If you had the right kind of vehicle, theoretically you could go to any of these locations whenever you wanted.
The mind might be that kind of vehicle.
If you had the wrong kind of vehicle, you might find it difficult to leave some of these locations.
The mind might also be this kind of vehicle.
Observation: Mental habits
Josh once observed—we were in his bed, whispering together—that sometimes I reach for theoretical physics as though for a teddy bear.
Observation: Fetal development
On Earth:
Assuming all was progressing normally, fetus would be approximately six or seven inches long—maybe the size of a small banana. Though it’s been a long time since I last saw a banana.
Assuming all was progressing normally, the fetus would be starting to grow hair and teeth, might be sucking a thumb. For comfort?
On Mars:
No way of knowing. We don’t have ultrasound equipment. We don’t have anything that allows us to see inside. We have stethoscopes, so what we have is a heartbeat. Nicole and Trixie say it’s a fine heartbeat. 140 beats per minute, right in the normal range.
Of course you can never see all the way inside. Not on any planet. Some things will always be hidden.
Observation: Possibility that the child will be born with a brain like my sister’s brain
On Earth:
Low but not insignificant. Bipolar disorder is one of the most heritable disorders; estimates suggest that c. 80-85% of variability among people on this dimension is attributable to genetic factors. Still—even with a bipolar parent, odds appear to be below 10% that the child will also be bipolar. Odds surely lower if the relation is an aunt rather than a parent. And Josh does not have this history in his family at all.
Note: Depression is also likelier among relatives of people with BPD.
On Mars:
Radiation can affect genes and genetic transmission. Because the atmosphere is thinner, we are routinely exposed to more radiation here. And the rocket trip, through unshielded space for six Earth months—radiation radiation radiation.
Does this increase the odds or lower them?
Observation: Distribution of anxiety
Observation: Gravity
On Earth:
The rate of acceleration while falling is 9.8 m/s2.
The rate is the same whether you fall, or whether you jump.
There are many tall buildings on Earth.
Nobody can state with certainty how far one has to fall to produce a necessarily fatal result.
On the one hand, a flight attendant named Vesna Vulovic once fell 10,000 meters and survived it. She broke many bones, and there was a brief coma, but eventually she made a full recovery. Though it’s worth noting that her fall was not a case of a human falling free in space; a food cart kept her pinned in the tail section after the plane broke up. And she landed, in that tail section, in snow. Still—that’s a long fall, and she lived.
On the other hand, it’s possible to slip on a puddle and hit your head and die that way. Falling hardly at all.
My sister’s apartment building was a brownstone. It was only four stories high.
Vesna Vulovic died in her own apartment at age 66, of unknown causes.
On Mars:
The rate of acceleration while falling is 3.75 m/s2.
There are very tall mountains, but no tall buildings, on Mars.
When we approached the planet after those six months in space, we were traveling at nearly 24,000 kilometers per hour. At that speed you could fly from Boston to San Francisco in less than 11 minutes. And as the planet was looming, I had the strangest thought; it occurred to me, just for a second, that we could change our minds and decide to not brake. We could maintain our speed, be slowed hardly at all by the atmosphere, and become Mars’ next great crater. The first that would be human-made.
And then, while I was thinking of that, almost paralyzed by thoughts of that, of course Stefan and Nicole were turning on the braking jets, and we slowed down, and there was a parachute, and we slowed down more, and we fell all the way to the ground, but more and more slowly, and then we landed—completely unharmed.
Observation: Boston and San Francisco; Uncrossable distances
Boston:
Where I lived for most of my adult life.
San Francisco:
Where my sister lived, for the year up until her suicide. She texted me—texted me—right before. Even eleven minutes would have been too long to get to her in time. The police, who I called, only took six, which is fast, compared to the national average for police responses. And that was too late. Eleven minutes would have been an eternity.
Observation: Time II
Fertilization:
Can take place as soon as a half hour, or as long as five days, after sex.
Getting to the roof and jumping:
In one sense, it only takes five minutes.
In another sense, a more accurate sense, it takes your whole life up to that point. My sister was climbing, in this understanding, for thirty-four years. Which means that we had plenty of time to reach her, even on foot. Even from across the world.
Observation: God
On Earth:
At best: Absent.
On Mars:
Josh asked me once how I would feel about raising the child Jewish. It’s like asking me what I would prefer in an imaginary friend.
