This man wants to be a Martian
Is there life on Mars? Ryan MacDonald hopes to move there to find out.
The British student, currently visiting Christchurch, has reached the final 100 candidates for the Mars One project that aims to set up a permanent human colony on the red planet.
More than 200,000 people applied for a place on the $6 billion mission, which the Dutch nonprofit organisers plan to film for a reality television series.
If everything goes to plan, 22-year-old MacDonald will take a ‘‘one-way trip’’ to Mars in 2026.
When he tells people he’s leaving Earth, their most common reaction, MacDonald said, was: ‘‘Why?’’
‘‘I can’t in good conscience just sit here on Earth in comfort but only making a minimal contribution to science if I knew I could make a larger contribution by going to Mars,’’ he said while on holiday in Lyttelton. The scientist working on his PhD in astrophysics said he was fascinated by the question of whether there might be life on other planets.
‘‘I’m also interested in the idea that this is a chance to establish a whole new civilisation on another planet.’’
The mission would see him realise a ‘‘lifelong dream’’ to be an astronaut. But he had a wider vision to leave a lasting legacy for those he leaves behind on Earth.
‘‘If we can manage to build a better society on Mars, maybe that can inspire young people back on Earth to want to become scientists when they grow up instead of superstars or models.’’
He admitted there was a personal cost.
‘‘If I have to give up the chance to have my own family in order that all of the famlies back here on Earth have a better quality of life, then yeah, that seems a sensible decision to make.’’
Training for the mission will take 12 years.
‘‘The chief medical officer at Mars One said to me ‘life on Mars will be a paradise compared to what I’m going to put you through’.’’
Optimistically, he said that in around a decade from now, he hoped to be living in a pod on Mars, munching on insects – ‘‘protein’’ – and hydroponically grown produce.
He would take with him a photo of his family, an e-reader and a few personal effects as reminders of what his life was like on Earth.
‘‘I have written a science fiction novel, I’d take that too. Hopefully it would inspire me to write one of the first books written on Mars.’’
Things about Earth he would miss, he said, was feeling the wind in his hair and ‘‘being able to breathe without dying’’.
For around the next decade or so, MacDonald would remain single.
‘‘You can’t exactly go into a relationship and say ‘by the way, I’m going to Mars’. You have to look at the bigger picture.
‘‘It doesn’t matter about your happiness as an individual, because you expire at a certain point. It matters what you leave behind.’’
If, against self-imposed probability, he did fall in love, would he stay on Earth?
‘‘As a scientist you should always be willing to change your mind as new evidence comes to light.’’