What Will it Be Like?

I’ve been amused at the numbers of people who are so interested in going to Mars they’d sign up for a one-way trip. THAT really says something about the interest people have in the Red Planet.

No, I didn’t sign up. I thought about it. But, ultimately I ended up NOT signing up. I’d want to come back, actually and share what I saw on the Red Planet.  But, I’ve often dreamed about walking those rusty plains, or climbing Olympus Mons, or taking a jet-assisted ride over Margaritifer Chaos, or slumming it down in the depths of the Valles Marineris.

You see, Mars looks a LOT like Earth in places. Yes, there’s no life (that we know of), no flowing water, no lakes, no rivers. Yes, there’s water, but you have to work to get at it. And, you’d be working in an environment with a thin atmosphere, little UV protection, cold temperatures, and living your life in a spacesuit much of the time. Mars is damned inhospitable to our type of life. We’ll have to take a lot of steps to protect ourselves, such as living underground, walking the surface encased in a suit and so on.

Still, that possibility hasn’t stopped a LOT of people from signing up for a one-way ticket.

I wonder…what will they do? Will they be the colonists that make it somehow, despite the harsh environment and no chance of return to Earth?  If so, and they reproduce, what WILL those babies be like?

Science fiction has notable examples of what life on Mars will be like for those first folks. In Mars Crossing, writer Geoffrey Landis describes a small band of people who go to Mars on what seems to be a publicity mission. It’s a captivating story; one small detail that really stuck out for me (out of  many) was the fact that people’s hair got bleached white by the ubiquitous presence of peroxide on the surface.

Then there’s Stranger in a Strange Land, Heinlein’s classic tale of Valentine Michael Smith, the child of a pair of Mars explorers who somehow ends up inheriting and representing Mars and the Martian Old Ones. The experience of growing up on Mars with ancient Martians who are simply spirits turns the human child into a very strange person, indeed.

Kim Stanley Robinson, in his set of books Red Mars, Blue Mars, Green Mars, sets out an exploratory civilization that somehow manages to bring many of Earth’s problems to Mars, and faces a whole new set of issues.  I think these books are the closest to what human exploration (and colonization) of Mars will be like. Humans are humans. We don’t leave our problems behind when we travel.

Like everybody else, I’m going to be watching these first Mars explorers, whether they go one-way or figure out a way to do a round-trip visit. Whatever they do, it will be the trip of a lifetime. Hopefully, it won’t be the last trip in their  lifetimes. I want to see them come back and tell us what Mars is like! It’ll be like things were when explorers were first visiting new lands on Earth. They eventually reported back what they found. And, the folks who stayed home anxiously awaited word of what things were like on those faraway shores.