My Journey to Mars

It's been quite a year, huh? I was originally going to do a year-in-review type post, but I was travelling over the winter break and honestly it was good for me to take a break from the computer screen for a bit, so I just have a couple of general updates.

The main update, and one that may not come as a surprise if you've been following it closely, is that Mars One is officially finished, following failure to get investment for any further stages beyond the latest candidate selection round. This has not been too surprising to me either—there's been a long time without any forward motion, and getting enough money was always going to be one of the hardest parts of this project. Though I am disappointed that Mars One wasn't able to get further than it did before having to give up—I was at least hoping for more concept studies to come out of it, and the in-person selection round. 

Still, I think that a lot of good came out of it—the idea of humans on Mars is in the public consciousness in a way that it wasn't ten years ago, and Mars One played a big part in putting it there. Whoever comes next will have a wealth of lessons learned and, hopefully, an easier time of it. For my own part, I've had so many opportunities to talk to the public and in schools about human space exploration and Mars settlement, and I’m hopeful that people can continue to be inspired by this goal. And on a personal level, I’ve made friends around the world with some incredible people who share the outlook on life that personally going to Mars would be a great idea, and they remain some of the coolest and smartest people I know.

The state of Mars settlement going forward is currently uncertain. SpaceX, while developing the rockets that could eventually get people to Mars, has repeatedly stated that they’re only interested in supplying the transportation to Mars, not any other aspect of a Mars mission. However, there don't seem to be any serious organizations at the moment ready and willing to actually go (or anyone capable and willing to fund the ones that might be, in the case of Mars One). With that said, there’s still plenty of on-going research in all sorts of fields addressing the various problems that will need to be solved to allow people to live on Mars. How it will all come together in a future mission to take human life to Mars remains to be seen.

In the meantime, I’m helping out with the problem-solving side of things as a member of the Mars Ethical Settlement Alliance, working on developing a Martian constitution and a series of papers called the Martian Papers. You can watch the presentation I gave at the Mars Society Convention in October on what will become the first of those papers very soon. I’ll be continuing to use this blog to report on my progress with that sort of thing, plus any other Mars-related stuff I get involved in. I also continue to be very interested in topics such as religion in space. 

Defining Mars for the Purposes of a Martian Constitution

We can talk big about sending humans to Mars all we like, but how will those humans be governed and protected? I'm delighted to announce a new project I am a part of: the Mars Ethical Settlement Alliance, a group setting out to draft a constitution for an independent Mars. 

So far we have released a preamble stating its intent:

"We, the Martians, declare Mars to be a free and independent state. This state and this planet will benefit the people of Mars, for the purpose of making humanity a multiplanetary species.

We declare Mars to be a sovereign entity, separate from the rest of human structures, yet part of the larger tapestry of the human experience.We seek peace and trade with all who wish it, but also choose to establish and defend our own independence.

Mars shall seek to uphold Liberty, the Preservation and continuity of Life, Stewardship of the planet, and the provision of Justice for its people.

We seek to fill Mars with life, and work towards making the planet accessible and habitable for the full spectrum of humanity.

Therefore, we the Martians, establish a sovereign Martian republic, and declare this to be the Constitution of the Republic and its supreme law."

I’m resurrecting this blog as somewhere to put my thoughts about sending humans to Mars... since although all has been quiet on the Mars One front for a while now, I still have thoughts, and need somewhere to put them!

The language we use to talk about sending humans to Mars is important—the words we choose have a lot to say about our approach and the goals and assumptions we bring with us. Many people are moving away from speaking about “colonization”, and for good reason. It’s a word that carries the baggage of countless atrocities, of people laying claim to land that was not their own, treating its inhabitants—and fellow human beings—as disposable. But even if there are no living things on Mars to steal from, it still carries connotations of ownership, entitlement, and exploitation. “Settlement/settlers” is often the preferred alternative, but I know that this term has its own problematic associations (in South Africa, for example), and in practice it’s often just a way for people to talk about colonization with a more palatable word. 

I don’t think we should settle for “settling”. I think we can make bolder statements about our goals for sending humans to Mars with the language we choose to use.

An alternative that I quite like is “Mars migration/migrant”. I like it because it literally describes what I want to do when it comes to Mars—move from one place to another to live and work there—without the same connotations of control and ownership. Not that a mission to send humans to live on Mars wouldn’t have to establish some form of political control and ownership, at least of the space it lands on and the resources it gathers for its own use, but the scope doesn’t have to extend beyond establishing a successful and sustainable community on the Red Planet, as opposed to the kind of planetary domination and manipulation implied by those folks who get a bit too excited about drastic terraforming measures. 

