Laika's Window

by Kurt Caswell

  Elon Musk and SpaceX, along with Robert Zubrin and the Mars Society, are at the helm of humanity’s dream of a crewed mission to Mars. The Mars Society’s “Founding Declaration” makes a compelling case. We must go to Mars to learn about Mars, which will in turn teach us about the Earth. We must go for the challenge, because we are a species that thrives on challenge. For most of human history, war has been that challenge and a prime motivation for advances in medicine and technology. But we have before us an opportunity to replace war with the challenge of cosmic exploration. “The time is past for human societies to use war as a driving stress for technological progress,” states the declaration. We must go for the future of humanity, not for ourselves but for generations yet unborn. A permanent settlement on Mars will revitalize our belief in and our valuing of human life. Elon Musk agrees. “Musk is in love with the idea that humans should become a spacefaring society,” writes Stephen Petranek in How We’ll Live on Mars. SpaceX’s mission in these early decades of the twenty-first century sounds a lot like Ted Taylor’s Project Orion from the 1950s: make space travel more affordable and go to Mars. In late 2016 Musk rolled out his detailed plan to colonize Mars, shuttling people and equipment in SpaceX spacecraft. China, India, Russia, Japan, the European Space Agency, private industry, and NASA have all been stirred to think and move in this direction. China has even appointed an ambassador to Mars, NBA star Yao Ming. Mars will be, Musk tells us, the greatest adventure in the history of humankind.

  With the end of the space shuttle program in 2011, the United States lost its capability to put astronauts into orbit. We have relied on Russia to get that done, buying rides for about $75 million a seat. Both private industry and NASA have been working on regaining crew launch capability. SpaceX is almost there, and NASA is developing the Space Launch System, designed to propel an Apollo-like crew capsule capable of long-duration deep-space travel, with a Mars mission targeted for some time in the 2030s. It isn’t quite the spacecraft Ted Taylor imagined, or von Braun before and after him, but it might do the job. NASA calls their new crew capsule Orion.

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  The famed British scientist James Lovelock told the Guardian in 2008 that climate change is unstoppable and all there is left to do is enjoy our lives, because if we’re lucky we’ve got about twenty years before “it hits the fan.” Frank Fenner, a professor of microbiology at Australia National University, has written that because of climate change and related effects, humans will be extinct by 2100. In Learning to Die in the Anthropocene, Roy Scranton writes that due to climate change, human “civilization is already dead. The sooner we confront our situation and realize that there is nothing we can do to save ourselves, the sooner we can get down to the difficult task of adapting, with mortal humility, to our new reality.”

  Beyond climate change, there are more dangers to the long-term survival of our species. Physicist Stephen Hawking had said we have about a thousand years left on Earth, and he later revised that number to one hundred years. Hawking cites climate change and overpopulation as major threats, as well as the development of powerful technologies, especially artificial intelligence (AI), that may incite catastrophic wars, either using AI against each other for control of the planet or wars against AI. Stephen Petranek has developed a list of some ten ways our world might end suddenly, among them a planet-killing asteroid, which would strike Earth with the force of many Hiroshimas and raise a dust cloud blotting out the sun that would kill all the plants on Earth that life depends on. Like the dinosaurs, we would not escape such an event, and such an event is a statistical inevitability. It’s just something that happens from time to time, and as of yet we have no defense against it. As Carl Sagan has written, human beings have but two choices: “spaceflight or extinction.”

  Elon Musk too “is keenly aware that Earth will not be habitable forever,” writes Petranek in How We’ll Live on Mars. “Musk seems frustrated by our denial about what we are doing to our habitat [the Earth], and is ever cognizant of a simple fact: humans will become extinct if we do not reach beyond Earth.” And reaching beyond Earth means colonizing Mars. It is the only option now, maybe the only option ever. The runaway greenhouse effect on Venus makes it far too hot (some 900 degrees Fahrenheit on the surface), and the moons of Saturn and Jupiter are too far away, at least for our initial effort. At about a six-month journey one-way, Mars is not much farther off than Lisbon was from Rio de Janeiro in the sixteenth century. While conditions on Mars make it challenging, it is achievable. Establishing a colony there will be, writes Petranek, “nothing less than an insurance policy for humanity.” Or as Musk has put it, a backup for the biosphere.

