Living on Mars
I think about it almost too often, considering it won’t really happen in my lifetime. And that I certainly won’t be the volunteer.
There are lots of thoughts I have on future “space colonization” (horrific word) efforts. There are the labor issues. I want to write at those at length at some point. (It’s not today.) There’s the day-to-day work itself. Hard scrabble survival — especially among the first few waves. There’s the danger and the folly of the environment, and the reasons we want to go there in the first place.
I’m moving past there for the time, for a mental image I get more often.
It’s the mental image of a Mars colonist, trying to call home. As they talk to their family or partner, they wait. And wait. At a good time, the window between the two is three minutes to get a message to Earth. Three minutes to get it back. At its most distant, it’s 24 minutes — and that’s not worth simply waiting around for. There’s no way to FaceTime or Skype that isn’t awkward. The data transmission rates may not even be workable without the right infrastructure.
What will life be like with the strain of asynchronous communication?
Videos and photos become the old letters. Conversations draw on for hours, if they don’t simply have to be changed entirely to missives, dispatches. In some ways, it’s juxtaposing a telegraph era with the digital age.
Of course, maybe the people that went had no family they left behind at all.
But what would it feel like to have everything forever distant? The only synchronous conversations taking place in person. However many people are there. And those are colleagues, especially at first. Hermetically sealed, maybe underground, from an unimaginably harsh environment. And Mars, in the solar system, if we ever want to get out there is … the best we can do. Jupiter’s oceanic moons Europa and Ganymede bathed in deadly radiation. Inert Callisto the only really “safe” place. Saturn’s moons maybe — just maybe — “safer,” but even colder and farther away. Venus cloud cities more a Star Wars dream than a functional reality.
Right now, we live in our pods of isolation. Some of our contacts asynchronous, others readily available. We experience moments we can’t be there for in glimpses and dispatches. Visceral, real life experiences are largely forgotten for the sort of monotony of where we’re stuck for the next few months. The next year? How long are we in this mess? Does this mess ever end?
I’ve been feeling the pull of “How long are we in this?” of late. It’s exhausting to think of. There’s no way to get off-world. We’re on the Moon at least for now. Little delays. We have synchronous communication, but it’s almost like we’re dispatching to other locations that we can’t get to. Our in person encounters are more like EVAs — all the caution we can lest we somehow put ourselves in danger. There’s no “return mission” planned. We’re left to settle in our own little worlds with whatever factors we went into from the beginning.
Maybe it’s better to think of protecting ourselves as a scientific experiment. Because in some ways, all the precautions we take on survival are currently just that. The experiment in keeping ourselves alive and ourselves, and others, safe.
Links
The Sexist Legacy in Star Trek’s Progressive Universe (io9)
There Is No Plan (For You) (In These Times)
The Balletic Millennial Bedtimes of ‘Normal People’ (New York Review of Books) — I’ve seen this Lorrie Moore essay going around a lot. There’s lots to chew on with it, especially with regards to how it approaches my generation (though I’m at the Gen X / Millennial straddle.) Maybe it’s right. Maybe it’s wrong. Maybe it applies to our younger set. Maybe it’s a late boomer / early Gen X’r coming for us. It feels like there are a lot of generations malcontent with our generation. Just witness the Zoomers who seem to despise us. Maybe it’s just kicking us while we’re down. But at the least, I haven’t let the essay / review out of my mind — so here it is for you to read and have your own thoughts on.
1000 Musicians play Highway to Hell (AC/DC) (YouTube) — h/t my brother, who does not read this newsletter.
Al Capone’s Tax Returns (New Yorker) — My dear friend Karl cowrote this and it’s funny and you should read it.
John Waters on his 50+ year film career (GQ UK)
Science
We should make hydrogen fuel out of garbage. We’ve got lots of garbage. It has lots of hydrogen in it. Why not try to kick off the hydrogen fuel economy we’ve been dreaming of for decades out of mountains of trash?
Mental health
I was at a doctor’s appointment on Monday, a formality to get a referral (not one I was really happy to make.) The med students who saw me in the ancient clinic space measured my height — one inch taller than I thought, apparently — and took my weight, under 300 lbs. for the first time in years. They wanted me to get blood work as well. Who really wants to be in a doctor’s office these days, let alone a lab? I said I had just gotten blood work done “in the fall.”
I realized then that it’s July. “That was almost a year ago,” they said. And I said my common refrain: “Every day is the same.”
Didn’t start with the new therapist, because the referral hadn’t gone through in time.
I’m going to try Buspar for anxiety. My sleep has been strange, per usual.
Jams
I have relentlessly been playing two songs the past week or so and I don’t know why. Both eighties schmaltz.
“The Living Years” by Mike + the Mechanics and “Head Over Heels” by Tears for Fears. So welcome to my earworm week.