[Image: An incredible shot of Mt. Sharp on Mars, via NASA].
Science writer Lee Billings has an interesting new article up at Scientific American about the quest to identify future landing sites on Mars.
Having recently attended an event in Houston dedicated to the topic of how humans might colonize the Red Planet—and, more specifically, where exactly they will land—Billings describes scenes that seem to resemble a tabletop role-playing game crossed with a good old-fashioned land grab:
In the sunlit rotunda outside the Lunar and Planetary Institute’s auditorium they had placed permanent markers and two glossy, oversize maps of Mars on foldout tables. Each participant autographed the maps, as if a delegate signing an interplanetary Declaration of Independence, usually marking the site where he or she hoped humans would go first. Before long both maps accumulated thick clusters of signatures marking 45 potential “Exploration Zones,” or EZs. Each EZ was a circle 200 kilometers wide, equaling an area nearly 20 times larger than the sprawling city of Houston.
These “Exploration Zones” marked target sites of potential human settlement and exploration—as well as, by implication, others places where humans might never go at all. “Among the signatures scattered on the map,” Billings writes, “there were voids conspicuously light on scrawls—places where no human would tread anytime soon, if ever.”
While this has the potential to remain entirely abstract—determining where humans may or may not someday settle on a world they may or may not ever even visit—there are some moments of evocative specificity.
Those include one participant’s vision of future human geologists chipping and scraping away at the walls of a colossal Martian landform called Valles Marineris, revealing “interior layer deposits, ancient bedrock, ancient lake deposits, sand dunes, landslides,” and uncovering traces of what Billings calls “a former, warmer, wetter world, and perhaps even learn[ing] whether anything had ever lived there.”
In any case, there are volcanologists and robots, “exotic locales” and bombs for mining ice, the ethical question of “Planetary Protection” and the limits of terrestrial law; it’s a fascinating look at conversations occurring today that might yet prove to be of great geographic significance for having determined, decades in advance, which landscapes will someday become intensely familiar to human settlers, on a planet that, for now, remains seemingly just out of reach.
Briefly, I’m also reminded of a paper presented a number of years back by Australian student Trevor Rodwell, called “Messages for the Future: The Concept for a First Human Landing Marker on Mars.” Although I don’t actually agree with Rodwell’s approach—he more or less outlines a digital time capsule that would remind future Martian settlers of Earthly life—I nonetheless find his idea of a “First Human Landing Monument” incredibly interesting, and suitably grandiose in terms of the workshop Billings documents.
How should we—if at all—mark a site that functions as a kind of interplanetary Plymouth Rock, and, in retrospect, how will conversations such as the ones Billings writes about be seen by future settlers?
Perhaps another way to put this is that we are already building an archive for the prehistory of humans on Mars, even if their departure for that planet has yet to occur.