MainlyMartian

One-way to Mars = no way to Mars

The one-way-to-Mars idea has been around a long time, and as someone who ended his book on Mars with a section on the various ways in which making the voyage to that particular "other world" could be seen as chiming with the idea of making the voyage to the undoscover'd country of death I have a sense of why it might appeal. But even when it is championed by someone as smart as my friend Paul Davies, as is the case in today's Guardian, it is still a silly idea. Here are extracts from Paul's article with my comments

I am not talking about a suicide mission. With its protective atmosphere, accessible water and carbon dioxide, and significant amounts of methane, Mars is one of the few places in the solar system that could support a human colony. By eliminating the need to transport heavy fuel and equipment for the return journey, costs could be slashed by 80% or more.

Well you can make do without a return vehicle, sure. At the same time, you have to take or pre-position four years of supplies if you are to keep a straight face about it "not talking about a suicide mission" -- two years to take you to the next resupply mission and two years to deal with the possibility that that resupply mission might fail. You have to take either more shelter or more tools for building  shelter. You have to take a long term power supply -- either a lot more photovoltaics than a short-term mission needs or a nuclear reactor. Again, if you are to say "not a suicide mission" with a straight face, back-ups for everything. And you still need to design a wholly new, large capacity entry descent and Landing system, which is a big challenge, and sort out how to stay ready-to-explore healthy on the trip out. The idea that leaving out just the return vehicle could in itself reduce costs by 80% seems extremely farfetched -- even more so when your plan includes prepositioning the supplies and food. Why not preposition the return vehicle too, a la Mars Direct? Would that really increase the costs fourfold?

Most importantly, in terms of costs, there's the ongoing commitment. A set of Mars missions you can cancel is a much more attractive than a set of Mars missions that you cannot cancel without killing people ("Launch the next rocket or the kid gets it"). To fund a single one way to Mars mission is more or less to sign up to funding them for as long as the colony lasts. That is a far larger spending commitment than required for a small number of return trips.

(Minor aside: no-one cares more about methane on Mars than I do: but does it really make Mars more habitable?)

After a century or two, the colony could become self-sustaining.

This carries a whiff of the idea that the colonisation is being done by underpants gnomes (not a bad idea: they'd use up fewer expendables), with "profit" in the archetypal UG business plan replaced by "self-sustainability". How and why should we believe that the colony would become self sustaining? And how much extra investment would that take? It is worth noting that Antarctic colonies, 50 years on, are not self sustaining. And Mars is a lot tougher. Not saying it couldn't be done -- but it doesn't sound cheap. You have to keep resupplying for a century at least, probably at an increasing rate for much of that time. If aiming for self sustainability were a useful goal in such circumstances, we would be trying to make McMurdo self sustaining. We're not.

And that's before we get to the pregancies. No one at present has any idea of what it might take to carry a child to term under Martian gravity, or whether a non-engineered human can actually do such a thing successfully. That's a pretty big known unknown to sweep under the table. Is the plan for people just to get pregant and see what happens?

A permanent base on Mars would have a number of advantages beyond being a bonanza for planetary science and geology. If, as some evidence suggests, exotic micro-organisms have arisen independently of terrestrial life, studying them could revolutionise biology, medicine and biotechnology.

Yes, it might -- if the colony has the capacity to get them out from the depths at which they probably live (ir heavy duty mining equipment). But the colony would also fatally compromise any possibility of making the research biologically reversible, which carries a strong environmental penalty over and above the fact that the contamination involved might make all that science a little hard to do.

Mars would also provide an excellent forward base for exploring and mining the asteroid belt, and developing whole new industries.

