Once Upon a Time I Lived on Mars

by Kate Greene

  The emails that Jill and I shared during the mission were, by far, my most important reading material at that time. Before the mission, she had, with the help of our other writer friends, collected 120 poems—one for each day of the mission—that had something to do with space or Mars or the moon. These were the basis of our near-daily correspondence, a sustaining force for me, a mix of diary, sounding board, reading material, and private literary salon. These emails, the poems in them, and our discussions, played a significant role in how I came to read and write poetry.

  Collectively we had our movie nights, which felt like messages from our past selves—favorite films from another time and another planet—shared with the group. I brought science-y flicks: Moon, Gattaca, and Real Genius, and also Burn After Reading and an episode of the Dutch political drama Borgen. Other screenings included Stargate, Solaris, and The House Bunny, a 2008 comedy about a Playboy Bunny who aged out of the mansion and found herself revamping a college sorority populated by unpopular young women. That was Simon’s choice. There are so few comedies with female leads, he said, and he thought this one was pretty good.

  On these nights, every Wednesday and Saturday, we would often make popcorn and tuck into our snack boxes to eat Famous Amos cookies or Oreos or peanuts or dried apricots or Kellogg’s Rice Krispies Treats, make hot chocolate or tea, and settle into the inflatable furniture that normally lined the contour of the habitat, but was easily moved in front of the screen. We watched the movies using a projector. Some of the people involved in designing HI-SEAS thought that a projector was an extravagance, but I am grateful that Kim Binsted held firm. We also used it for research presentations, personal photo slideshows, and workout videos. P90X was by far the most popular workout video on our crew—Angelo and I were fast workout partners, motivating each other throughout the mission—but I also became smitten with a yoga DVD, gifted to us by Neil Scheibelhut, one of the mission support staff who was so unfailingly prompt and kind in his correspondence that he quickly endeared himself to us. Neil, a student at the University of Hawai‘i at the time who would later participate in a follow-up HI-SEAS mission, lived in Hilo, but would make the drive up for maintenance runs. He was often responsible for removing trash, making sure gray and black water tanks were emptied regularly—he was the one who ultimately unclogged the line—and he would make sure that we had enough water to drink and to bathe, to wash dishes, to mop floors and do laundry. He and his girlfriend at the time, a yoga instructor, had made the video, filmed on gorgeous Hawaiian beaches. Neil’s calm voice narrates the instruction. Over the months, though I never emailed directly with him, strange as it sounds, through this video and by his caretaking, I began to consider Neil a good friend. And after the mission, when we did finally meet, he was as warm and kind as I’d imagined. Years later, his is still my yoga workout of choice.

  Hi folks,

  How are you all holding up?

  As we move into the dreaded third quarter, with comms delay imminent, I hope you’re ready for a challenging phase of the mission. After the breaking-in issues of the first month, and the hassles of the second, I’m sure you don’t want to hear this, but this is the hard part. You will be (if you’re not already) stressed, tired and dispirited. You’re a long way into the mission, but the end is still a long way to go. The potential for crew-ground disconnect and other communication problems is very high. We in mission support will do everything we can to help you, but we’re very aware that our help might not be sufficient, and that we will occasionally (hopefully not often!) drop the ball.

  I don’t have any magic solutions, although if HI-SEAS lives up to its potential, we will be able to offer some useful strategies to future astronauts on long-duration missions. That’s the prize to keep your eye on! You were picked for this crew because you are astronaut-like in background and attitude. If you’re having a tough time, it’s not a weakness on your part—it’s because times are tough. As you cope and (hopefully) thrive, notice what works and what doesn’t. Surveys and instrumentation provide important data, but often don’t capture the key lessons.

  Finally: we’re very proud of you. You are an awesome crew, and I can’t wait to shake your hands when you come “back to Earth.”

  Brave hearts!

