Once Upon a Time I Lived on Mars

by Kate Greene

To his credit, something Elon Musk is good at is thinking about scale. His engineers are designing rocket technology that scales through its reusability. This means, essentially, that since the rockets are able to be used more than once, their cost is much cheaper than traditional one-off rockets, which means more rocket launches. Eventually, Musk hopes, this will allow SpaceX to make spaceflight cheaper for the people. So then what? It’s dark, but imagine the scenario of a struggling SpaceX Mars colony. Reports of longing for fresh water, for fresh air, for blue skies. What kind of sympathy would they receive from people back home? Empathy might be even less likely. What would the effect of a commercial Mars colony have back on Earth, if any at all? Might it just feel like another spectacle? But also, what policies, action, art, or perspective shifts might it inspire?

  In September 2018, SpaceX announced its first private customer to the moon. Yusaku Maezawa, a Japanese billionaire founder of Zozotown, Japan’s largest online clothing retailer, reserved all the seats on an orbital moon ride, to take place sometime after 2023, on a spaceship that does not yet exist. Maezawa, who also founded the Tokyo-based Contemporary Art Foundation to support the next generation of contemporary artists here on Earth, announced that he wants to take six to eight artists with him. “What if Picasso had gone to the moon? Or Andy Warhol or Michael Jackson or John Lennon?” he asks. “What about Coco Chanel? These are all artists that I adore.”

  Maezawa’s artist crew—he wants a variety, from painters to piano players to filmmakers—will be asked to create something after they return to Earth. “These masterpieces,” Maezawa says, “will inspire the dreamer within all of us.”

  X

  DEEP TIME, DEEP SPACE

  My task was to remotely control a little rover, to drive it out of a crater. The crater was supposed to be on the moon, though it was really in a sand pit outside Montreal. And I was supposed to be on Earth, though also presumably on Mars, while still on Earth. Timing was everything. And so was positioning. The timing challenge was that the video only refreshed every second, making it hard to adjust to obstacles as you drove. The positioning challenge was that I needed to go at high speed up the 20-degree slope of the crater and thread the gap, just a little wider than the rover, between two rocks, and fast so as not to slide back down the crater, except not so fast that if I hit the rock I would tumble and end up like poor Gregor Samsa, stuck belly-up on his first morning after the change.

  What actually happened: I gunned it. And evidently drove over one of the rocks to a position of immobility. An engineer had to walk over, pick me up (wheels still spinning?), and place me on flat ground. I wasn’t proud. I’m still even a little sensitive about it. And because of these uncomfortable feelings, now comes the part where I write my thin defense. Visibility and telemetry were limited. As was my training. It was my first time at the controls (such an advanced maneuver for a novice!), and I really shouldn’t point fingers, but my crewmates previously at the helm, who drove with far fewer challenges, both got up and left as soon it was my turn. They told me it’d be fine. I thought it’d be fine. Technically, it was. No one died, nothing was damaged beyond repair.

  The lunar rover exercise was one of many projects we helped with during our mission. Testing a 3-D printer, assessing those space-suit trainers, and wearing workout shirts to the point of disgust were others. We’d try out various systems, offer feedback. This test run was provided by the Canadian Space Agency, which operates a facility for engineers and astronauts to evaluate equipment on their mock-up of the moon and Mars surfaces, yards about the size of a soccer field, featuring hills, rocks, sand, craters, and gullies.

  It could have been worse. The Canadian engineers didn’t even implement the three-second video feed delay that one would experience with a real Moon rover, which makes making quick decisions even harder. High centering on a lunar rock and seeing your folly three seconds too late is the sort of mishap that ends a mission unless there’s someone nearby to dislodge you. That’s why there are pregame simulations, I guess. It’s why we practice.

