SAVING FACE
Could humanity’s salvation lie on Mars’s rocky exterior?
In 1976, Mars was back in the news once again, courtesy of the Nasa Viking 1 mission’s ‘discovery’ of what appeared to be an enormous human head, nearly two miles long, on the surface of the planet. Although refined imaging showed the ‘face’ to be nothing more than a cluster of rocks, with each new advance, Mars became more approachable.
Recent films and books, such as the 2015 movie The Martian, based on a 2011 book by Andy Weir, treat the challenge of Mars not as that of a god of war but a hostile environment that can be overcome by human tenacity and science. The film sees astronaut Mark Watney stranded on Mars and forced to find a way to survive until a rescue mission can be sent.
But future expeditions to Mars might not be confined to fiction. Back in the real world, the Mars One organisation aims to have landed humans on the planet by 2032, with the purpose of creating “a second home for humanity”.
Elon Musk, founder and owner of SpaceX – which develops rockets and sells launch services to fund efforts to reach and inhabit Mars – has declared: “The future of humanity is going to bifurcate in two directions: either it’s going to become multiplanetary, or it’s going to remain confined to one planet and eventually there’s going to be an extinction event.”
We may develop the technology to explore Mars’s environment; we may not. Either way, there’s little doubt that we’ve long viewed the planet through the prism of our own environment here on Earth.
DISCOVER MORE
RADIO
Radio 4’s Martians festival gets under way in March. For more details, turn to page 75 MAGAZINE The March issue of BBC Focus Magazine will be exploring plans to upgrade the human body for the colonisation of space. For more details, go to sciencefocus.com