Danger! Will Robinson. Danger!

By DAVID KITTREDGE
People have been standing in line champing at the bit to get to the planet Mars. I have read where a reported 200,000 souls signed up for the one-way trip. I know of a few people I would like to send to Mars, but that would probably entail another whole column so it will have wait. 

I cannot imagine volunteering for a 200-day journey in space to an inhospitable, parched, and hopefully lifeless planet. I say and pray hopefully lifeless because the main point in the voyage would be to discover a new life form of some type. If something were to be found it would probably be in the form of a micro-organism and it would probably be infectious and it could then possibly morph our diligent human pioneers into some new form of life and then the carnival begins. The next thing you know, our Marstronauts could end up resembling crinkled up leaf litter bags and I would be saying “I told you so.” 

If people are so inclined to explore a lifeless vast and arid land why not drop them off in the middle of the Gobi Desert. At least they would have a better chance of survival there. Others have crossed the Gobi and managed to survive as in the autobiographical book “The Long Walk”, by Slavomir Rawicz. (A very good book, regardless of the unimpressive title.) There isn’t much chance of finding water there either, but you might run into some Mongolian tribesmen with some fermented mare’s milk or some yak butter tea to spare. These probably don’t seem all that palatable, but I bet you wouldn’t find better on Mars.

Apparently our voyagers to the Red Planet will be bringing their own food with them, which hypothetically would be cyanobacteria, essential a blue-green algae found on Earth in a number of different environs, mainly in ponds in the form of scum. Sounds scrumptious! And since this is probably all that would be available until viable greenhouse gardens could be cultivated it would become an extremely tedious diet. Maybe you could opt for green algae on one day and blue-algae the next just to help break up the monotony. Of course there is always the possibility of this food source being contaminated with some Martian toxin to again morph into some other unknown life form and here we go again plummeting into another science fiction movie plot.

A few other problems exist for our pioneers to the little red ball in space, such as the almost total lack of oxygen in the atmosphere, which has it’s obvious drawbacks. The planet is only about two thirds the size of earth, which means our inter-planetary explorers would encounter microgravity, which would come in handy when first landing on the planet, just in case the crew were joyous enough to do cartwheels upon landing, they could do so with ease. But unfortunately long exposure to microgravity leads to bone loss and muscle atrophy. Another drawback to living on the red orb would be severe radiation risks from the Sun of which no amount of Coppertone is going to help. They would have a massive sunburn and again would probably end up looking like a crinkled up leaf litter bag, just a different color of leaf litter bag.

Other concerns involving a trip to Mars or any other destination in space is forward contamination and back contamination. Forward contamination could occur with our presence on a foreign planet. We humans carry a hundred trillion micro-organisms on and in our bodies. These could be introduced into the new ecosystem accidentally with interesting outcomes. Or our Martian voyagers could cause back contamination by returning to Earth with some unknown entity, if a return flight were mechanically possible.

If Mars were to be successfully colonized an economic system would be necessary with goods being traded. The planet would be mined for precious ores and minerals which would be sent back to Earth. In return Mars is going to need manure to be able to grow food because the soil there is lifeless, so we would have to send spaceship load upon spaceship load of manure to our extra-planetary brethren.

If I were a contractor, in charge of sending loads of manure into space I would start in Washington, D.C., there is plenty being thrown around there. These missions could also serve my aforementioned idea of sending certain undesirables to Mars, including a few politicians to oversee and manage the manure distribution on their new planet. Experience should count for something.

As it happens, on Monday, Nov. 26 a planetary probe known as Mars Insight is going to land on the planet Mars. The hope is that the probe will drill into the surface far enough to be able to find water in liquid form along with other scientific data. I quote the robot from the 1960s TV show “Lost in Space”, “Warning, warning!” as it waved its arms frantically or maybe better yet, “Danger, Will Robinson!”