  * * *

  According to NASA’s website, the moon is deep space. And the agency plans to send astronauts back to it sometime soon, across the 250,000-mile gap, as a stepping-stone for Mars, which is even deeper space, sometime thereafter. The moon as practice for Mars. One possible timeline: by 2020, the agency hopes to launch, for the first time, the Orion capsule (room for four astronauts, though it’ll be uncrewed to start) atop its brand-new, extremely thrusty Space Launch System rocket.

  By 2022, astronauts aboard. Also in 2022, the first components of a mini space station to orbit the moon could be launched. This space station, called the Gateway, will act as an outpost and docking station for lunar missions. Finally, by 2028, a crew could very well descend to the moon from the Gateway to explore, test equipment, and conduct science. They could stay on the surface for up to a week. And after that? Vaguely, the 2030s are for Mars. According to copy on the website in early 2019, “NASA is keeping its eyes on human exploration of Mars. Our sustainable Moon to Mars exploration approach is reusable and repeatable—we will build an open exploration architecture in lunar orbit with as many capabilities that can be replicated as possible for missions to the Red Planet.”

  I wrote my first article about NASA’s plans for Mars in 2005 for Science News magazine, and looking back I see that the current timeline is actually not too different from the one outlined in that Bush era. The major difference today is that some of the technologies—the spacecraft and the rockets—now exist and are almost, in operational parlance, okay to go.

  * * *

  The Curiosity rover, rolling on Mars as I type, digs into the crust, takes samples, and runs them through a spectrometer to see what they’re made of. It’s slow going and limited in scope. But a real human geologist? On a real Martian walkabout? She could, in mere hours, find the rock that might upend our entire understanding of how the solar system formed.

  When you hold a rock, you’re holding deep time. The oldest terrestrials were formed more than four billion years ago in the Earth’s primordial crust, when our little protoplanet was a roiling, churning, molten mess, bombarded nonstop by meteorites, and the moon was only 20,000 miles away, its smooth seas forming against the heat of a nascent Earth as its far side, facing the void, was cooling into saw-toothed crags.

  Igneous, sedimentary, metamorphic. Geology is mystery solving and storytelling. Decoding rocks and their formation is how we know what we know about the origins of Earth, the moon, Mars, our solar system. And the more kinds of rocks we can look at, the more we can know.

  Even back in the ’60s, NASA understood the importance of training its astronauts as geologists. “Our point of view was that the moon is made of rock, and a large block of relatively inexpensive shirt-sleeve time on Earth might be the key to choosing the most important samples during those precious hours on the Moon,” writes Don E. Wilhlems in an argument for astronaut-geologists in To a Rocky Moon: A Geologist’s History of Lunar Exploration (1993).

  Astronauts-in-training visited the Grand Canyon, Big Bend Marathon Basin in West Texas, the Sunset Crater cinder cone with adjacent lava flows, and Meteor Crater near Flagstaff, Arizona, all analogs for the lunar surface. They learned to map structures and record where exactly they found which samples.

  An “erratic” is a rock or a boulder that differs from the surrounding rock and is believed to have been brought from a distance by glacial action: a stone out of place. An extraterrestrial erratic is called a meteorite. More than 61,000 meteorites have been found on Earth. Of those, more than 200 have come from Mars and more than 300 from the moon. They are brought from a distance by ejecta, formed from the impact of an asteroid or a comet. The principle applies to chunks of Earth blasted into space as well. It’s kind of a sweet fact of the solar system that though separated by tens and hundreds of millions of miles, the Earth and Mars have a history of swapping rock.

  Lunar meteorites are ID’d by comparing chemical and
isotopic composition and mineralogy to lunar samples from the Apollo missions. Geologists confirm a meteorite’s Martian-ness, however, by the gasses trapped inside—inside the glass formed by the high-heat impact—that match the makeup of the planet’s atmosphere.

  On our crew, Oleg and Sian were the trained geologists. They’d bring back samples from the lava flows near our dome. Oleg even led a seminar about the geology of our site, the local lava tubes, which are also a kind of cave found on Mars.