Another word I came across recently while reading this old Slate article is “cultivation”. I really like this one because it carries connotations of the care-taking and safe-guarding of life, a commitment to making Mars flourish rather than exploiting it for all it is worth—a commitment that could apply equally to extant life on Mars and life that has arrived from Earth. What I feel very strongly about is looking after the planet from the moment humans first set foot there, taking on the role of stewards of the place we live just as the environmentalism movement asks us to do on Earth today.

I spent last week in Utah at the Mars Desert Research Station as volunteer staff for the University Rover Competition, run by the Mars Society. 34 student teams from universities around the world brought rovers they had designed and built to carry out various tasks in the Mars-like environment around the station. 

I spent most of my time facilitating the Extreme Retrieval and Delivery Mission, in which rovers controlled by students at a command station inside the habitat had to pick up tools, rocks and water bottles, and deliver them to destinations in the rugged terrain. It was a tough mission, and many rovers came out of it somewhat more battered than they went in, but there were some incredibly impressive performances. The winners this year were a Polish team called IMPULS (Kielce University of Technology), whose rover I got the time to follow out on the course with the judge.

A number of us stayed in the MDRS habitat overnight during the competition, so while I wasn't a part of a simulation mission, it was still extremely cool to live on base and I was really stoked to have the opportunity to visit. Fellow Mars One candidate Kay Radzik was also a competition judge and staying in the hab as well, so it was a chance for us to spend some quality time together over the course of the week. She is extremely smart, funny and kind, and a real inspiration!

You may remember that a couple of years ago, Mars One went public via reverse takeover of an old company called InFin. This basically meant that Mars One had two parts: the Mars One Foundation, the original non-profit organisation that’s running the mission, and Mars One Ventures, the for-profit arm that was created in order to make money that would then fund the Mars One Foundation via a subscription fee.

It’s recently hit the news that Mars One Ventures has gone bankrupt, which some are interpreting to mean that the mission itself is over. As Mars One said in a brief statement yesterday, this is not the case. They are working with a potential investor to sort out that situation and take the next steps forward, but in the meantime Mars One still exists and is still as ever working towards its goals of putting humans on Mars.

Before Mars One can send anything off the planet, let alone humans, it needs to perform the design studies that will turn its project outline into a fully workable mission that can then be built. That doesn’t happen by magic - Mars One needs money to pay the companies who will perform those studies (Lockheed Martin and Paragon Space Development Corporation have already performed initial pre-phase A studies for some aspects of the mission as Mars One has been able to commission them). And then of course they need the money to go ahead and build stuff. 

I’ve often said that the hardest part for Mars One at this stage is securing the investment needed to make all this happen. It’s an apolitical organisation not tied to a source of government funding, and it’s not lead by a billionaire who can plough his own funds into making rockets happen. So they’ve needed a plan that not only supplies the Mars One Foundation with the money it needs, but provides a return for investors as well so that they are encouraged to support us. We all knew that this would be difficult to do, so while I’m a little bummed out at the latest news, I’m not particularly shocked and nor am I particularly worried. This new investment company seems to be committed to getting Mars One through this, and will be delivering a press conference on March 6, when I am sure we will find out more. 

This might be a setback, but Mars One isn’t giving up. This is just a hurdle to get over - it’s a challenge, but who said Mars was easy anyway?

One thing I got to do quite a lot in the first year or so after the Mars 100 were announced was go into local schools and talk about Mars with kids. Now I've moved to California I don't really do that any more, but I do occasionally exchange emails with classes doing projects on space. Recently, one particular Year Six class sent me a list of questions which I've decided (with permission) to answer as a blog post so that you can see the sort of questions I get asked. There are always one or two that surprise me, even now! You can find them below:

This year feels like it has been long. So, so long. It’s been a good year, I think, filled with a lot of great things. But also hard. And I feel very, very tired. Still, here’s the roundup:

The paper version of my talk at the Mars Society Convention this summer, 'In Search Of A Martian Faith', is up! 

I give an overview of my own approach to science and religion, and the perspective it gives me as a Mars One candidate. I then go on to explore various aspects of religious practice that face challenges in the context of space exploration - religious community, timekeeping, and sacred places. 

National Geographic’s Mars is back for a second season!

