When someone lives your dream…
You must wish them luck.
It was our 8th or 9th grade. 30 full years ago. We, the 4 boys, were a wild bunch in our class of 29; not in an entirely bad way — it was Soviet time, and a better school, too. We pulled pranks, made fools of ourselves occasionally, skipped classes and tried vodka in the backyard — that kind of stuff. We liked it this way and it helped me, in particular, fit in: I was a year younger than the rest and perhaps that was the reason my social skills lagged somewhat. That year we got lucky in our chem class: our replacement teacher was bright and open-minded. She was my neighbour, too — a single mother of two unruly boys. At one point she did the unusual thing, not something any teacher would ask for in the 1980-ies in the backwater Kazakhstan. She said we should break into groups and each do a project on the best way to manufacture iron, industrial scale.
I was nerdier than my three comrades (and more athletic, too, thanks to my mom’s insistence on sport regiment — not that it matters for the story but a reader today may get a wrong mental picture) with acute interest in space travel and a lesser one in chemistry, even subscribing to the popular chemical science magazine of the day. So, it came to me to offer ideas for the project.
To this day, I am proud of my suggestion and the entire reasoning process. First, I reasoned that the industrial production of iron truly hurts our planet. Anyone who saw the stacks of an ironworks can attest. Second, it is a finite resource. Third, it is simply not cool, not edgy enough. Boring. So, let’s work on it. We’ve been told that Mars is red due to its iron-rich dust, iron oxides, blowing in the thin cold wind (the full story, of course, is slightly more nuanced).
So, how about we send a recon mission, a satellite to find the richest sites with electromagnetic and gravitation equipment. Then we set up an unmanned enrichment factory. It does not need to be very efficient, just very-very large. Simple robots digging up ore and removing the tailings. The iron is to be enriched by bacteria — I’ve read recently about advances in this field. A factory will also have a breeding facility where harsh radiation and automated sampling will help breed new generations of little workers, ever more effective. Finally, a Sun-powered or an atomic smelter will make large slabs of iron, simultaneously releasing oxygen into the Martian atmosphere (you notice the hint at terraforming?). Those slabs will be catapulted outside of Mars orbit with explosions — the cheapest way to deliver heavy objects into Space — and intercepted somewhere near Earth to be guided into desert landing spots.
We made a huge A1 diagram of the entire process, with Earth in blue and green, and Mars in red, and blow-ups of the details — all with coloured pencils. None of us had any drawing talent, so it did require a lot of explanation in class. We were the last to present, after three other, exceedingly boring projects, all of which drew their (lack of) inspiration from the university schoolbooks or encyclopedia. Then our time came. I have to give it to my mates: they withstood the laughter and the mockery, solemnly standing by me, who exposed them to such insanity. We were appreciated by the teacher though, which I never have doubted, and earned our 5’s. I knew back then that I will grow to prove us right, and have our Earth a green sanctuary, not a smoking pile of messed up land.
As we stood, the third year of Perestroika was broiling in the country, the process that eventually made most of us squander our talents and education, and the entire country’s potential on things entirely inconsequential: surviving the onset of capitalism, making a few very bad people very rich, and driving our planet closer to the point of no return. Even today, in relative stability borne out of the oil boom and sheer luck, heavy machinery scrapes black topsoil in the orchards next to my home, to sell to the city to spread on poorly designed lawns to be washed away in a single season (someone is getting rich and “successful” in the process). And yet another set of tractors pulls away with a metal rope at hardy desert bushes, called saksaul, to provide hundreds of kebab stands with prized fuel and making the advance of the desert inevitable (someone earns their meager wage doing it).
But I harbor lots of hope. And I just stumbled upon this company’s website: Planetary Resources — they are going to use asteroids in outer space as resources for Earth and space missions — and instantly remembered what I and millions of children from my generation were supposed to be doing. I hope that I and all of my three kids will soon be involved in Space exploration or Earth betterment. That we escape the dead-end turn that we took, as humanity, perhaps by quickly learning to fly over the abyss ahead. And I wish I had kept that A1 roll of paper with our crude drawings. I’d send it as a gift to the folks at Planetary Resources and tell them to hurry: it has all been designed 30 years ago already, after all! *smile, wink*