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  The first two decades of the twenty-first century have been a boon to space science and exploration. We—the human animal—have landed the rover, Curiosity, on Mars to explore the Gale Crater and environs (2012); landed the Philea probe on the comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko (2014); discovered that liquid water flows on Mars, making it ever more likely that life was or still is present there (2015); flew the New Horizon probe past Pluto to explore that astonishing and active world at the limit of our solar system (2015); inserted the Juno probe into orbit around Jupiter to find out more about that planet’s formation and origin, and thus the formation and origin of Earth (2016); detected gravitational waves pulsing outward from the collision of two massive black holes at an immense distance from the Earth, waves that Einstein’s theory of general relativity predicted a hundred years ago (2016); discovered that Earth has a second moon, a little asteroid called 2016 HO3, that our planet caught about a hundred years ago and will likely hang on to for a couple hundred more (2016). We accomplished all this using robotic technology. No one had to travel to the moon, and no one had to travel to Mars.

  When I began to explore Laika’s story, I felt strongly that human beings should not go to Mars. We should stay put and work on things at home, because the fate of humanity is inseparable from the fate of the Earth. We should use our capital, ingenuity, intelligence, and cooperative spirit to build a more sustainable civilization here on Earth, one that will stabilize and then reduce human population growth, repair our decimated ecosystems, and encourage biological diversity. Humans will do better, because the Earth will do better. When I began to explore Laika’s story, I wanted to make a plea for an expansion of robotic exploration of our solar system and an end to crewed missions into space. Robots are cheaper and hardier than humans, and they don’t require training or life-support systems. Instead of the expense and resources required to send humans to Mars or anywhere else, we should send robots and robots alone, robots that are, as Carl Sagan has written of his beloved Voyager spacecraft, “intelligent being[s]—part robot, part human,” that “[extend] the human senses to far-off worlds.” Without humans in space, we might also reduce the need for biological research in space. We would not need to learn how to survive long-term in microgravity or how to shield ourselves from deadly radiation in space or on Mars, and we would no longer need to send animals of any kind into space. If biological research did continue in space, it would be directed away from how humans might live out there and toward how humans and all Earth’s creatures can live better here. That research would help us take care of our planet, not help us leave it. When I began to explore Laika’s story, I wanted to say that space exploration is already at its limit, that Mars is a fantasy and will always remain one. The dream of Mars, I wanted to say, is no better than a wish for immortality, a wish for what we can never have. I wanted to say that what we really need as a species is to stay home, on Earth. What we really need is to be at home on Earth.

  But I feel differently now.

  Freeman Dyson is right—he must be right—that the human animal needs, always, a new frontier to push against. We cannot prosper without the exercise of our spirit of discovery and exploration. We need to explore to remain whole—physically, emotionally, psychologically. Maybe even spiritually. Going to Mars is not for everyone, but everyone will be stru
ck with awe and amazement when we do. Nothing good will come of a suppression of human desire. It will manifest itself, either in a positive way that unites us and inspires and improves life on Earth, or in a destructive way that continues to polarize nations, fuel bloody competition for resources, and ensure the end of us all. Restraint is not the way. The way is expression, release, liberty, Mars.

  When I spoke to astronaut Donald Pettit, I asked him what he thought about a crewed mission to Mars, about establishing a permanent colony there. Is Mars even possible? “It’s inevitable,” he said. “Human beings will become scattered throughout the solar system.” At the present rate of development and planning, he said, it will take a couple hundred years but we can easily accelerate this process if we have the financial and political will.