My feelings a little bit mixed. I liked the concept and sort of enjoyed the first season. I felt like it had a great start, and I especially loved Hana Seung (not just because we share a name!) mainly, I think, because of her prequel episode which really made me invested in the character in a way I couldn’t be with the others, and also because of the excellent story-telling decision to make someone who isn’t yet another white man the leader (even if it took killing off the white male leader to get there).

However, for a show that is part documentary, part drama, I felt that its weakness was the definitely drama half. As it went on, the tone was always so grim and it put tension in very strange places - why would a trained astronaut get so distracted she’d forget to respond on the radio while descending into a dark cavern? Why would you design a door without an airlock that a delusional biologist can easily open and accidentally kill himself with? I can think of so many realistic scenarios for things being tense and challenging on Mars that I don’t understand why the story writers kept going for something so ludicrous. 

Also, aside from Hana, many of the other characters felt flat. There's no real sense of camaraderie. The team is committed but weirdly passionless. No one communicates effectively. Their mission is all struggle and no joy. I kept wondering what they were doing there. It seemed like the show decided that in order for there to be drama, none of the astronauts would be any good at their jobs (and you just need to look at Mark Watney from The Martian to know that that really doesn’t have to be the case). It contrasted badly with the present-day interviews, in which everyone is passionate and well-informed, the stakes are real and the challenges are faced with genuine expertise. 

It has sometimes felt a little like treading water over the past year and a half to two years - on a semi-regular basis people will ask me for news on Mars One, and my reply is always something along the lines of, “It’s all behind-the-scenes, investment-related stuff at the moment. I’ll let you know when there’s news.”

I’ve tried not to be unduly pessimistic about it - we’re very familiar with delays to space missions in the astronomy community after all - but the right thing for me to do in the meantime has been to complete my PhD and crack on with my career in research, and be patient while Mars One works it out. I’ve always believed that gathering investment is one of the hardest tasks that Mars One faces at this point in the timeline.

So I’m very pleased that Mars One has struck an investment deal with Phoenix Enterprises. All going well, Mars One will start receiving money within the month - we can get over this initial funding hurdle and start making progress on the mission again.

While the book club over the period of Lent concluded, most of us in the book group returned this evening for a three-hour session with someone who actually teaches Nonviolent Communication as part of his work and offered to put on a workshop for us and others in the church.

Now, you may have noticed Easter passing by recently, making Lent well and truly over. My Nonviolent Communication book group has wrapped up and I’ve finished the book (I’ve still got a few blog posts to go on it), although I’m only three sections into Drawdown out of eight. While I didn’t complete both books over Lent, I am happy that it got me sitting down to read more, something I don’t make a lot of time for usually and continually regret. Anyway, despite the break (I have a good excuse - my sister came out to visit me in California, which was lovely!) I’m going to keep blogging my way through the books and hopefully maintain the habit of reading just a little bit more in my spare time.

The second section of Drawdown revolves around food, and while the solutions it explores are ostensibly still for reducing the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, this feels almost like a secondary benefit to most of them. The primary benefit being increased and more sustainable yields in farming, leading to a better food supply for a growing population.

Now’s as good a time as any to make a bit of a disclaimer about this book. In my notes I’ve been making on my way through, there’s one sentence I’ve drawn a double line and stars around:

“The purpose of NVC is not to get people to comply with your requests, but to establish a relationship based on honesty and empathy.”

We learned back in the beginning that there are four components to NVC: observation, feelings, needs, and requests. It feels kind of clinical to put it like that, but thankfully the book has a ton of different examples of it in action, from people learning to communicate better with their families, to defusing some really pretty scary situations. A chapter is dedicated to each component, breaking it down to understand why it is necessary and what it contributes to the communication - and also the potential damage it avoids.

We tried giving an example a shot in our last meeting a couple of weeks ago. It was tricky! I’ll work through it here to try to summarise what I’ve learned. The scenario was a chance face-to-face meeting with a friend who I’ve tried to contact for a while, but they haven’t returned my calls or texts. Something I could say at that point might be, “You never reply to any messages I send you - you’re so inconsiderate!” Now, I might feel very justified in expressing my hurt that way, but if my goal is to have a constructive conversation that might resolve the issue, then the judgement and aggression that’s baked into that sentence will already put the other on the defensive and close them off to me, making finding a resolution difficult. So how can we rework it?

