As a Mars One candidate I can reach for the stars

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/feb/19/mars-one-candidate-reach-for-the-stars

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I became a scientist on 26 October 1980 on the floor of the family room in the house where I grew up. I had just turned nine years old and my conversion was prompted by a broadcast of Carl Sagan’s Cosmos.

The episode, hauntingly titled Blues for a Red Planet, summarised human exploration of Mars, first in our imagination, then through telescopes, and ultimately with robotic probes. I was fascinated.

How had this world, in some ways like our own, taken such a different course? Why was Mars dry and cold, while Earth remained warm and wet? The ambiguous results of the Viking probes’ exobiology experiments were tantalising: had Mars ever hosted life? Might it still? It seemed obvious and inevitable that we would someday travel there ourselves to answer these questions. In the way of young boys, I was certain that I would be among the first to go, and I was sure that in order to do so, I would need to become a scientist. And so, I did.

Later, my dreams changed shape as I realised that we had lost our will to voyage great distances to accomplish great things – that I would not go to Mars, because we would never again go even as far as the moon. I locked my aspiration to travel to another world in that special room of the heart where we hold our childish certainties.

Mars One has given me a chance to revisit that room. Here, finally, is an idea whose audacity matches the importance of the goal: a privately funded effort to establish a permanent human presence on Mars. Once there, we will take advantage of the versatility and ingenuity of human scientists to obtain definitive answers to the critical questions raised by 40 years of robotic exploration. We will look for evidence of past (and present) life, even as we prepare the planet for new life: ours.

To succeed, we must overcome daunting technical and financial obstacles, but early on in any great undertaking, it is easier to talk oneself out of trying than to actually try. Meanwhile, I find it far more interesting to think about how we might make the mission work than to compile the reasons why it might not. If no physical law prevents us from succeeding, then what practical and technical considerations do? Let’s figure that out.

This conversation, and the efforts that follow from it, are valuable in themselves. It is possible that with vast dedication and cleverness (and, let’s be honest, luck), Mars One or an effort like it will colonise the Red Planet in our time – but it is certain that our children will settle the solar system. The detailed discussions we have today about how to initiate the colonisation of Mars will influence how that settlement takes place, and how (and whether) it ultimately succeeds.

In preparation for that undertaking, the young people of today will benefit from witnessing that conversation unfold. The images from the Viking landers inspired my nine-year-old self to study astronomy, and then engineering, and ultimately biology, launching me into a life as a scientist.

Knowing that the effort to colonise Mars is real and serious – that we are returning to an age of space exploration, and that we are leaving Earth not to plant a flag and return but to make a second home on another world – will inspire students to pursue careers in science, engineering and technology.

Presented with the incentive of gaining another planet for humanity, young people will see these fields not simply as professional opportunities, but as a means of embarking on a great adventure, for the benefit of the whole species. I hope that they will devote their genius not to designing the next hot app, but to building the spacecraft that carry us between worlds, the bioreactors that synthesise our air, water, and food, and the recyclers that preserve precious materials (and possibly teach Earth a thing or two about resource management).

Whether we succeed or fail, every step we take along this path brings us closer to Mars. I look forward to participating in Mars One, and in doing so, helping to inspire the generation of scientists and engineers – and settlers – who come after us.