false hope. And the Mars One settlers are okay with that. The folks on Earth should be, too.

And then THIS happened... Making the Mars 100

Receiving the email itself was not a surprise. We had been told when it would come: a few days before the official announcement. Sitting in the kabob shop, I even distracted myself for almost three full minutes after the appointed moment before checking my Inbox. I fully anticipated something like the usual job rejection letter: "Thank you for applying, but your skills do not meet our present needs..."

But I got something else, altogether.

Honestly, upon seeing the word "Congratulations", my first thought was an expletive. I really had not expected to advance to Round 3. Hell, I had never expected to advance into Round 2, either. But back then, just over a year ago, I was one of 1,058. Cool to make it in, but still strong odds against advancing.

I felt like a stone had suddenly appeared in my stomach. Lunch lost all its appeal.

Don't get me wrong: I want to go to Mars, even on a one-way mission. But so many things not under my control have to occur correctly and in a timely fashion for that to happen. But even before those out-of-my-control items can occur, I may have to take decisions that throw my life and the lives of my family into disarray. There are things I need to know that Mars One cannot (understandably) tell me at this time: If selected, how much will I be paid? Will I have to move, and if so, to where? What's their dental plan like?

These questions may seem prosaic, given that I may be asked to blast off the planet, go where no one has ever been before, and try to stay alive indefinitely in a human-made bubble. But all that really dangerous stuff is years down the road. In the meantime, I have a family to support.

And there remains the real question that I have been wrestling with for over a year: can I undertake something that ultimately means leaving my wife behind? Or which could drive her from me?

All that and more flashed through my head as I mechanically ate my chickpeas and naan.

Still...

Still... The chance of my being selected to go to Mars had risen. One in twenty-four.

Wow.

THINKSgiving

I rise this morning to celebrate THINKSgiving.

I offer my thoughts (my “thinks”) to the agricultural scientists and transportation engineers who have made food so abundant and available that, as a percentage, fewer people now go hungry than at any time in history.

I offer my thinks to the medical researchers, medical technologists, and chemical engineers who create new medicines and techniques to make our lives longer, our pain less, and our babies less likely to die in infancy.

I give thinks to the construction engineers, textile engineers, and manufacturing engineers who make it possible for us to be housed and clothed in a fashion that would make kings of only a hundred years ago weep with envy.

I offer my thinks to the computer scientists and telecommunications engineers enable us to keep in touch with friends and family around the globe.

I encourage all of you today to take a moment and give your thinks to the rational thinkers who have used their thinks to make your lives richer, longer, more comfortable.

Amen.

"I grew up in the future"

I just recently finished listening to the audiobook of The Republic of Thieves by Scott Lynch. (I highly recommend both the novel series and the audiobook series, BTW). And I have just started listening to the audiobook of The Name of the Wind, by Patrick Rothfuss.

In the latter, the main character is relating his autobiography, and the book invokes the image of The Chronicler setting out a blank piece of paper to begin capturing the narration. This image sent my mind off on a tangent of how I would choose to start narrating my biography (if there were ever reason to bother capturing it at all).

In the former, a society of rather sociopathic mages have a "grey name" (or an image or sigil) that they can and do use commonly because it gives other mages no power over them, and they have a "red name" which is kept secret. One of the mages is called Seamstress (with an accompanying mental sigil of a painfully pricking needle). What, I wondered, would my grey name be?

These two questions make a nice confluence with one another. When I think about my self, the mental image I had of myself from my earliest remembering, I was always yearning to travel in space and visit other planets. From my youngest years in the Gemini and Apollo eras, through the 70s when I was captivated by Gerard K. O'Niell's visions of orbiting space colonies and waited eagerly for the launching of the Space Shuttle, I imagined myself going "out there", beyond Earth. Even in my mature adult years, when it was clear I would probably never escape Earth's gravity, my inner mental image abjured that defeat and clung tenaciously to being clad in a pressure suit and floating in the black. So I imagine my grey name would be something evoking that space-travelling adventurer. Nothing so ostentatious as Peter Quill's "Star Lord" in Guardians of the Galaxy. Just something simple, like "Spaceman".

And my autobiography would begin with, "I grew up in the future."