I accept that arguing from science fiction is not ideal, but bear in mind the early Larry Niven stories in which Mars is an unexplored backwater largely because asteroid miners see no reason to ever descend into a gravity well. If asteroid mining ever makes sense, wouldn't it make most sense to target near-earth asteroids, of which there are plenty, rather than main belt asteroids? (Also, I suspect that in terms of travel time rather than delta v the average main belt asteroid is not that much easier to get to from Mars than from Earth, but I may be wrong)

A self-sustaining Mars colony would serve as a "lifeboat" in the event of a global catastrophe on Earth. In coming centuries, our civilisation faces small but persistent threats from comet and asteroid impacts, world wars, global pandemics and climatic upheavals, any of which could wipe out all humanity.

Really? All humanity? A cataclysm that would mean that the earth bound survivors were fewer in number than a colony on Mars suggests to me either an extraordinarily thorough-going cataclysm or a really large colony on Mars, and neither of those seems very likely. Certainly seems beyond the power of war or disease, and I'm not sure even Chicxulub could do it (New Zealand flora were not hugely affected by the K/T event). Also note that having detoured through the Mars-as-a-trading-partner idea, we have now returned to the Mars as self-sufficient outpost idea -- a Mars robust enough to have all links severed is a Mars less reliant on earth than the Greenland colonies were on Iceland and Scandinavia. (Also, there's a philosophical point here: if all but a handful are dead, does the continuation of the culture as an idea really matter? Is it that much more than its instantiation? And does the answer to this change if the genocide was self inflicted?)

Perhaps the best motivation for going to Mars is political. It is obvious that no single nation currently has either the will or the resources to do it alone, but a consortium of nations and space agencies could achieve it within 20 years. A worldwide project to create a second home for humankind elsewhere in the solar system would be the greatest adventure our species has embarked upon since walking out of Africa 100,000 years ago, and provide a unifying influence unparalleled in history.

Leaving aside that our species didn't walk out of Africa (a few did, a lot stayed), the symbolism here is terrible. While Paul is definite that this would not be a suicide mission, it would involve a great deal of death and a high risk of total failure (especially if being done on the cheap). As Paul says, there will be "reduced life expectancy due to radiation, lack of advanced medical resources" as well as a very high risk environment: as Greg Benford once put it to me "Like the moon, but with worse weather". I was going to write at this point that human sacrifice is not an acceptable instrument of policy, and then realised that of course it is. But in such a blatant form I can't see it flying. The fact that there are plenty of people who might volunteer, as Paul rightly says, does not mean that it would be right to indulge them.

And what if they live? They do so because of unparalleled spending. A world where a select few gets hundreds of millions, at the very least, invested annually merely to keep them alive while equally deserving people die in large numbers for want of far less is not a very attractive place.

Human Mars exploration is indeed a fine goal, and it is quite possible that fairly early on there will be some who elect to stay. But the only real argument for doing it sooner or rather than later is the selfish one of wanting to see/participate in it personally. I can appreciate that, but I don't think it's a compelling policy point. There are a lot of other big exciting projects to inspire us -- a new energy infrastructure for the world, the millennium development goals, in pure science the development of telescopes for characterising the atmospheres and possible biospheres of exoplanets.

There is something poetic about the notion of death on Mars, or of choosing to die there -- Clarke's Transit of Earth caught that nicely. But Liebestod is not a good basis for public policy.

(This post doesn't mark any long term intention to start blogging here again in a serious way; I am in fact somewhat surprised to find myself putting it up, since there has been so much good stuff about Mars I haven't blogged. I guess I felt I had something to say. More frequent, less Martian blogging can now be found over at Heliophage.)

Eating the Sun and Heliophage

Just an update, in part because this is a page to which Google likes to send people who are looking for Oliver Morton.

Big news: Eating the Sun, my book about photosynthesis, has just been published in the UK.

You can read a little about it in this post on my other blog, Heliophage.

Heliophage is not, I fear ever going to have the sort of care and attention I gave this blog during its glory days of Beagle 2 and the Martian methane, but I do intend to keep it going with any news about the book, reviews of the book, or ideas relevant to the book that I can find time to blog about. (Since its the contention of the book that more or less everything is relevant to photosynthesis in some way or other, it's the time not the ideas that will be the limiting factor there.)