  Kim

  “We felt this was a sacred trust, that here we were, half a dozen very flawed human beings with huge holes in our knowledge of all these subjects, building a cultural Noah’s Ark,” said Ann Druyan, the creative director of the Golden Record, in a 2007 interview. The Golden Record, a copper phonograph record protected by a gold-plated cover, is a correspondence from humanity to who knows who. One copy is affixed to Voyager 1 and another is on Voyager 2, both of which launched in 1977 to study Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune, but are now well beyond even Pluto.

  The record holds 1) music such as the 2,500-year-old Chinese song, “Flowering Streams,” a Navajo Night Chant, Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode,” Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, the pan flute from the Solomon Islands, 2) images (encoded in the audio) such as a leaf, a seashore, a group of children, dancers from Bali, the sun, a factory interior, diagrams of DNA, and 3) Earth sounds, including greetings in fifty-five different languages, whale song, a mother’s first words to her baby, a train, crickets.

  Etched in the cover are pictographic instructions for the speed with which to play the record (one revolution every 3.6 seconds), the time (coded in 0.7 billionths of a second), so chosen for the length of time associated with a changing energy state of the hydrogen atom—a physical standard that makes a cosmically universal clock. The cover also features a pulsar map that points to the location of Earth. There is a stylus for playback.

  “It was a chance to tell something of what life on Earth was like to beings perhaps a thousand million years from now because the Voyager engineers were saying this record will have a shelf life of a billion years. If that doesn’t raise goose bumps you’d have to be made of wood,” Druyan said.

  When people talk about the Voyager spacecraft, they’re usually referring to Voyager 1, since its path has sent it the farthest and fastest from Earth. It’s now officially in interstellar space, beyond the influence of our sun’s magnetic field and the flow of solar material. By 2025, Voyager will no longer have enough power for its scientific instruments. They will shut down and the craft will cease to send messages back home, which, at that point will take seventeen hours to reach us. Then, in 40,000 years, Voyager will fly by another star or at least pass within 1.6 light-years of it. The star, named Gliese 445, is 17.6 light-years away from Earth.

  After that, the spaceship, the Golden Record, and humanity’s message in waveforms embedded on a flat circle zooming through the interstellar medium will end up in the constellation Ophiuchus, the serpent bearer, which straddles the celestial equator. We know that there are planets around at least fifteen of those stars. But are those planets inhabited by any creature that could detect a tiny spacecraft zipping through their neighborhood at 38,000 miles per hour? And then reel it in? And then play the record? Or does Voyager just keep flying, encountering nothing, only emptiness, for billions of years? Statistically, of course, the latter.

  But if uncorked and decoded (imagine!), the Golden Record might tell not only the story of some parts of Earth and its creatures within some sliver of time, but, in a way, also the love story of Annie Druyan and Carl Sagan, who chaired the committee that pulled the record together. In June of 1977, in the middle of the project, Druyan and Sagan, after having been friends for years, declared their love to each other. Two days after, Druyan provided biometric signatures during a meditation—her eye movement, her brain waves, her heartbeat—for the record. “Part of what I was thinking in this meditation was about the wonder of love, and of being in love,” she said.

  Emily Dickinson wrote, “A letter always seemed to me like immortality because it is the mind alone without corporeal friend.” A body in space located where no body could exist, the Golden Record is a love lette
r meant to live beyond our solar system, and likely even outlast our species. With no specific destination, no reader in mind, it is perhaps the most hopeful human-crafted correspondence in the universe.

  * * *

  A couple of days before the mission started, our crew was blessed by local kupunas and cultural practitioners, Kimo Pihana and Koa Rice. Pihana had worked as a sailor, a soldier, a refinery worker, a ranger, and ultimately a cultural practitioner on the mountain Mauna Kea. Rice, also a cultural practitioner and science advocate, had led the discussion with our crew before the mission about ancient Hawaiian astronomy. During this blessing, we stood on lava rocks, circling these elders as they sang Hawaiian songs and spoke directly to us in English. Kimo issued a warning I didn’t quite believe at the time. “What you’re doing is hard,” he said. “It’s not easy to be so far away from your family and friends. You’ll be lonely. Sometimes you’ll feel like crying. Cry if you need to cry.” I was moved by these words, and the generosity and humanity behind them. Tearing up only a little bit, I looked around to my crewmates, but none seemed to be quite as affected.