The first step is observation, which means identifying the action that is hurting me and expressing it without evaluation or judgement - not that I cannot evaluate that action at any point in the conversation, but starting from the facts of the matter that are neutral territory. In this case, even “You never reply!” carries a baked-in judgement - a better way of saying it might be, “The last time I tried to contact you, I left a message but didn’t receive a reply from you.” Or perhaps easier, stating the observation as a lead-in to the next part, such as, “When I reach out and don’t receive a response from you...” 

The next step is to identify and communicate the feeling that the action provoked in me. This can be quite a difficult step, especially if I’m not sure exactly what I’m feeling, and there are several pitfalls to avoid. One is mistaking a thought for a feeling: “I feel that you’re ignoring me.” It’s more accurate if you replace “feel” in that sentence with “think” - it’s not an emotion! In general, the phrases, “I feel that...” or “I feel as if...” or “I feel you are...” are deeply unhelpful in this context. Another more subtle pitfall are phrases like, “I feel neglected,” or “I feel ignored.” Again, these are not actually emotions! They are actually disguised ways of saying, “I think you are neglecting or ignoring me.” The goal of this step is to honestly express my own emotions in response to the factual action rather than assuming what’s going on with the other person - centring on myself avoids condemning or blaming the other person for my own reaction, just letting them know what I feel. In this case, perhaps I feel upset, or angry, or worried. These are all legitimate emotions, and expressing them in this way offers the opportunity to the other person to respond with compassion.

The emotions that I feel stem from an unmet need. Identifying the need behind our feelings is, if anything, even harder than identifying the feelings themselves! But once a need is established, it offers a way forward to finding a solution that will resolve the situation. The need in this situation is pretty context-dependent - it might be a need to know that the friendship is valued by the other person, a need to know that they’re doing all right, or maybe something more practical such as the need to obtain some specific information from them. In the former examples, these needs might be pretty subconscious and take some thought to drag them into the light so that I can share them. Establishing a need at this point also makes it clear that I’m not bringing this up just to shame the other person or make them feel bad, but because I need something. I’m admitting that I’m not self-sufficient, and becoming less threatening as a result.

Finally, with a need established, I make a request for action that might meet that need. It is important that it is clearly a request and not a demand - if the other person feels coerced, duty-bound or guilt-tripped into complying with it, then they will end up resenting it and feeling like they don’t have a choice in the matter. Presenting a request allows the other person to respond to meet my need out of compassion because they want to - and also offers them the option of saying no (and if they do, that answer must be accepted graciously, with empathy for their position and without blame, otherwise the request was actually a demand all along). A request should also be as specific as possible - asking that they just talk to me more is vague and doesn’t offer any way of establishing how much more talking is required before my need is met. Rather, something like, “Would it be possible to set up a time once a week when we talk on the phone?” offers a concrete action that can be taken or refused, or negotiated together until something that meets both of your needs is discovered.

So, putting it all together: “Hey, so when I left you a voicemail three days ago and didn’t get a reply, I felt anxious because I need to know that you still care about our friendship. Do you think we could meet for coffee and catch up at some point in the next couple of days?”

How’d I do? It still feels a little artificial and stilted to me, because while it all seems to make a lot of intuitive sense, I am just not in the habit of communicating this way, though I’m certainly trying my best to put it into practise where relevant. Also, it’s worth remembering that it’s not always relevant - it applies mainly to situations where unmet needs are causing negative feelings and conflict, which can be dramatic and potentially violent or just small niggling things in everyday life that are becoming frustrating. 

I mentioned in my first look at Nonviolent Communication that both books I am reading have a core of optimism. Drawdown’s may not seem entirely obvious - it is a book presenting one hundred substantive solutions to the problem of climate change, with the goal (or rather, the necessity) of not just reducing our emissions, but reaching the point at which the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere begin to decline on a year-by-year basis. It’s no easy task. Many of the solutions that Drawdown presents, however, have social and economic benefits beyond the environmental, and its core of optimism is that global warming can be seen not only as a problem that urgently needs solving, but as an opportunity and invitation to innovate.

It begins with the first topic that springs to mind for most people when we consider global warming - the generation of electricity. Many of the solutions presented here won’t come as a surprise. This section is dominated by different types of renewable energy, including wind, solar, wave and tidal, geothermal, and a couple of less well-known ones such as concentrated solar power (using mirrors to produce heat to drive steam turbines, rather than photovoltaics - one main advantage to this is that heat is easier to store than electricity). Across the board, costs are coming down for most renewables, and the range of options means that the intermittent nature of, say, wind and solar power, can be mitigated by the more persistent geothermal and tidal sources. While none of this came as a particular surprise to me, some of the numbers quoted did - apparently, 314,000 wind turbines provide ~4% of global energy today. For some reason, that feels like both way more energy and way fewer actual turbines than I expected. 