Rather pleasingly, in its first week Eating the Sun was named as one of the ten best nature books by The Independent. They didn't supply the list online, so I did so in this post (10 best nature books)

Eating the Sun is to date available only in the UK; the US edition is not expected until next year. But Amazon.co.uk, who do the best price I've seen so far, will undoubtedly ship it should anyone beyond these shores want an early copy.

On other matters. I'm still Chief News and Features Editor at Nature, and can be found now and then on Nature's Climate Feedback blog, and also very now and then on its new Great Beyond blog. I'm meant to also appear occasionally on First Drafts, the blog run by Prospect, but don't hold your breath.

As mentioned before, when I was explaining the silence on MainlyMartian, if you're a friend, associate or indeed enemy who has lost track of me, perhaps due to the interruption of my abq email address, you can reach me via gmail as oemorton, or at nature.com as o.morton.

We now return to our usual lack of programming

(originally published August 25 2007, republished July 5 2008)

Phoenix descending -- and caught in the act!

This really is an extraordinary picture (though Typepad seems to be trying to hide that fact: click on it for better resolution). It's Phoenix on its way down, caught from orbit by the Mars Reconnaisance Orbiter's  HiRISE camera, parachute deployed, shrounds taut, swiningin down like a gnat in a spotlight. (Also a salutary reminder that the surface of Mars, being basalt, is really really dark; this is not a night shot).

As I said way back here there's something truly remarkable about one spacecraft seen from another. Since then HiRISE has given us a bunch of shots of the MER landers (and indeed the Malin MOC did so before it). But this shot of a spacecraft in transit caught by another hundreds of kilometres away moving at a realtive velocity of thousands of kilometres an hour -- and the knowledge it implies of how well the people involved understand the precise positions and orientations of their minions half way across the sky -- is really something else.

Wow.

Eric at Nature's In the Field has more, on that picture and on everything else Phoenician.

UPDATE: BBC Radio Three just asked me to go on their Nightwaves slot and talk about Mars and images of Mars on the back of the Phoenix pictures. I did, and anyone who wants to hear it should use the BBC listen-again service. (Link will rot in a week). I would guess I'm on somewhere around the 25 minute mark can download some sort of best-of podcast, where it appears in roughly the last third.

Phoenix descending

Having witnessed two Mars lander failures, Mars Polar Lander before this blog was even born and Beagle-2 back when it was young and active (Landing and prelanding in the December 2003 archive, and the whole sad story in the Beagle-2 archive), and having been absent for all the other attempts that have proved successful, it seemed to me only prudent not to cover the landing of Phoenix this weekend (and, yes, the fact that Pete Smith has bribed me heavily not to bring my big dead martian albatross anywhere near his nice shiny mission does play a role in this...).

However my excellent colleague Eric Hand is taking up the challenge -- he's down in Tucson now, embedding himself with Pete's science team, and will be blogging at Nature's In the Field blog. So if this post turns up unexpectedly in your RSS feed (I can't believe anyone looks at a blog this defunct) I advise you to  turn your attention to what he has to say...

Oh yes: for more on what it was like to cover the loss of Mars Polar Lander, debates over where to send the spacecraft which eventually became  Phoenix, and a few apercus from Pete Smith, and the significance of ice on Mars you could do worse than turn to Mapping Mars, now invitingly cheap at Amazon US and not that much pricier at Amazon UK

Global warming across the solar system

There's a nice new paper in Nature by some NASA Ames and USGS people (including Bob Haberle, who used to have a sign saying "Commander of the Solar System" taped to his office door) on the link between climate and albedo on Mars. As my colleague Katharine Sanderson reports, they found that warming of darker patches creates winds that move the lighter dust around so that the darker patches grow and get warmer still -- a nice positive feedback that is presumably reset by global dust storms and the like.

This provoked me to a little venting on the Nature website about the absurd climate skeptic riff that there's warming going on all over the solar system and that since the thing all the warming places have in common is the sun that must be the cause.