  One of the reasons Mauna Loa was chosen as the HI-SEAS site was its geological similarity to Mars. Martian volcanoes, long extinguished, are estimated to have formed between one and two billion years ago. The major ones are of the shield volcano variety, meaning their gently sloping sides built up over time. Scientists have dated the youngest of the Martian lava flows to between 20 and 200 million years old. So about the same time dinosaurs roamed Earth’s skies, land, and seas, Martian volcanoes were pouring forth.

  Similarly, but different, Mauna Loa is an active shield volcano though it’s been quiet for decades. Its cooled flows provide the mountain’s characteristic long and low profile. When observed from sea level Mauna Loa seems to carve across the horizon with barely an apex despite a peak at 13,700 feet. It is the world’s largest volcano, a mound of rock so massive that it sinks 26,000 feet into earth, even below the ocean floor, and forms 51 percent of the landmass of the Big Island, born between 600,000 and a million years ago.

  * * *

  Something muddled my awareness of time on Mars. On May 24 in my journal I wrote that we were already talking about getting out, only little more than a month into the mission. So soon? I also noted that I couldn’t remember when we drank the last of the Crystal Light, a favorite. “Was it yesterday or the day before? This time compression … is really something.”

  Days seemed to drag, weeks seemed to vanish in a flash. A month could feel like a year, and a night’s sleep could feel like a twenty-minute nap. On real Mars, a day—the time it takes the planet to spin on its axis—lasts twenty-four Earth hours and thirty-seven Earth minutes. A year—the time it takes to revolve around the sun—is 687 Earth days.

  We kept to Earth time. But on Mauna-Loa Mars, I’d never experienced such an amorphous chronometry, and I became obsessed with it. What was its root? Was it seeing the same people every day? Living with the same backdrop? So few trips outside? The never-bright-enough indoor lighting? The same smells, same schedule, day after day? What was this environmental smoothing doing to my internal clock? In my journal, I wrote of my intentions to write an essay on the natural history of the second. I would visit the antique clock repair shop in my San Francisco neighborhood, hang out with its proprietor. We’d become friends and talk time. I wanted to get a better hold.

  There are, of course, scientific studies. People older than forty report that time moved more slowly in their childhood but sped up in their teenage years and into early adulthood. The reason for this may be that our brain writes new experiences to memory, but not familiar ones, and the longer we live, the more familiar it all can seem. Another study shows that the experience of terror, true fear for our lives, can also slow our clocks. The neuroscientist David Eagleman tested this by using an amusement park ride that drops people from a height, eyes skyward, onto a net 110 feet below. He asked them to gauge the length of their fall. On average, they overestimate it by 36 percent.

  Virginia Woolf, in Orlando, writes: “Time, unfortunately, though it makes animals and vegetables bloom and fade with amazing punctuality, has no such simple effect upon the mind of man. The mind of man, moreover, works with equal strangeness upon the body of time. An hour, once it lodges in the queer element of the human spirit may be stretched to fifty or a hundred times its clock length; on the other hand, an hour may be accurately represented on the timepiece of the mind by one second.”

  That’s memory, which can, depending on how closely you’re paying attention, sometimes feel nearly the same as experiencing a now or fantasizing a future. Simultaneity. A collapsing of all possible timelines. Did my brother die yesterday or three years ago? Am I still partnered with Jill, as in my dreams? How long has it been since my own death? Is it possible that my parents never met?

  For better or worse, most of us live in a world of standardization of time, and we can blame or thank trains and their schedules for this. In 1883, North American railroads, which had previously been operating on their own times, adopted a standard time to keep trains on the same track from colliding. Factories followed suit, and soon time became regulated and precise.

  Trains, along with telegraphs, were also responsible for a noteworthy event, an example of technology’s ability to bewilder through the compression of time and space. Before the telegraph, steam engine was the fastest way to send information over great distances. But after the telegraph, information seemed to fly at seemingly unbelievable speeds. Consider Fiddler Dick and his gang of pickpockets. This group became famous in the nineteenth century for working London train stations—they’d nab a wallet, hop a train, and disappear into the ether. But a telegraph connection along the rail line between London Paddington and Slough meant a message of the crime could be sent and the police would be waiting when the offenders stepped off. Time, and the related perception of space, is relative and evolving.