  During the mission, I did cry, outright, without reserve, three times worth noting. Once in late April, only a couple weeks in, after receiving an email from a friend, a running buddy who I had regularly seen multiple times a week for years. She was the friend, other than Jill, I talked to and saw the most. She had written to say that she and her husband and their new baby would soon be moving to San Diego to be closer to family. I took the news, which I saw while checking my email during the morning meeting, hard. As my crewmates took turns detailing their plans for the day, I finally understood what it would be to return “home” to a place that wasn’t the same as I’d left it. No one noticed the tears. I left the table to quietly sob in the bathroom.

  Maybe I could have made San Francisco a better place for my friend and her family? I felt like I hadn’t done enough to help after her son was born. He had colic, brutally, and she had endured post-partum depression. I was less than attentive, wrapping up writing projects before heading off to play make-believe on Mars. Even now, I still feel I should have done it differently. But there, on that mountain, inside that dome, I was already sitting with regrets and self-pity. The city would be so much emptier without her and I was lonelier already.

  The second time came on my birthday. Jill had put together a surprise multimedia package for me—a pdf of notes and pictures she’d collected from our friends and families as well as short videos some of them made, a little digital surprise party. It was an overwhelming display of affection and a reminder that so many people loved me, and they were excitedly awaiting my return. To be honest, I was embarrassed by the outpouring, that kind of love and the deserving of it.

  The third time was after an email exchange with Jill late into the mission. This one I shared with Yajaira and Angelo, the two on the crew who were most receptive to emotionally pitched conversations. The upshot was that I had written Jill about possible future travel after I came back—not immediately, but still, it would likely mean more time apart—inspired in part by the others on the crew who’d talked of their own plans.

  After almost four months of waiting for your partner to return, how would you have responded to such an email? I didn’t really know what it was like for Jill. She would write to me about day-to-day triumphs and anxieties, but the language we shared hadn’t yet developed to acknowledge a truth of our situations, about what we’d ultimately come to want and need from our relationship. I remember that for weeks after Mars we would bump into each other in our kitchen and not in the cute way. How we’d talk over each other in conversations then stutter to silence, waiting, feeling wrong and wronged. I know I sensed the return wouldn’t be easy, especially after I’d written of my desire to travel more, and I think I was scared and frustrated by her email response. Why should this be so hard?

  The 2013 HI-SEAS mission wasn’t the reason Jill and I decided to part in 2018. Though in scanning those emails, I can see signatures coded within that reveal some truths of our ending—some sensitivities, some careful wording that showed us both wondering toward other possibilities. As with anything written, hindsight provides context for the subtext of a message—the future-present, if you let it, becomes a great illuminator of the past.

  I don’t remember exactly the relationship wisdom that Angelo and Yajaira imparted that day, but I do remember they were patient and kind, sitting with me for more than an hour as I poured it all out. I felt like I was able to say everything I needed to say and their friendship and witness consoled me.

  * * *

  Shannon Lucid’s library, only ever meant to be temporary, eventually burned. But first it froze. Its remnants now lie at the bottom of the Pacific, near Nadi, Fiji. Nothing similar in scale, of course, to the destruction of the Library of Alexandria, but still a drama worth telling.

  Lucid had left all her books for future Mir astronauts, but two missions after hers, during a manual docking, a resupply vehicle crashed into the module where the library was kept. The collision had as much to do with economics in post-Soviet Russia as anything else. Previously, the supply pods had automatically docked with the space station using a system called Kurs, built in Kiev. But after the breakup of the Soviet Union, Kiev became the capital of an independent Ukraine, the government of which steadily raised the price of Kurs by 400 percent. The Russian space agency decided it would go without the automation in future dockings and wanted to test a new procedure, leaving it up to the cosmonauts and astronauts on board to guide the resupply pod to the station.