  Having come this far, having gone that far out, how can we turn our back on human space exploration, on the adventure that is Mars, when such adventures have the power to free us from our myopic and self-serving perceptions? How can we turn our back when such an adventure may bring us to understand again that we are in the universe together, and it is our togetherness—our empathy for all living creatures—that sustains us? Instead of squabbling and warring on Earth, all of humanity might join in the project to colonize Mars. How can we turn our back on Mars when, as Hubert Planel writes in Space and Life, “exploring faraway hospitable planets directly has always been Man’s dream”?

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  John Karas, vice president of business development at Lockheed Martin, believes it will require a cooperative effort to colonize Mars. “Space is a matter of national pride,” he said. “Nations want to be in space because it is the technological high ground. But I don’t see a Space Race today so much as a space cooperation, or collaboration. Likely Mars will be a joint venture among a consortium of nations. We can’t do it alone. To go to Mars, we will need to collaborate with spacefaring nations. This will be a human endeavor, not an American or a Russian endeavor.”

  After the divisive US presidential election of 2016—which is more a thermometer for the health of our country, even for the health of our species, than a cause for its illness—it’s clear that our government is failing, at least in the short term, to unite us as a people. But perhaps Mars can do it. Perhaps Mars can do even more. Perhaps Mars can unite the US with the rest of the world, especially with our longtime partners in space exploration, Russia. For the past seven decades or so, cooperation in space has mostly transcended whatever political harangue is in play. Even with tensions building between the US and Russia over Syria, charges of Russian interference in the 2016 US presidential election, Russia’s annexation of Crimea, US sanctions against Russia, Edward Snowden, you name it, Russian president Vladimir Putin made this statement in 2016: “We attach great importance that despite whatever difficulties we face on Earth, people in space work shoulder to shoulder, hand in hand, to help each other and fulfill tasks that are essential not just for our countries but for all of humanity.” Maybe we need a Mars mission to bring the world together in common cause. Mars could be this century’s greatest creative act, the renewal of the world’s science and technology, political and economic relationships, art and artistic form. Mars can be the physical expression of everything that is good about us.

  “Yes!” Karas told me when I asked him what he thought of these ideas. “I love these ideas. Without cooperation, we’re going nowhere. And the technology required to go somewhere, to go to Mars for example, will benefit everybody on Earth.” Consider the many benefits that came from the Apollo missions to the moon, he said. That technology required “us to build everything smaller. Those missions kick-started a microelectronics revolution. We need a Mars mission to push technology. If we don’t have such a mission, the work, the innovation and discovery doesn’t happen. To get to Mars and to live there, we will have to learn how to get water from a rocky, barren desert planet, where there is, as we are now discovering, a lot of water in the form of ice. We will have to dramatically improve our solar technology, and we will have to find ways to protect astronauts from radiation. Now do you think we could use these same technologies here on Earth?” Not to mention, Karas said, “the cultural dynamics, the shift in the way we think about the Earth that will come from such an endeavor. A journey to Mars will give us a perspective of our own planet that would otherwise be impossible. This paradigm shift will come in like a lion, a shift as big as our coming to understand that the Earth is not the center of the universe. Space is a realm of peace and sharing. Space exploration is for all of humanity. It transcends divisions of culture, ethnicity, gender, religion, and nationhood. In space, these things no longer matter.” Going to Mars, Karas told me, can teach us how to live better here on Earth.

