Can (and should) earthly ecosystems go off-world?
Is it right that humans should colonise Mars when we’ve made such a mess of Earth? Multidisciplinary artist Dr Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg has created a reflective project that questions humanity’s colonising mindset and urges another perspective.
The Earth is in a dire way and as unsettling as Trump, Brexit or any far-right conspiracy theorist certainly is, the biggest threat we face today is climate change. It’s an irreversible crisis and the absolute pity in it all is that we’re solely responsible. We humans are capable of doing so much good on the one hand, but on the other, we’ve been so reckless, especially in the face of scientific fact. How then can we begin to imagine colonising other planets when we can’t even take care of the one we have?
Moving to Mars, an exhibition on show at London’s Design Museum until February 2020, may offer some insight on the subject. But one of its exhibiting artists, London-based Dr Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg, isn’t giving anything definitive away. She does challenge if we should even be designing for Mars in the first place though.
Her project, The Wilding of Mars, is a digital installation that uses a gaming engine to create multiple brightly coloured simulations of the growth of a planetary wilderness across a number of screens. The video loops are an hour long and represent a million years, with each one proposing a different outcome. There are no humans in Ginsberg’s fictional colonisation, and her idea of sending plants to Mars instead of us is so we can’t exploit it.
The simulated plants, fungi and lichen featured in the videos were selected in consultation with NASA scientist Dr Lynn Rothschild because of their ability to withstand extreme conditions on Earth. Whether they would thrive on Mars is hard to say. This is, after all, a planet with the largest dust storms in the solar system, where temperatures can reach lows of -143°C and the atmosphere contains chemicals not unlike dry cleaning fluid. How to get them there in the first place without human intervention is another good question. As is the issue of how they’ll actually be kept alive. And will they have a negative impact on the natural order or a positive one?
If it seems there are a lot of holes in Ginsberg’s conceptual framework, that’s because there are. But this project isn’t a proposition, nor is it speculative. She is not suggesting someone seek funding to actually make it happen. The Wilding of Mars is simply a way to bring attention to the rhetoric of colonisation that’s used whenever we talk about Mars. For Ginsberg, it’s reflective and designed to make us think about why humans want to go to Mars and what’s driving that desire. “The idea that somehow the Red Planet is a barren frontier and as humans we have the right to take it for ourselves is problematic,” she says. “This project makes us question whether the ultimate unnatural act for humans is to hand power over to other life forms and never exploit them.”
Can we even imagine Mars except as a place for ourselves? And why are we spending so much time thinking about other possible worlds when we already have one that’s in desperate need of our attention? Perhaps this is the wake up call we all need to hear. And instead of seeing ourselves inhabiting a hostile planet that couldn’t possibly be terraformed anytime soon, we need to focus our attention on the issues of biodiversity, conservation, preservation and extinction as they affect planet Earth.
As Ginsberg explains, “I’m particularly worried about how Mars is presented as planet B and this thinking behind the idea that it can offer us a second chance after we’ve trashed Earth. But we only have one planet and we need to look after it.” Indeed, the camera angles in The Wilding of Mars are intentionally voyeuristic to heighten the sense of human intrusion. In this respect, Ginsberg presents Mars and her vision of a plant-colonised future as a look-but-don’t-touch scenario. Maybe we think we could make it better, but the truth is we first need to identify whether indigenous life exists there – in whatever form that may take – and if it does, then we need to respect it. Ginsberg is not shy in implying the ultimate act of respect would be to simply let it be.
It’s possible that Mars could become a repository for plant species on Earth and the notion of the archive is something that interests Ginsberg. In developing this project, 128 plant pioneers and their offspring, sub species that have adapted over one million years, were documented. The Wilding of Mars may very well leave us with more questions than answers, but there’s no more gently seductive way in which to be confronted with the brutal consequences of human actions. We need to take responsibility for our own personal footprint and try to put things right on Earth.
Moving to Mars will be on display at the Design Museum, London from 18 October 2019 to 23 February 2020. The Wilding of Mars involved research and development by Dr Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg, Ness Lafoy, Johanna Just, Iona Man and Stacie Woolsey; software development by Tom Betts/Nullpointer, Jelena Viskovic and Ana Maria Nicolaescu; and sound by Sam Conran. The project was commissioned by Vitra Design Museum and the Design Museum.