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At one time, water was the biggest challenge to exploration that faced humankind in its search for distant lands. It was the vastness of the oceans that kept us where we were. Water could again be our biggest challenge, but for a different reason. On Tuesday the book
How We'll Live on Mars
was released, and in it author Stephen Petranek writes that finding a water supply on Mars that will sustain future colonists is the most important hurdle to establishing a permanent presence on a planet other than Earth. Well, that and actually getting to Mars.
The book begins with an invented scenario, with a Mars landing that happens years before the current timeline supposes. From that fictional beginning Mr. Petranek, moves into the past, into the historic writings and theories of onetime NASA scientist Wernher von Braun. In his book
Das Marsprojekt
, von Braun designed what is considered a feasible plan to travel to Mars. NASA, Mr. Petranek tells us, failed to act on these ideas, instead pursuing a course that President Nixon decided should focus on the space shuttle, and what Mr Petranek speaks of as NASA's "position that we should build a base on the moon first to learn more before attempting to do the same on Mars." Writing of the direction that NASA had taken in regard to space exploration after the Apollo successes, he states: "NASA focused on a dated rocket plane design that did little to advance space travel, fell out of the sky too often, and had nowhere to go until a space station was built for it to dock with." The author comes to the conclusion that it will be a private space firm that will accomplish the first trip to Mars, and he points to Elon Musk, and his SpaceX, as the clear leader.
Assuming that we can get to Mars, which the author assures us will happen regardless of the setbacks from last weekend's failed SpaceX ISS resupply mission, our biggest and first challenge will be finding water. "If Mars does not have the water we think it does," he writes,"we will not be able to live there." Too distant to transport water to Mars, we will need to find it on or just below the Martian surface. From that basis in water, we will be able to develop most of our other environmental needs. Water, then, is the crux issue.
Mars has had water, flowing water in now dried up riverbeds, evidence of lakes and perhaps even an ocean that covered as much as one third of the planet. Drawing on what we've learned from satellites and rovers, Mr Petranek tells us that the water is still there, in the ice caps, perhaps below the surface, and even locked in the soil, called regolith. The thin atmosphere, he writes, is wet, sitting at nearly 100% humidity. He tells us that collection should be possible from both the air and ground. Devising the technology to do it on a scale to support a colony is another matter. Water isn't the only problem to establishing permanence on the planet, but everything else circles back to it. With it will come the development of a thicker atmosphere, and with that the ability to grow food rather than rely on food imported from Earth.
How We'll Live on Mars
is a book that raises questions and proposes answers. Some of those solutions can be uncomfortable, such as nuclear powered mining technology and nuclear powered sources to heat the planet and even create an atmosphere that would support human life. There is a discussion of the uses of a runaway greenhouse effect that, while destructive here on earth, could be helpful on Mars. Mars, in this context, is a first step as humankind moves away from the Earth and future uncertainty. Our ecological disaster, the far distant projection of the burning out of the Sun or its explosion, or the chances of being hit by an asteroid, are reasons he lists to compel us to leave. But, he says, even more importantly we are impelled by our desire to explore. A hefty dangled carrot of wealth doesn't hurt either, as Mars is close enough to asteroids that mining them could become a new gold rush.
Certain aspects of the author's vision of Mars, terraforming for example, read more like conquest rather than exploration. We may not agree with Stephen Petranek's conclusions, with the tools he writes about for developing a Mars colony, but what he offers us is a framework, a possibility, a chance to explore, discover and understand what we have here before we are able to physically find a home there. He writes about the past and looks forward into the future. There must always a speculative sensibility attached to writing either about the past, especially deep history, or the future. Through exploration and discovery we refine words like 'may' and 'might' into words of deeper certainty like 'should' and 'will'. With that in mind, we need to remember is that this book is written in ink and not in stone, and that we can read in it a challenge to explore our own world, our water and our oceans. If we are to paint a portrait of our planet onto Mars, we can learn from our mistakes, take our knowledge further, and responsibly create a colony that we are told is a matter of 'when' and not 'if'. So, if water is the most important part of the equation for a sustained human presence on Mars, it would seem like a logical place to start investigating it fully here in Earth. Whether you like what he sees or not, it is up to us to either take this framework and choose whether we can keep it as it stands or decide what we need to change. The book is presents possibilities, and by extension, a call to further understand our place on this planet. We can look
forward, but we still need to keep our feet on the ground, the ground here on Earth, because we cannot leave right now, because there are too many ways that we can mess this whole thing up and we really need to consider all the options. We need to truly look around at what has happened here and what is still happening honestly and openly if we are going to be spacefarers. As Mr. Petranek writes at the very beginning of the book: "The potential is enormous, but the pitfalls are numerous. The time to think is now."
How We'll Live on Mars by Stephen Petranek
Simon & Schuster / TED books
Hardcover $16.95
77 pages of text, 32 pages of illustrations
released July 7, 2015