  Quantum mechanics backs this up. What if time is less a fundamental property, and more an emergent one, arising from its interactions with other aspects of the universe? In other words, what if time’s forward march of cause-and-effect is just dependent on your perspective, the way the night lighting in a room makes it look like a monster in the corner when it’s really just a pile of clothes?

  A Journal of Physics paper from 2015 outlines this possible emergence by reminding us that even physicists don’t consider time to be absolute. “Physicists are in the situation where time is an essential physical parameter whose meaning is intuitively clear, but several problems arise when they try to provide a clear definition of time. First of all, the definition of time is different in different branches of physics.” The authors compare classical and non-relativistic physics with classical and non-relativistic quantum mechanics with special relativity and with general relativity. The reference frames for time are different for each—in physics there is no absolute agreement on what exactly constitutes “time.”

  The authors go on to describe some specific physics issues that, when hashed out, imply that the state of the universe is actually static, meaning it is fundamentally without time. It sounds very strange because everyday observation tells us this can’t at all be the case. But what if, the authors propose, the universe is in fact static, and that time emerges from this static state because the state is entangled? Here, “entangled” refers to a quantum mechanical property of two particles whereby the act of measuring some feature of one particle somehow affects the measurement of the corresponding feature on another particle, no matter how far apart the entangled particles are, inches to billions of light-years.

  And so they tested this question. To perform their experiment, the scientists created two entangled particles of light, and then they looked at properties of these photons in two different ways asking, is this system static or is it evolving? In one case, for an “internal observer,” the system appears to be evolving. In other words, the internal observer saw the passage of time. But for another “super-observer,” with a zoomed-out view, the system appears to be static. How can this be so? When considering entangled particles, it seems the fact of their evolution, which is also a signifier of time, depends on your reference frame. That is, who you are and what you’re looking at. This is actually the case with much in physics. For the most part, we’re looking at a universe and accepting time progression as reality. Peek through to something else, and maybe it’s not really what we thought it was.

  As I write this, the East Coast winter is turning to spring. My brother is dead, and my marriage is ending. My parents are aging, I am no longer young, and I
spend much of my day-to-day life in solitude except the few hours a week I’m socializing, often with gusto, as if to make up for the hours spent alone.

  I have a hypothesis. I wonder if the year-round pleasant climate of Silicon Valley is part of the reason for the rise in immortality start-ups and more generally the belief that it’s possible for human beings to live forever, or at least much longer than we currently do. And, adjacently, that it’s possible to upload a consciousness into a machine, for humans to merge with one or many machines, an idea known in the business as the Singularity. Is it because, unlike in many parts of the world where seasons appear in relief and act as reminders of the cyclical nature of time, aging, death, and birth, you can magically think your way out of the natural ending of things? In Silicon Valley, and maybe even in other parts of California in general, seasons are all so easy to background. Death can become theoretical. Then again, it could also be the money, a proxy for power, and one of our great insulators from a variety of mortal realities.

  When I first moved to San Francisco, I was shocked to find roses blooming outside my neighbor’s building in November. But then of course, within a week, they had wilted. Imagine my surprise when a few weeks after that they bloomed again. Having grown up in Kansas, where roses come in early June and only early June, this rejuvenation struck me as opulent, and even a little like cheating. It was like San Francisco was getting away with more than the fair allotment of beauty. I now know that various kinds of roses continuously bloom, and it’s not just a San Francisco thing, but at the time, my midwestern sensibility led me to take slight offense at so many nice Bay Area features—the mild weather, the stunning views, the recurrent roses. After a few months of it, though, I came to enjoy those roses and to see their renewal, the replenishment of those petals, as a natural variant, no longer showy, just another way to be.