  Around noon on June 25, 1997, the resupply vehicle, moving at about three meters per second, suddenly revealed itself out a space station window just before it slammed into a solar panel and ricocheted into the station. Almost immediately, the crew felt the pressure change in their ears—they needed to seal the compartment off fast before they ran out of air. And they did, preserving oxygen in the rest of the station, but all experiments and personal effects in that module, including those books, were lost to the cold vacuum of space.

  Mir flew for only another four years. On March 23, 2001, to begin its planned de-orbit, Russian ground control remotely fired its engines to stop its forward motion. The space station began its fall to Earth. As it fell, friction from the atmosphere burned it, then aerodynamic forces sheared off the solar panels. The main modules, superheated and buckling, eventually broke apart. If you were in the South Pacific watching, you would have seen fireballs of various sizes rain down, accompanied by sonic booms, as an estimated twenty tons of material squelched into the ocean.

  The library burned. But what words can last forever? Ponge, taking a long view, writes:

  Oh Louvre of language, which may become a home, after the end of the race—perhaps for the other guests, some monkeys for example, or some bird, or some superior being, like the crustacean that substitutes itself for the mollusk in the periwinkle shell. And then, in the twilight of the animals, the wind and the tiny grains of sand slowly penetrate it, while on dry land it still shines and erodes, becoming brilliant as it crumbles; oh sterile immaterial dust, oh brilliant residue, although endlessly tumbled and crushed between cutting blades of the air and sea. At last! No one is there, nothing can reform the sand, not even glass, and it’s all over.

  Our sun’s nuclear furnace is running on about five billion more years of fuel. Or at least that’s the estimate for when it will enter its red giant phase, so swollen that it swallows Earth, etc. So it will burn, yes, with certainty, though Earth has the potential to become a scorcher at the rate it’s going before our ballooning star can get to it. Nothing lasts forever.

  Lately, I’ve found solace in thinking about the Golden Record, encoded with some of our planet’s sounds and images, with human biosignatures, a kind of metaphysical love. It fixes me onto a grand timeline that somehow, counterintuitively even, makes me feel less insignificant—part of something larger, in any case, with or without corporeal friend. />
  IX

  DREAMS OF MARS, DREAMS OF EARTH

  I never dreamt of Mars. As a kid, my faraway planet, the one I looked for in the night sky, read about obsessively in science books, and envisioned orbiting while riding its moons into and out of penumbra, was Jupiter. That giant red eye swirling, first observed around 1665, inside which our own Earth could fit. Those demure and delicate rings, nothing like Saturn’s ostentation and as if it were its own solar system with all those moons. Almost big enough to be a failed star—just shy of the mass to become a brown dwarf, to get the fusion engines up and running. That’s okay, not everyone can be a star. And then later, when I learned the theory about the solar system’s early days, when Jupiter possibly lunged toward the sun, clearing the way for the rocky planets including Earth to make ellipses unencumbered by debris, and then swung back out to its current status—like a humble but respected older sibling in high school telling everyone about you, priming friends and teachers for your arrival.

  I was also quite fond of our moon, always just there, so lovely with its moods. Coy as crescent, a little regretful-after-the-banquet as gibbous. Then, when full, so proud. And when new: just taking some time for itself. Mars was hype, the moon was real. So, as a participant on this Mars simulation, I was different. Not as much a superfan as the others, I had some catching up to do.

  Oleg, for instance, told me that he’d always loved Mars and its very small moons, Phobos and Deimos, named for the Greek gods of fear and dread. As a planetary scientist he loved Mars for the secrets it holds to the formation of the early solar system. Oleg, the backpacker. He was a true believer in adventure and the glory of expeditions, and so he also loved Mars for its ultimate backcountry status. Human life can be sustained, but not without effort and clever engineering. And it’s able to be terraformed, given a long-enough timeframe. Mars as tabula rasa.