Advocate of colonising Mars is no longer ‘eccentric’
ABOUT 25 years ago, journalist Stephen Petranek worked on a story for Life magazine.
The image on the cover was of a pinkish sphere on a black background.
Above it were the grandstanding proclamation “Our Next Home.” Just a few days before the issue was to be printed, Petranek was called in to talk to someone from corporate.
The inquisitor had all of the pages of “Our Next Home” laid out in front of him, and Petranek worried that he was about to scuttle the whole thing.
Instead, he had a single question: “Could this possibly be true?”
Landing on Mars - and colonising it - isn’t merely possible. “This is going to happen,” Petranek declares.With Petranek’s 2015 book, “How We’ll Live on Mars,” his goal was to deliver a wake-up call that we’re on the verge of one of the most significant events in human history.
It also turned into the basis for a script for National Geographic’s “Mars,” which debuted last month. The following is based on a recent interview with Petranek; the transcript has been edited for clarity and length.
Q: How common are inaccuracies in most science fiction movies or TV shows?
A: I think they’re in almost all science fiction movies, even “The Martian,” which is based on really good science. There’s a lot that drives me nuts. A 300-mile-perhour windstorm isn’t going to almost kill you. In the atmosphere on Mars, it’ll hardly push against you at all. (In “The Martian,” the main character, played by Matt Damon, is somehow impaled by flying debris from such a storm.) But I’m very grateful for “The Martian.” Before the movie, I gave a TED Talk on Mars. This talk was greeted with nice, polite applause. People were not excited. Half of the people didn’t believe it could be true. Now we’re getting the message across that by 2050, there might be 50,000 people on Mars.
Q: Why has going to Mars seemed so impossible to the public?
A: Part of it is because we didn’t continue to be a space-exploring species after Apollo. There was no particularly good reason to go to the moon. We proved we could do it. Then we didn’t do anything after that. In the 1970s, scientist Wernher von Braun was running around the halls of Congress saying, “I can get humans on Mars.” For at least 30 years, we’ve had the technology. All we did was fly 135 space shuttle missions with nowhere to go. We built the International Space Station, but we weren’t significantly exploring space. People got bored. The only time people paid attention to the space shuttle is when it killed a whole crew. It was supposed to be cheap and reusable, but it cost US$1.4 billion every time it went up. We spent US$150 billion. If we had one-fourth of that money, we would have had a viable outpost on Mars, and we would have had it for a while. — Washington Post