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  Mars is endlessly fascinating. The fourth planet from the sun, the second smallest in the solar system, named after the Roman god of war, Mars is a desert planet and cold, with an average annual temperature of –81 degrees Fahrenheit. But an average is an average, and for brief periods during the summer Mars feels like an ordinary day in San Diego, with temperatures hitting 86 degrees. The low, of course, is bitterly cold at –284 degrees. Mars’s atmosphere is thin and mostly carbon dioxide, deadly to humans and most other animals on Earth. Violent sandstorms kick up every year, possibly the largest such storms in the solar system, lasting months and covering the whole planet. In the thin atmosphere, these storms carry fine particles that can remain aloft until another storm rolls in. The Martian atmosphere is always swirling with dust. A day on Mars is about the same length as a day on Earth, but a year is nearly twice as long. The Martian sky appears a pinkish ochre, and the sun looks half the size as it does from Earth. Mars itself is half the size of Earth, but its landmass is about the same because Mars is almost all land. Almost, because while the once abundant rivers, lakes, and possibly oceans on Mars are gone—swept away by solar winds along with most of the planet’s atmosphere—as much as one million cubic miles of water remain, frozen at the poles. In orbit around Mars are two little moons, Phobos, at about fourteen miles across, and Deimos, nearly eight miles across. Mars’s gravity is about 37 percent of Earth’s, which means you can jump about three times as far. Mars has the highest known mountain in the solar system, a shield volcano called Olympus Mons, which rises 15.5 miles above the Martian surface (Everest is just over 5.5 miles). The mountain covers an area of approximately 120,000 square miles, or just shy of the size of the entire state of New Mexico.

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  Sputnik II, and Sputnik I before it, changed everything. What we were before we ventured into space we can never be again. Spacefaring made us into something else, but something no less essential to ourselves. So fully have we occupied this new self as to shut off the possibility of return. There is no going back. There is only the going on. And if things go along as Konstantin Tsiolkovsky imagined, along with Robert Goddard, Sergei Korolev, Ted Taylor and Freeman Dyson, Werner von Braun, Elon Musk, and others, we are going on. We are going to Mars, and we are going to colonize it. We are going to establish permanent habitation on the Red Planet, and future generations of humans will be born and live out their lives there. Future generations will be able to immigrate from Earth to Mars. You can see this truth emerging in the books we’re writing, in the movies we’re making, in the science and planning in the space industry, and in the excitement of people all over the world.

  Mars is a planet without animals, and when we go to Mars I do not think we will go alone. We have always taken animals with us into space, and in fact we sent them into space ahead of us. When we go to Mars, we will fill our ships with biological experiments. Fruit flies will certainly go, mice, microbes (those we choose, and those that hitch a ride with our equipment and our bodies), plants of various kinds, and a store of seeds, some for science and some for crops. Maybe we’ll take a few species of fish, molds and yeasts (we could not live on Mars without beer), and maybe bees. Wouldn’t we want some bees? We’ll take animals for food—chickens, lam
bs, maybe goats or hogs—a veritable farm of animals to seed the Red Planet with their kind. The biblical story of Noah’s Ark is not history, and it is not myth. It’s prophecy, and the only thing that may stop us from colonizing Mars is both the reason we must go and the reason we may not make it: our own extinction.

  Animals for science and food will not be enough. There is no hope of joy—on Earth or on Mars—except in companionship, with other people and with other animals. Human evolution and development are inseparable from the evolution and development of animals, especially the dog. I think we will take our dogs to Mars when we go. For how could we live without them? Why would we want to? On our first journeys into space we followed the tracks of dogs, and when we go to Mars we will make those tracks with them. When the people of Earth gaze up at that small red point in the morning sky that is Mars, and the first Mars colonists stand with their dogs looking back at the beauty of the Earth, it will be with gratitude to Laika, who showed us all the way.

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Abadzis, Nick. Laika. New York: First Second, 2007.

  Andrews, James T., and Asif A. Siddiqi, editors. Into the Cosmos: Space Exploration and Soviet Culture. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2011.

  Asashima, Makoto, et al., editors. Fundamentals of Space Biology. Tokyo: Japan Scientific Societies Press, 1990.

  Bergwin, Clyde R., and William T. Coleman. Animal Astronauts: They Opened the Way to the Stars. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1963.

  Berry, Wendell. “The Body and the Earth.” In The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays, 99. New York: Counterpoint, 2003.

  Brzezinski, Matthew. Red Moon Rising: Sputnik and the Hidden Rivalries That Ignited the Space Race. New York: Times Books, 2007.