Twenty -seven years ago on Valentine’s Day, Voyager 1, a space probe launched in 1977 to explore the cosmos, sang its final swan song as it left the solar system at a speed of 40,000 mph. In its loving ‘goodbye,’ the spacecraft turned its camera Earthward to snap one final picture. We know this picture today as ‘Pale Blue Dot.’ Within the grainy frame are several of the sun’s rays in the form of colorful bands of pink and green and yellow. Situated within one prominent brownish band, about half -way down, is a blueish -white speck. It is hard to miss if you don’t look carefully. After all, the camera was about four billion miles away from it. ‘It,’ of course, is our home; Earth — “ On it, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever lived…the aggregate of all our joys and sufferings,” remarked the late Carl Sagan, who was not only one of the leading scientists on the mission but also a hopeless romantic.
Fast forward almost thirty years later and our thirst for interstellar travel remains unquenchable. Last Friday, Elon Musk, the flamboyant chief executive officer of SpaceX, announced at the International Astronautical Congress a new plan to send humans to explore and colonize Mars. This comes a year after a similar unveiling, albeit a more extravagant one, that included a sleek viral video featuring a group of humans boarding a streamlined, glass-topped BFR, or ‘Big Fucking Rocket,’ as the Muskians have come to call it. Now on board, the spacecraft launches from a beautifully sun-soaked Florida and into the upper atmosphere, where the reusable rocket booster — which has managed to land and then launch again for a cosmic rendezvous — gives it a much needed boost and propels it towards the red planet. On the way, the ship casts a winged array of solar -powered panels resembling those terrifying crests on a Dilophosaurus. A time-lapse of a rotating Mars later and you have yourself a new, illuminated home planet.
Musk’s new proposal is to send not one but four ships to Mars by 2024, with an initial launch five years from today. Funding, he suggested, will arrive from the funneling of all of his company’s current resources — a stock of other big fucking rockets that service the International Space Station — into the Martian program. That is in addition to, quite possibly, the millions of dollars of revenue from the hordes of people who will use those very same missiles for intercontinental travel — another project unveiled by Musk at the event. “If we’re building this thing to go to the Moon and Mars then why not go to other places on earth as well,” he said. A New York to Shanghai flight — time is calculated at thirty-nine minutes, with a maximum speed of 16,000 mph. The cost remains unknown, as are the levels of perspiration that will be emanating from the suits at the National Transportation Safety Board. But putting all of these logistical matters to the side, my main point of concern is as to how SpaceX is going about the process of picking out their ‘volunteer’ candidates, and what ethical and psychological issues will those astronauts come to face?
At first glance, the selection procedure seem arduous. On the Mars One site, a non-for-profit organization planning a similar mission, is a long list of the credentials and requirements necessary, some of which is having an A2 English level speaking proficiency and a “Can do!” attitude, in addition, of course, to normal blood pressure. Those who volunteer go through a four-round process of a résumé submission, general knowledge examinations, physical and mental exercises, and a final “isolation challenge.” Then, for the select few who are picked, there is a full -time, paid period of training consisting of all things technical and personal. The final lot of astronauts who have endured by then will go on to travel to Mars, spending about thirty weeks “in a very small space — much smaller than the home base at the settlement on Mars — devoid of luxury or frills, ” where “ showering with water will not be an option. ” The mission organizers concede that this will be difficult, but maintain, almost absurdly, that “ the astronauts will endure because this will be the flight carrying them to their dream.” Musk, for the record, proposes an eighty -day travel time and never mentions anything about showering with Wet Ones.
Nevertheless, this, funnily enough, reminds me of the British reality television series ‘Eden,’ whose social experiment was chronicled in a recent New Yorker article I happened to read. The show, which ran for only one season in the summer of 2016, placed a group of twenty-three individuals on a remote strip of the Scotland isle with a mission to, according to the show’s website , “build a new life and new society from scratch, isolated from the rest of the world.” But what was supposed to be a new rendition of ‘Survivor’ soon descended into chaos — something resembling the Stanford Prison Experiment — as some participants began to blatantly cheat while others chose to walk-out of the show entirely, prompting the show’s producers to rebrand the series to “Eden: Paradise Lost.” “A few of the cast members with specific tasks soon got a sense of how hard life in Eden was going to be,” the author, Sam Knight, noted in his article.
“Hunger stalked the first months in Eden. There were moments when it seemed as though the experiment was working,” wrote Knight, continuing, “But, surviving on meagre bowls of potatoes or barley, the participants soon fractured between those who felt that they were carrying the community and those who felt dominated as a result. A crude hierarchy formed, based mainly on physical strength…Group meetings did not go well…Arguments became constant…The cast members also relentlessl y exchanged rumors about one another…Eden came to feel increasingly lawless.” One cast member, who by the end of the show learned “that Britain and the United States had split more or less fifty-fifty over both Brexit and Trump…wondered whether the division within Eden had expressed something fundamental about the way that humans live together. ‘It seems to me just a natural number,’ he told me. ‘It is binary. You are either in one camp or the other. It is us and them. Things tribalize.’”
There is of course significant contrast between ‘Eden’ and the mission to Mars, but there is also a prospective degree of similarity in their fundamentals. The question dealt with, for both, is what implications does isolation have on the individual and on the community? I am sure that the prominent figures at both SpaceX and Mars One are pondering such questions, and one would imagine, and hope, that the “production” of a multi-billion dollar voyage to another planet is taken more seriously, and structured and planned out to a much more significant and intricate degree, than a television program on BBC Channel 4. But what I wish to point out with the ‘Eden’ example is that this is not merely science and numbers, and that people should not be analyzed by data and video interviews only. Moreover, we should not get carried away by clickbait headlines of a massive interstellar undertaking, which remains questionable in terms of engineering, when we still know very little about its implications.
Indeed with humans, and their so-called ‘nature,’ comes a level of unpredictability and uncertainty, especially in situations of isolation or stress. Tough decisions will have to be made. And although we have to come to know a lot over the years about our psychology, we remain ignorant as to how much strain our minds can endure; how long does it take until we ‘snap.’ Maybe, just as the producers of ‘Eden’ came to discover with their micro-experiment, we do not know what we are getting ourselves into with our desire to explore and inhabit regions beyond the realms of our pale-blue dot. Maybe we should first learn how to appreciate one another (not that that’s easily achievable) and to appreciate the planet we call home.
Yes, we are explorers and wonderers and we do have a future in space. Studying what is ‘out there’ helps inform, protect, and better our understanding of what we have here, on that “mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam.” For Sagan, as it should be for the rest of us, “there is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly and compassionately with one another and to preserve and cherish that pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.”
