REAL LIFE ON MARS

Innovative series Mars, which melds a dramatic storyline with fascinating facts, reveals how humans could make a home on the red planet

You can’t breathe unaided and there are no living creatures or vegetation. It’s also much colder than any place on Earth. Yet we still plan to make life on Mars possible, and a groundbreaking show reveals exactly how.

Inspired by the NASA announcement that it would be sending humans to the red planet by the 2030s, the series Mars merges fact and fiction, combining a made-up drama about the first human Martians with documentary inserts revealing how it might actually happen.

The first series – billed by producers as ‘science fact’, not science fiction – aired in 2016 and was the most popular National Geographic show ever screened in Britain. It showed a group of astronauts as they battled to set up home there. It also featured real scientists, tycoon Elon Musk discussing how his SpaceX company plans to colonise Mars, and author Stephen Petranek whose book, How We’ll Live On Mars, inspired the series.

‘There are many factors which mean we’ll have to move to another planet,’ says Stephen. ‘Humanity has always been a nomadic species; nothing lasts forever.

‘If you accept that you can’t live on Earth forever then you realise that while we have the ability to create another outpost of humanity, we need to take it up.’

He says it is not impossible that millions of humans may one day live on Mars within the lifetimes of some of us.

‘ The biggest challenge would be warming the planet up as it can go down to -126ºC at night,’ he adds. ‘You could use something like a solar mirror and grow plants to thicken up the atmosphere and heat up the surface. The plan is that within 30 years you’d have running water, lakes and agriculture to grow your own food. Within 50 years the environ- ment would be like Canada’s – a little chilly, long winters, but acceptable.’

None of that is possible without huge investment and it’s the conflict between commercial interests and those of science that is the focus of the second series of Mars, which starts tomorrow.

It’s set five years on from the end of series one, with many of the pioneers from the original having spent a decade on the planet, with its haunting red skies that turn blue at sunrise and sunset. They form a colony called Olympus Town, led by Commander Hana Seung. Physician Amelie Durand longs to return to Earth, while her geochemist boyfriend Javier Delgado wants to stay.

The scientists, who also include geologist Dr Marta Kamen, are joined by astronauts and engineers from mining company Lukrum Industries, including macho Commander Kurt Hurrelle, who

has signed up to make a fortune to give his daughter a better life. Operations foreman Jen Carson’s loyalties are tested when she begins a relationship with someone from Olympus Town. The company is there to mine for water and starts drilling on the planet regardless of the warnings of the scientists.

‘They all have a lot to deal with,’ says South Korean actress Jihae, who plays Commander Seung. ‘They’re still getting to grips with living there, then people arrive to drill and potentially disrupt the planet. Lukrum aren’t necessarily baddies but they want different things. They must learn to help each other. The story shows that you can put humans on another planet and they’ll behave exactly the same as on Earth.’ Mars, tomorrow, 8pm, National Geographic Channel.