Published in the Sept. 30 – Oct. 13, 2015 issue of Morgan Hill Life
By Marty Cheek
Marty Cheek
Photo courtesy 20th Century Fox
Could scientists someday create robotic exploration drones with artificial intelligence to study the Martian world?
The movie “The Martian” will be coming to Morgan Hill’s CineLux Friday and I can’t wait to see this space sci-fi adventure starring Matt Damon as an astronaut accidentally stranded on the planet Mars. I’ve been fascinated by the solar system’s fourth planet ever since I learned as a boy that my name means “warrior of Mars” (although I later realized it was referring to the Roman god and not the Red Planet).
Reading Ray Bradbury’s Martian Chronicles short stories got me imagining what it might be like to voyage the sea of space to eventually land on the sands of Mars and explore the terrain. That author had Martians interacting with human settlers, something highly improbable in real life – but that doesn’t mean Mars won’t be any less fascinating to future colonists.
Half a century ago, Mars was a mysterious world viewed through telescopes by astronomers who thought the lines on it were canals. But with the flyby by the Mariner 4 spacecraft in 1965, humanity got its first close-up look with 22 photos showing a cratered and canyoned Martian surface. That sneak peek led to a series of Soviet and American orbiters, landers and rovers that have taught us much about the planet’s geology and formation history. NASA scientists have concluded it is highly likely that billions of years ago extensive oceans once covered the planet for a few hundred million years, almost certainly containing organic material from comets. Who knows if one day we might find fossil evidence of micro-organisms that evolved in those ocean waters. That kind of discovery would imply life is not a fluke on Earth but most likely exists on many other worlds.
The movie “The Martian” takes a look at what it would require for human life to survive in the harsh environment of Mars, a place where the temperature can get as low as -100 degrees Celsius (far colder than Antarctica). Although there is an atmosphere, it’s extremely thin so explorers on an expedition would require space suits. Humans visiting Mars would also be exposed to radiation because Mars, unlike the Earth, has no protection from the solar rays bombardment.
Then there’s the psychology of living on Mars for a long period of time if humans establish a colony or Martian base. The Apollo missions to the Moon were relatively quick jaunts — missions of about 10 days from start to finish. A Martian mission could take as much as one to two years depending on the length of the round-trip journey and how long astronauts stay. Some people have even suggested the possibility of making a mission to Mars a one-way journey in order to cut costs, with the explorers having the fate of living the rest of their lives away from Earth. Although no doubt there would be people who would line up for the trip, the ethics make such a suicide-in-the-service-of-science mission unlikely.
NASA is working on a manned trip to Mars, possibly by the year 2035. The cost for the adventure would be incredibly expensive. NASA estimates the figure at about $100 billion over 30 or 40 years, but that projection might be optimistic. The International Space Station was initially anticipated to cost $10 billion over 10 years — it ended up costing 10 times that amount, and took nearly three decades to assemble.
Perhaps there’s a cheaper way for humans to explore Mars, one that will stimulate innovation in two industries and allow potentially millions of people to join the journey. The pioneering fields of robotics and virtual reality are forecast to grow exponentially in the coming decades. Perhaps the billions that NASA might spend on manned missions to Mars would be better spent on creating robotic exploration drones with artificial intelligence that spend their mechanical lives studying Mars. And virtual reality will become so sophisticated over the next decade or two that NASA will have the capability to send a moving rig to Mars and map the terrain in high-definition 3-D, sending the data back to Earth where people in VR studios can “walk” the sands of Mars and explore the planet in safety.
Similar to how the Apollo missions stimulated new industries in the 1960s and 1970s that resulted in innovation and economic bounty for America, advanced robotics and virtual reality exploration of Mars could bring in a new wave of technology for the world.
One reason to send humans to Mars is for the wow-factor — the drama of people setting foot on the surface. But, as we learned with Apollo, the wow-factor is short lived and the public’s attention moves on to other interests besides astronauts who might be on Mars — unless, of course, those astronauts are in a life-and-death situation, much like Matt Damon in the movie “The Martian.”
