I’m planning to move to Mars, whatever the dangers might be
Dear Elon Musk, I hope you don’t mind me contacting you out of the blue. I read that you’re looking for people willing to endure significant risk of death in order to establish a Mars colony as species-wide insurance against a third world war. “There’s not many people who will want to go in the beginning,” you told a conference in Texas this week. Being from the UK, where certain events involving a lethal nerve agent and a car park ticket machine have prompted me to consider the prospect of global cataclysm more seriously than usual, I would like, as humbly as I can, to offer myself.
Why would I say such a thing? It’s not that I’m tired of life on Earth. I would dearly miss its waterfalls, wine bars and welloxygenated atmosphere. But for me Mars has attractions that would more than compensate for exile.
As it happens I do think I have qualities that would make me a good fit for your mission. I am phlegmatic by nature (note to medical staff: this means I am calm, not persistently coughing up goo), and have extensive knowledge of word and card games to pass the Martian nights. My journalistic training means I can diarise our colony’s growing pains in text, video and Snapchat, while my political insight would assist us in drafting a declaration of independence and a Martian constitution should events require one.
Ultimately, though, I don’t think my skills are the most important thing. Water filtration, orbital trajectory calculation and robotic rover tele-operation can all be taught. What really matters is surely my passion for the project. Here, I hope, is where I excel.
There are nearly seven billion people on this planet, and while most of them are very nice it does make it hard to stand out. No human being now alive can achieve prominence or excellence in every field. You have to pick your corner, and our corners are increasingly tight: the world’s best grime musician; the world’s best integrative therapist specialising in Rogerian analysis; the world’s best dog-walker between the age of 26 and 39. Any human being on Mars, on the other hand, is unquestionably engaged in work of acute importance. Your place in history, and your significance to the species, is unimpeachable.
Got another passion? You can still pursue it. You can take an online course or study the poetry of Anne Finch. Yet you won’t worry about being the best at it: you’re already on Mars, so in every other field you’d be content to be a dabbler. Most of us go through life in search of a purpose – something to say when God asks us what we lived for. For the certainty of knowing what that was, I would cheerfully take up a quite menial job of the kind you suggested in Texas: space bartender, Martian pizza cook, interplanetary janitor.
Ironically, being on Mars, with no serious magnetic field and only a whisper of atmosphere between me and the void, would put me closer than most people to the truth: that nothing really matters because eventually there will be nobody left for it to matter to; that over a long enough timescale the survival of humanity’s descendants, let alone anyone or anything we would recognise as “human”, becomes almost unthinkable; that we might be better off following Candide’s advice and tending our gardens rather than digging them up and porting them out to a geodesic biodome on the seventh moon of Jupiter. But these are philosophical niceties I’d be happy to contemplate in 62 per cent of Earth’s gravity and 276 times its average annual radiation dose.
A swift response would be appreciated.