So, you want to move to Mars?

BRIMFUL WITH IDEAS: DOCTOR IN PHYSICS WILL SOON BE LIVING ON THE RED PLANET Mining the asteroids may be the next great frontier for investors, says Adriana Marais, the only South African selected for the Mars One expedition.

Dr Adriana Marais is not your typical extraterrestrial. For that matter, she’s not even your typical earthling. With a doctorate in theoretical physics, a passion for jazz and a lifelong love of reading, she sparkles with enthusiasm. Most of that energy is devoted to her pet topic: why a human colony on a distant planet is not just a good idea, but an essential one.

Adriana is the only South African selected for the Mars One project to establish a permanent human colony on Mars in the next decade. The catch: they can never come back.

Yet, the organisers claim 200 000 people applied. Just over 1 000 made it to a second-round pool and 100 finalists were announced in February 2016.

In September last year, six teams comprising two men and two women each were selected – and one member is from South Africa.

Many people have questioned whether the project is possible.

“That’s the point of dreams: the dreamers have a belief in themselves that propels dreams into reality,” Marais said in an interview this week.

“As Nelson Mandela said, something is always impossible until it is done.

“The American announcement that it would put people on the moon was an impossible dream, but it was achieved in eight years.

“Team size and budget and determination made it happen. We’re in a similar position. I think it will happen. Unless we self-destruct as a species before then, we will be a species living off Earth in a few decades,” said Marais.

The question Adriana is asked most often is not an engineering one about space travel, but a psychological one: how will she cope with the desolation of potentially being one of only 24 human beings on an entire planet, for the rest of her life? She jokes at first: “I’ll finally have some peace and quiet, and have time to read, which I’ve loved to do since I was a child.

“Seriously, any price you’d need to pay to be one of the first members of a new society on a new planet would be worth it.

“I’m very lucky to have been born in this very narrow window of human existence, of life on Earth. These few decades are the most unique in the history of the planet,” she said.

Meanwhile, she is likely to be kept busy for some of the 10 years that have been scheduled for training the astronauts.

Far from leaving everything behind, Adriana’s selection for the project kick-started a new career. The enterprise software company SAP, which runs 15 Co-innovation Labs across the world, approached her to run the South African facility. She was appointed head of innovation at SAP Africa, where her duties include driving strategic co-innovation projects and taking responsibility for the SAP start-up focus programme, which provides small and medium enterprises with digital solutions to help accelerate growth.

At this week’s Saphila 2017 SAP user conference in Sun City, Marais teamed up with a mining software specialist to present her perspective on a topic as visionary as a colony on Mars: mining the asteroids.

“I believe mining resources from asteroids is a more ethical way of mining than disrupting unique ecosystems on Earth, which is teeming with life. And there are far more metals in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter than have ever been detected on planet Earth, or on these bodies floating in space that not having life on them, waiting to be harvested.”

She gives the example of the asteroid Anteros, a 2km-diameter lump of rock that is so packed with rare minerals, it has been valued at $5.57-trillion. A methodology has already been developed for asteroid mining, going by the acronym Sheperd. Adriana enthuses about the engineering innovations that will make the mission profitable.

“While bringing the samples back to Earth, you can already

start mining, using electroforming, which uses gases to differentiate metals from volatiles, which rn off so that you can collect metals. As you’re electroforming, you’re doing spectral analysis he particles flying off. If at any nt you find that the metals acumulating are not of sufficient ue, you can abort the mission. It provides real time profit analysis.”