Second Season of "Mars": Can't We All Just Get Along?
Review: first episode of 2nd season of #Mars on @NatGeoChannel : Predictable plot & conflicts, too much stock news footage combined with pretty scenery & cool space suits. Worth watching for the special effects but little else. If we are going to screw Mars up like this, why go? pic.twitter.com/kGd2Naiqy9
— NASA Watch (@NASAWatch) November 13, 2018
On one level I’m enjoying the ‘Mars’ series. But on the other; it’s almost like they’re making it look like an extremely undesirable thing to go there! I’m not advocating a rose-tinted, pro-Mars propaganda version of the show, but still… Or maybe I am?!
No, you are not wrong.
Find the National Geography Mars series is just a disaster of the week serial.
That is because it is what brings the viewers. If there wasn’t a disaster every week it would bore them, just as the real Apollo landings bored the television audience after Apollo 11, except for Apollo 13, because it was a near disaster. That is the challenge of doing a television series for the general public.
I have to say I really enjoyed last night’s episode as well as the previous season. As much as MARS highlights the technical and operational challenges to such a colony, I’m glad to see it also highlights the mental/emotional stresses this type of pioneering would offer. Colonization is not easy or without consequence (personal, ethical, psychological, etc.) and I think the series does its part to take off that overly romanticized varnish that it’s all going to go perfectly and without loss.
Some of us like the American southwest. Realistically, on Mars, you wouldn’t be going outside very often. My guess is something like eight hours once a week, and that is a drawback. But people here in Boulder often don’t manage more time up in the mountains (hiking, climbing or skiing) than that.
Well the 1/3 gravity is a definite plus. I can easily see mars settlers won’t want to come back to Earth and its crushing gravity after a few years on mars. We who live in inhospitable regions of Earth don’t really get out much anyways, maybe a few times a year for a week or so, maybe every day for short walks. But the majority of our hours are spent in our climate controlled homes or workplaces. You have listed many awesome attractions on Earth, but we can only imagine the awesome attractions that will exist on mars, and I am certain that the first settlers will discover some, while saying things like rain, snow, and oceans are highly over-rated!
For all the talk about the technical requirements of getting to Mars, and indeed living there on the planet, I’d have to say that humankind is facing a big fork in the road.
There will be humans who yearn for the Red Hills of Mars; those who want to live in space, deriding ‘grounders’; and there will be folks living in spots like Ceres. This is going to require in my view a dramatic re-thinking of what it means to be a human being. There will be similarities, surely, but mostly these will be “interior” living for some centuries to come.
More significantly perhaps, is this: those people will consider themselves a unique and perhaps desirable sort, and so different, each from the other, that our abilities to be just plain get along will make international borders pale in comparison.
Personally I’d visit Mars/Luna in a heartbeat, though now I’m too old for that to be in my future. But in the same way that living in an apartment, rising an elevator home seems dehumanizing to me, I’d just miss my garden.
And my cats.