Observation: Paradoxical feelings
If r = relief (e.g., like what I felt when my sister first moved to San Francisco, which meant that I could no longer be called on to rush to her side again and again and again when her life was falling apart in one of a thousand ways);
and if g = guilt (e.g., how I felt afterward because I had been at a distance where I couldn’t be called on to rush to her side); then
g = rm
where m = the magnitude of the consequences brought about by the distance.
Observation: Uncrossable distances II
Mars is so far from where things have gone wrong in the past that the relationship between r and g are no longer certain.
Which produces more r.
The distance between Mars and present and future potential disasters = 0.
Question: Siblings
Is it possible that this child inside me will ever have a sibling?
Observation: There were good times with her
There were!
Question: Age
If—I looked it up—the average lifespan of a human being on Earth is now 76.1 years (Earth years), and 80.2 years in the United States specifically (interestingly, at 80.6 years it’s actually slightly higher in, even more specifically, my mother’s home territory of Puerto Rico), what is the life expectancy on Mars? The people here are healthy, but we’re also less equipped to handle medical emergencies, and then there’s the increased radiation. And if a person takes her own—the point is that it’s hard to predict.
But say we each live exactly to the unknown average Martian lifespan that I will assign the variable x. Let’s say that. And also say the baby lives a full life. Let’s say that. And that I will be 34 years old (Earth years) at the time of the birth.
That means that I will have (x – 34) ye
ars left to live, (x – 34) years to spend with the child.
The child, on the other hand, would have x more years to live, including (x – (x – 34)) = 34 years without me. 34 years without me.By that same formula, 36 years without Josh.
By that same formula, 29 years without Trixie, who is our youngest.
In other words, if Destination Mars! doesn’t send any more people to Mars and if this baby lives—please—a full lifespan, that person, our child, will be alone on this planet, this place that nobody’s currently working on terraforming, where you can’t even breathe, for probably decades. Alone.
Unscientific question
Is death always an abandonment?
Unscientific question II
Can making life be an abandonment?
Observation: Gravity II
As we already know, F (gravitational force) = G(m1m2/r2), where G is a constant equal to 6.67 x 10-11 Nm2/kg2, m1 is the mass of the first object, m2 is the mass of the second one, and r is the distance between the objects. With this formula you can calculate the pull between any two objects, whether they are two planets or two people in the same or different rooms.
I would calculate the pull between Earth and Mars as it currently stands at the current distance between the planets, but it’s getting pretty late.
I would calculate other pulls, but some of them are incalculable.
Question: Notes
Who, again, are these notes for?
Unscientific question III
Is it possible that, if I had stayed on Earth, I would have stayed infertile? That I couldn’t have produced life there? That I had to be this far away for it to happen?
Observation: Linea Negra
On Earth:
In some cases, a darker line develops between the navel and the pubic bone. Caused by increases in hormones.
On Mars:
The line is not a metaphor, but it seems like a metaphor. The line between the navel (the place where my umbilicus once was) and the pubis (the place where the baby will, if all goes well up to that point, enter the world): the line between generations, maybe. The symbol of continuation. Is this a beautiful thing or an awful thing?
Observation: Genes vs. environment vs. . . .
Genes:
Studies routinely suggest that around 50% of a baby’s personality can be explained by genetic background. (Though see above re: bipolar disorder.)
Environment:
If 50% is genetics, that leaves a lot of room for something else. Environment is the prime candidate. And what is the environment, the one around me and this developing fetus right now? It’s a planet, an orange planet, where a person can’t breathe, where there are no trees. Also, where there is none of my past. Not my parents, not my sister, not anything they ever did or knew. None of that is in this particular location in space-time. But there is Josh. And there is me. Is this, taken all together, a beautiful thing or an awful thing?
. . .
It is possible that we are the product of more than genes and environment. That there’s something else shapin gus, mapping out directions and constraints and possibilities. What that something else would be, I’m not sure science can say.
But is it real anyway?
Observation: Quickening (first movements)
They say it doesn’t feel like movement right away, like an actual baby moving inside of you, where you might think Oh, that’s the elbow nudging, that’s the leg kicking. They say it typically feels like gas. Like the aftereffects of a burrito. Like bubbles. I am experiencing something like bubbles, something like gas. Like so many other things—all things?—it’s impossible to be certain about a cause. And impossible to be certain about an effect.
Maybe someday Josh will observe that I retreat into indeterminacy as though under a blanket.