Mars One will not be Utopia

I just managed to watch about 20 minutes of the pilot episode of the "reality" (and I use the quotation marks advisedly) TV show Utopia. That was all I could manage to stomach. And it was everything I hope the Mars One documentary shows will not be. Seeing it, and knowing that this is what so many people mentally picture when the Mars One selection process is described as "Big Brother in space", I can understand why they believe we are doomed to fail.

But I am confident that this will not be what Mars One will turn out to be. Reality TV show producers are looking for individuals who will be in conflict, who will generate drama from the tension and dissension they create. Mars One will be looking for people who can work together from the get-go, whose unity in supporting the mission will provide the common ground required to quickly put aside the sort of conflicts that the Utopia producers appear to revel in. In a typical reality show, the contestants are just that: contestants in a competition, trying to win money. And the producers have relatively little money riding on the show itself. Reality shows' inexpensive production costs are one reason they are so attractive to studios. But Mars One's candidates aren't competing for money. It is my hope that, in one sense, they're not competing at all but are instead merely trying to find the most skilled, viable combination of people to put forward for the settlement of Mars. And the Mars One team will responsible for billions of dollars of investment. They are not going to risk that kind of money on a bunch of hyped-up attention-seekers squabbling over who gets to go into the airlock first.

Depression Lies

Robin Williams passed away yesterday.  I am not one to be overly emotional about the passing of celebrities, or even those close to me.  (My mother passed away last week from Alzheimers', and my emotions are still a bit more muffled than I anticipated.)  But Williams' notable struggles with substance abuse and depression are generating a lot of thought-provoking articles from those who knew him well and those who only saw him on the screen.

A short piece in the The Guardian by Simon Jenkins particularly struck a chord with me:
Physical illness is something the medical profession understands. It knows what to do when the human body malfunctions and what not to do. Mental illness, if illness is the right word, seems lost in some dark age. Otherwise healthy people with every reason to be happy are found wrestling with private demons. Therapists wander the scene like surgeons on a medieval battlefield, at a loss for what to do. [emphasis mine]

For the longest time, I was That Person: the one who felt that depressed people just weren't trying hard enough; that if they chose to, they could lift themselves out of their funk and get on with having a better life.  I thought that lots of them were just attention-seekers, or were using their supposed depression as an excuse for [insert bad thing here].  And so unbeknownst to me, I was adding to the problem.  Because I wasn't aware of people around me who were struggling with depression (including, as it turned out, my own father), my attitude, mostly unspoken but probably made known one way or another, was increasing the stigma under which my depressed friends were struggling.

One way in which I now feel more like an adult (and indeed, more like a human[e] being) is having dropped that attitude.  My eyes were opened by many friends, acquaintances, and Internet personalities who have come forward to talk frankly about what it is like living with depression.  Thank you all, for your courageous efforts to educate clods like me.

This new awareness and perspective on my part is why I added the emphasis to Jenkins' quote above: "if illness is the right word".  Is it?  I'm not sure.  It strikes me as implying that mental illness is something that can be remedied.  But as Williams' death makes sadly clear, that is not necessarily the case even when one has the money, time, support, and resources he had available.  But is there a more suitable term?  Mental "condition" sounds too vague; "malfunction" sounds too mechanical; "dysfunction" seems inaccurate (e.g., my dad worked, played, worshiped, and served his whole life while carrying that burden without seeming dysfunctional).  "Imbalance"?  "Handicap"?  I simply do not know what word might be better suited than "illness" because they all bring with them some associated semantic baggage.

But I do know why even a recovering That Person such as myself struggles with how to treat our depressed friends.  If someone we know has a broken leg, we can help them maneuver around.  If they have the flu, we can bring them food and make sure they drink fluids.  We know to do these things because our friend's condition is visible and will last a known length of time.  The things they need at that time are relatively obvious.  But a friend living with depression may not give any visible clues that The Black Dog is shadowing them that day/week/month.  They may not say anything about what they need because the depression is lying to them, telling them that nothing can be done and nothing will ever get better.  This makes it difficult for us on the outside to help.  We feel impotent, stymied.  That feeling on our part can makes us hesitant to reach out.  Which makes us feel like jerks.  Double whammy for us, and leaves our friends even more isolated.

So it is my hope that the courage of Allie Brosh, Wil Wheaton, Jenny Lawson, and others is changing social attitudes, and that will have a feedback loop that makes it at least a little bit easier for those who battle depression to let us know what we can do to help and support them.  Because we do want to help.  Always remember, my friends: depression lies.