The case for moving to Mars

Going to Mars is a bit like visiting a hotel bar in Dubai: there’s no atmosphere, there’s nothing to drink, and if you go outside you’ll probably die.

It’s a desolate, lifeless ball of red dirt roughly 140 million miles away, where nothing grows, where one dust storm can cover the entire planet and rage for months, and where the temperature can fall to minus 130 Celsius. That’s colder than Dunedin. Plus, a day on Mars is 39 minutes, 35.244 seconds longer than a day on Earth. You can imagine the one-star Trip Advisor reviews.

“Too dusty. Days longer but no late checkout available!? Give it a miss.”

“Life there is tough, but beautiful,” says Clementine Poidatz, who plays physicist Amelie Durand on National Geographic’s hybrid doc/drama show Mars. “Everything that happens can potentially be a disaster, because we’re so far from home. No chance of help. Far away from your family, your loved ones, good food, good cheese.” (Clementine is French.) The planet is too far away to even let you call or Skype your family. The delay on the line would be ten minutes or more. You’d be limited to video messages, or cryptic status updates.

“Anyone know how to make beer from dust LOL.”

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Jeff Hephner, who plays mining colony leader Kurt Hurrelle, recently gave up drinking—though it wasn’t to prepare for the fictionalised hardships his character will face. He did it for his health. And he misses it. “It’s a social thing, a thing to get through the day. The dangers of an actor’s life”—much like a Martian colonist’s life, I imagine—”is that you’ve got nothing to do.”

Season one of Mars focussed on the challenges of just getting there. This season, a decade has passed since the voyage, and the International Mars Science Foundation (IMSF) astronauts have built a burgeoning colony. The six-ep series arc, which alternates scripted and documentary sequences, explores how the settlers deal with challenges like contamination, natural disasters, the arrival of the private sector, even motherhood.

“I’m the mother of the first Martian baby,” says Poidatz. “It’s really cool. But there’s this conflict of ‘Should I have the baby?’ Because that child will be stuck on the planet its whole life. Because of Martian gravity, your bones and muscles don’t develop the way they would on Earth.”

“There’ll be some muscle wastage,” says Stephen Petranek, whose book How We’ll Live on Mars formed the basis for the show. “But you won’t need as much muscle, because for every step you take on Mars you can walk nine feet. You’ll feel like a superhuman.”

There’s a tendency amongst Mars enthusiasts to push the upsides. Sure, you have no bone density, but look how you can dunk a basketball. The show has employed a small army of “Big Thinkers”—Elon Musk, Bill Nye, Michio Kaku, Andy Weir—to present the factual side. There’s an ever evolving debate about exactly how we should get there, and the best way to establish a colony. But one thing they all agree on is that we should go there.

“Exploration is a matter of our survival,” says Petranek, “Because if we stay on Earth we will all die. We’ll get hit by an asteroid, or we’ll have a mutated virus that kills every human on Earth. Even if you’re not worried about those things, eventually our own sun starts to expand, boil all the oceans away, and destroys everything.”

His point seems to be that one day the sun will expand, and the Earth will end up like Mars, so the obvious solution is for us to move to Mars. Plus, it absolutely has to be Mars.

“It’s the only place there is. You can’t go to Mercury, or Venus, they’re way too hot, and too toxic. You can’t go to Titan, Titan’s a joke.” Seems harsh, but okay. “It rains methane there. If you light a match the whole planet ignites.”

This is a highly partisan sport. Everyone has their team. I’m a Venus man myself. It’s even closer than Mars, has roughly the same gravity as our planet (so no bone density issues). Sure, it’s surface temperature is hot enough to melt lead, but who says we have to live on the surface? The cloud-tops have breathable air, and the temperature is a manageable 75 degrees. It’d also be fine place to launch interstellar missions, eventually.

But Mars is so hot right now. It’s hotter than Venus in summer. With the likes of Elon Musk proposing privately funded voyages, and Donald Trump declaring his intention to send proud Americans to plant the flag (and possibly open a tacky resort). Petranek doesn’t think Trump is getting there any time soon.

“Unless Trump increases NASA’s budget significantly, NASA’s not getting to Mars before the 2040s. Private companies are gonna get to Mars long before any government. Mars is the only place we’ve got. And it’s not too far away.”

34 million miles away, give or take.

“250 million miles,” he schools me. “The moon is 250,000 miles, Mars is 250 million.”

Except that the average distance to Mars is 140 million miles. The Mars Close Approach, which would provide the best opportunity for a mission, happens every two years (according to the show’s own press materials) and puts Mars around 34 million miles away. But let’s not split space-hairs. We’re going to Mars, that’s all there is to it. Some of the cast would go, too, given the chance—even if Martian cheese isn’t quite on par with French brie.

“I would love to go there, even if no return was possible. I’m passionate about this planet, I know it sounds weird!”

Jeff Hephner is a slightly less willing candidate than Poidatz.

“Kicking and screaming. I would only go if it was the last choice. You’ve got to be able to survive the voyage, and to possess the mentality to be in that kind of confinement. It’s not terraformed, you’re not going for a walk, you’re not going swimming.”

It’ll take a certain kind of human to make this trip, and he doesn’t think he’s one of them. Nor does he think our conquest of the Red Planet will be the utopian triumph some are imagining. He plays the leader of a mining colony which comes to the planet to exploit its resources, as is our way.

“You get a lot of people, they talk about the science, they talk about finding life on Mars, but it’s also to preserve humanity. When you’re trying to save your own ass, you’ll do anything. Right? I mean isn’t that human nature?”

Which is the big question: whether we can move planets without taking our worst qualities with us. He’s quick to point out, as an example, the debt his country owes to Nazi rocket scientists, whose research kick-started America’s space program. Progress isn’t always pretty, but it does make for great drama.

“That’s what sci-fi does, and why it’s so cool. You project the elsewhere of it all. You take these huge questions humanity faces, and put them in a different context. It’s an important art form.”

When I ask what a Trump expedition to Mars would be like his response is as cold as Martian ice.

“Isn’t he already on one?”

* Mars 2 premieres Wednesdays from November 14, 9.30pm on National Geographic, SKY Channel 72