Note: The term quickening apparently comes from the fact that the word “quick” used to mean alive. As in, “the quick and the dead.” Before ultrasound, before even stethoscopes, the quickening was the first compelling sign that the baby was alive.
Tonight I felt the quickening for the first time. Which is the actual occasion for beginning these notes—not, honestly, the nosebleed. It was that sensation of gurgling or tickling or bubbles. That sign of whatever it signifies. I have been writing this ever since, re-researching all the things I’ve researched before, for several hours now. Josh has twice come out from the bunk dome to ask me if I’m going to come to bed soon. I should.
My nose is no longer bleeding.
This is not a sign of anything.
Observation: Probability
On Earth:
Unknown.
On Mars:
Unknowable.
How to Deal with the Unknown
(Section 27 of the unofficial Destination Mars! handbook, as written by the founder of Destination Mars!)
You are not new to the unknown. Every day, whether you think about it or not, you wake up into mystery. You have plans, very likely, and maybe even a routine that you’re ready to settle into even as you rub the sleep out of your eyes, the slumber from your face—but that doesn’t mean you know what’s going to happen, because you very obviously cannot. You don’t even know what you’ll be thinking later, let alone what you’ll be doing or what will be happening to you.
And it’s bigger than that, bigger than the unpredictable future. You also confront the unknown on a daily basis in the sense that what you understand about the world around you is infinitesimal in comparison to what you don’t understand. What you really get is basically nothing. This is just as true when you’re looking at the world of the self.
Not one person has a decent grasp on the future, the past, or the present. Not the world, nor themselves.
That said, you are already accustomed to this much mystery, and it probably doesn’t even register anymore. It’s an everyday thing; you don’t think about it. It’s only when you’re facing something dramatically new—something vivid and unprecedented—that you are struck by the limits of your knowledge.
Going to Mars is likely to be one of those occasions.
With that in mind, we’ve written this chapter to support you as you confront these new realities, and, even more, as you sit in uncertain anticipation. As you, in other words, wake up once again to the profound inscrutability of everything that is. We of course don’t know exactly when those situations will come up, or what they’ll be about—that’s sort of our main point here—but some general thoughts may help.
First of all, the best approach varies by personality. For example:There are people whose preference is for control, and who see knowledge as control. These are the people who will read up exhaustively on Mars before going. Of course, you will all have to absorb an enormous amount of information before getting on the rocket, but some people will go well beyond the requirements. Not content to study the behavior of dust storms on the planet’s surface, or even the chemical structure of Martian dust (this varies, but there will often be iron and magnesium involved), these folks will need to study the seventeenth century physicist Evangelista Torricelli’s groundbreaking theories about the origins of wind and dig up the etymology of the word dust (which, as we understand it, derives from the pre-Germanic word dunstaz, a word that meant the ultimate minute and scattered product of human decomposition). They will need to taste the dust (which we do not advise). For these people, a piece of knowledge is a fingerhold. Never mind that still their ignorance is to their understanding as the universe is to a grain of rice; the fingerhold is their salvation.
Then there are the head-down types. They set aside the unknown and get back
to work, doing the things they already know how to do. These are not, admittedly, always the most exciting people in the world. But they do tend to show up on time and meet deadlines. No group of people is likely to survive without a few of this kind sprinkled among them.
People with a more philosophical bent, or people who are religious in a certain kind of way, often like to do something they call sitting with the unknown. They face it and take it in and continue to face it some more. Without moving. We find this attractive but itself fairly mysterious. There are times when we don’t believe this is even possible.
There are also individuals who, when faced with the unknown, want to destroy it. This is probably not a good tendency to indulge.
Artists and other creative types, meanwhile, generally dive—without even thinking about it—right into the center of whatever it is they don’t know, just to kind of poke around in there. Results vary.
Speaking of religion, different religions have different understandings of the nature of the unknown. In the Qur’an, for example, only Allah is described as knowing the unknown, seeing the unseen, which means that the rest of us have to do without. In the Bhagavad Gita, one reads, Knowledge is superior to mechanical practice. Meditation is superior to knowledge. But best of all is the surrender of attachment to results, because this leads immediately to peace. So you may be able to do something with that. And St. Ignatius has a great quote on the subject: Less knowledge, more virtue! he said. There’s even part of the Passover Seder where you break a piece of matzah in two, and you hide the bigger part, because what’s hidden is larger than what’s revealed—which is just what we were saying above—and then the kid who finds the hidden piece at the end of dinner gets a prize. Real life may or may not work in this way.
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