The book presents as separate solutions some of these same technologies, but at a micro scale, such as rooftop solar power or individual wind turbines supplying a single location. Small-scale, localised power generation is well suited for rural areas, reducing the need for the main grid to be extended and granting independence to remote areas. And in general, the book makes a good case for the future of energy being in distributed and decentralised renewables, with local power supplying the local area and thus able to be more responsive to changes in demand and overall more efficient, with less energy lost in distribution.

In order to enable this, the grid itself needs to become more flexible, capable of handling intermittent supplies that are highly distributed, including microgrids at a local level which can either stand alone or hook into the main grid as required. In tandem with this, another technology that is vital to enabling this sort electricity generation is storage. We are familiar with the idea of pumping water up to reservoirs in order to generate power via hydroelectricity when needed. But developments are also being made in using energy storage by rail, by moving loaded carts up to the top of sloped tracks and using regenerative braking to retrieve the power (with the advantage that rail carts don’t evaporate!) As mentioned earlier, heat is also easier to store than electricity, and molten salt can stay hot for hours, allowing for steam power to be produced when required. And the development of better batteries is also highly important, especially on a distributed level where they can be powerful enablers of microgeneration. Tesla’s Powerwall battery and other similar products are things to keep an eye on.

The majority of the solutions presented by Drawdown are “no-regrets” solutions, for which there are very few in any downsides apart from the initial costs of installation. However two in this part are very much “regrets” solutions: waste-to-energy, which speaks to the excessive consumption of the Western world and offers an alternative to fossil fuels only at the cost of releasing harmful chemicals and toxins, and nuclear power, for which the essay had the following to say: “In effect, nuclear power plants boil water. ... It is the most complex process ever invented to create steam.” Savage! While nuclear power does have a low carbon footprint, its cost has only increased over time rather than decreased, it does not fit in well with a paradigm of decentralising power, and while nuclear plants are good at reducing the spread of additional coal-burning plants, especially in China, it may be that the period in which they are of most use is already coming to an end. And it shouldn’t be forgotten that they are capable of releasing terrible calamity, such as what occurred in Chernobyl and Fukushima.

The first thing that struck me about both of these books I am reading is their core of optimism. Nonviolent Communications’ is that the natural state of human beings is one of compassion, once an absence of violence has been brought about, rather than the other way around. Which blew my mind a little bit (I was to learn that it would keep doing that).

Nonviolent Communication (or NVC - as an astronomer I have an affinity for acronyms so I’m going to go with the one presented) in a nutshell is made up of four components: observation of actions that affect our well-being, our feelings in response to those actions, which stem from our needs, values and desires, leading us to make requests for actions that enrich our lives. NVC involves honestly expressing these components, and empathetically receiving them from others. Simple, right?

However then the author goes on to describe the things that stand in the way of NVC, including making moralistic judgements on or comparisons with other people, or by communicating our desires as demands, making them coercive. The one that stood out to me was the denial of responsibility - in which language can be used to shift the blame for our actions and responses onto other people or even abstracts (such as, “I had to do this because it’s policy”, rather than “I chose to do this because I wanted to follow policy in order to keep my job”). Oof. It’s hard, but also more emotionally honest and acknowledges the agency we have in choosing how we act towards others. And this goes deeper than simply our actions - we also need to take responsibility for our thoughts and feelings. (That was hard for me to take in - I’m of the opinion that our feelings happen to us, we can’t usually choose how we feel about something but we can choose how we respond, so responsibility for feelings seems... unnecessarily strict? I think it does get clarified in a later chapter, though, so I’ll hold that thought. Perhaps it’s responsibility to know and understand our feelings, and where they come from.)

I think responsibility also informs what’s going on when the author talks about things like moralistic judgements - that is, taking responsibility for and owning our own value systems. When we get angry or upset by someone doing something we consider to be morally wrong, it’s important to remember that it is our own value system they are acting against, and the reason that we are angry is rooted in our own worldview. Taking ownership of that when communicating with them is less likely to put them on the defensive and cause them to get angry in return than flatly accusing them of being immoral. (We may consider ourselves to be objectively right in our worldview, but it is nonetheless still our worldview, and it is not necessarily shared by who we’re trying to communicate with).