My conclusion:

What's saddening is that people should miss what these various phenomena really have in common — their explicability. They show that our ideas of atmospheric physics are applicable and useful on bodies that range from the tiny (Pluto, the atmosphere of which is hardly worth mentioning) to the gigantic (Jupiter, the atmosphere of which outweighs a hundred solid Earths). And computer models based on the ones used to study the climate on Earth provide results even when applied to the hugely different conditions on Mars. That is truly impressive.

So what these disparate observations actually tell us is that the scientific community — the scientific community that enjoys a firm consensus on the causes of Earthly climatic change — has a fairly impressive grasp of the fundamentals of how weather works elsewhere, as well. It's a rather inspiring insight. But it is not the lesson that climate sceptics want their readers to learn.

It would be remiss of me...

... on this, Spirit's 1000th sol, not to point you towards this.

The Pluto controversy

Just to say that my magnificent Nature colleague Jenny Hogan is blogging the IAU's decision on Pluto's planetdom, or lack of it, more or less live here. I'm all for the planetinos myself.

Update: Pluto is out!

Mainly Marc

This is really a placeholder post to tell people that:

1) This is still Oliver Morton's blog, but is currently being used very rarely and fitfully. It is still in principle devoted to matters martian, but for the time being I'm not updating. The set of posts on methane on Mars can be found here, and observations on the life and death of Beagle 2 can be found here. The big wodge of stuff on synthetic biology from May 2006 is here because of a snafu that stopped me blogging live to the Nature Newsblog over the relevant weekend. It is of little or no planetary science value, though interesting in other ways.

2) If you're a friend, associate or indeed enemy who has lost track of me, perhaps due to the interruption of my abq email address, you can reach me via gmail as oemorton, or at nature.com as o.morton.

3) The Marc made by the Domaine Ott is I think the best truly strong (>50%) liquor I have ever drunk. Or at least it seemed so on Sunday night.

Synthetic Biology 2.0: Nature product

I meant to do a wrap-up post, but travel and poor connectivity intervened. Rob Carlson had a last post on the conference that I found intriguing, but  I will content myself by pointing to Erika Check's news report on the meeting in Nature, and an editorial that accompanied it. Here's the nub of the argument:

Self-governance need not and should not be exclusive — it does not preclude other forms of governance, any more than the possession of conscience makes redundant the strictures of law. It is hard not to suspect that the problem with self-governance from the point of view of the letter-writers is that it could go some way to addressing potential problems that would make good campaigning issues.

The ability of human societies to modify and transform biological systems will increase more in this century than it has in the hundred centuries since the dawn of agriculture, regardless of whether the transformation unfolds under the rubric of 'synthetic biology'. Or, at least, we must hope that it will — as the only credible alternative is a future in which massive social upheaval, armed conflict or natural disaster halts the progress of scientific knowledge. The challenge is to foster a matching, or at least sufficient, increase in the wisdom and accountability with which these abilities are used.

That challenge will require changes in the law and customs, in ideology and theology, and in education and economics. No scientific community can be expected to shoulder all that on its own, and nor should it. Scientists who are alive to the possibilities of change, anxious to keep their house in order and be seen to be doing so, and keen to discuss the issues with the world, are part of the solution, not part of the problem.

Update: I'm informed by the excellent Kevin Costa that the webcast of the SB2.0 talks is now archived for online viewing here, and will soon be added to Google Video for podcasting. The community declaration, which is still a work in progress as of June 13th,  can be viewed here.

Synthetic Biology 2.0: More bloggers

Crossposted from the Nature Newsblog; to comment, please use the version there.

Alex Mallet, from Drew Endy's lab, gives his take on the whole meeting here. And a student at Davidson college has lots of entries summarising specific talks on cis-action. In the long run, I expect the easiest way to browse them will be on the May archive.

Four active bloggers at a small biology meeting: the shape of things to come? or an outlier produced by an over-representation of geekiness in this very specific field?