Outpost, p.12
Outpost, page 12
But maybe I was being overly dramatic, the result of too much time spent in airports – oscillating between isolated wilderness, high-security cities and transport hubs, whilst jet-lagged, with no workaday normality in between. Perhaps I hadn’t seen the real America at all. Perhaps the fact that I was en route to a Mars Base had put me in a slightly apocalyptic state of mind. Imagine serious people using World War III to justify billion-dollar projects, that would just be ridiculous. Imagine a world like that, I frowned, glancing briefly at the Guardian’s website whilst fact-checking Pink Floyd’s 1973 tour dates:
ELON MUSK: WE MUST COLONISE MARS TO PRESERVE OUR SPECIES IN A THIRD WORLD WAR3
Humans must prioritise the colonisation of Mars so the species can be conserved in the event of a third world war, SpaceX and Tesla founder Elon Musk said on Sunday.
‘It’s important to get a self-sustaining base on Mars because it’s far enough away from Earth that [in the event of a war] it’s more likely to survive than a Moon base,’ Musk said on stage at SXSW – just days after Donald Trump announced plans to meet the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-un, in an attempt to defuse rising nuclear tension.
‘If there’s a third world war we want to make sure there’s enough of a seed of human civilisation somewhere else to bring it back and shorten the length of the dark ages,’ Musk said, responding to questions from his friend Jonah Nolan, co-creator of TV show Westworld.iii [. . .] But building a colony would require ‘tremendous entrepreneurial resources’, Musk said.
The next logical step must surely be for Amazon to build HQ2 on Mars.
—
When I’d left Colin in end-times Seattle it had been raining. When I landed in the neo-noir of LA there was a dry wind blowing fit to strip paint and my skin strobed ashen the half hour it took to reach Long Beach. The heavens burnt orange, the air was filled with fuel and engines. Switching yards snaking silver under tungsten gantries – everything and everyone routed elsewhere, peeling away from an automotive city where to be mobile was to be automobile and I imagined the only wildlife to be lizards and nighthawks. LA: newly extruded, thrumming talcy and hot. The oldest things I saw on the drive were fellow motorists; over- and under-taking pensioners.
Bath felt impossibly quaint and far away.
Kate is a native Long Beacher and her house was a 50s suburban dream – a craftsman home on an avenue lined with magnolia and jacaranda trees in a neighbourhood set back from Los Coyotes Diagonal. The air was full of sweet pollen. Everything was dusted with blossom. We’d been talking about America since LAX – family, Colin, Desolation, Bath, Kate’s life here, her Hollywood childhood – anybody who got taken along to meet Harrison Ford on set as a birthday treat had A Hollywood Childhood as far as I’m concerned – but everyone here is involved with films in some way, she told me; everyone knew someone and everyone was working on a screenplay, including Kate. So that was all right.
I’d met Kate and Colin the year before when they’d been in the UK to study. They’d been to Bath, now I was in the US. I’d shown them the classical ropes at the Royal Crescent, Jane Austen museum and Roman baths, and now I was learning all about bears, Beats, Tinseltown and Armageddon.
Kate met my saucer-eyed angst about the Mad Max traffic with easy, teasing Californian charm. This was her patch and she was the perfect company and guide; graceful, glamorous and assured – hair flowing, walk languid, sunglasses habitually worn indoors and out. She was a local. I was not. Snapshots from the next few days show me looking panicked and shifty at various LA landmarks having apparently forgotten how to stand in a relaxed human way; crumpled and shifty at the Walk of Fame, clammy and crazed outside the Hollywood Masonic Temple, slowly pitching over outside Grauman’s Chinese Theatre . . . But there’s a lovely shot of us up at the Griffith Observatory in gold-pink light one afternoon where I managed to raise my game and we look happy, normal. Inside the grand domed space was a Tesla Coil whose orb of purple lightning recalled the electric storms which heralded the Terminator’s arrival on the lawn in 1984 – as James Dean had rolled up three decades before and the stars of La La Land danced a few later. The Observatory is so keyed into LA’s film and television history, the backdrop and setting for so many movies, that you probably know it even if you’ve never heard the name – the sci behind a great deal of fi. But then LA is a dreamlike zone where roles and lines of reference blur. On the afternoon of 25 May 2008, an audience in the Observatory’s Leonard Nimoy Event Horizon Theater watched live pictures of the NASA Phoenix rover’s touchdown on Marsiv – the data feed from Mars, fifteen minutes delayed at the speed of light, playing out across tense faces at Pasadena mission control, beamed into a room named after the man who played Mr Spock; a sci-fi TV funded TV science seance.
Later that day I was handed a free bottle of chilled chocolate shake by a smiling girl on a downtown street. The drink was named Soylent. ‘It’s made of soy,’ the girl explained. ‘Is it though?’ I asked her. ‘Is it really? Nothing in this town seems to be exactly what it claims and this would seem a worst case scenario.’ She laughed and told me yes, it was really made of soy. ‘It says so on the bottle, you see?’ She was charming. The drink was cold and tasted good. LA might consume beautiful people but the beautiful people didn’t consume each other.
Soylent Cacao – Ready-to-drink meal – Natural and artificial flavours – 20% daily nutrition – 20g protein – 14 FL OZ – tasting of chocolate milk but actually soy. Not people, silly, soy. The bottle said so.
—
On the sixth day of my stay, Dr Shannon Rupert emailed to invite me down to the Mars Desert Research Station outside Hanksville, Utah. I booked a flight out to Salt Lake City and a train, the California Zephyr, down to a town named Green River, the nearest stop to Mars. That left me with a little under sixty-five miles of scrub and desert to negotiate. I sat for a long time scrolling across it on Google Earth, zooming in and zooming out of the rust and tan expanse. Any way you spun it, it was sixtyfive miles.
Kate drove me back to LAX.
I emailed MDRS to tell them I was on my way, explaining that I did not drive and asking if there was any chance of a lift from Green River. Before leaving LA I had an answer: I should rent a car in Salt Lake City and drive down to Hanksville. Dr Rupert knew of no way to get from Green River to MDRS. This was the true West, she told me, and there was no public transportation in such rural areas, but if I drove down from Salt Lake City on Highway 6 through Price, the fall colours were currently really pretty.
I arrived in Salt Lake City to news of a mass shooting in Las Vegas. The attack grew more horrific with each news cycle. My train was at 4:30 a.m. so I sat for five hours in the empty terminal, a huge deserted glasshouse echoing with escalators, air-con, rolling news and hand-driers which sounded like blenders.
A small-hours taxi took me to the Amtrak station. There were no other cars on the road. The frosted blacktop shone. The sky was clear. There were stars. The air was freezing. My breath steamed.
Our off-ramp snaked through a freight yard full of pitched tarps and polythene; shadowed avenues stretching line on line.
‘Tent city,’ noted the driver.
‘How long has that been here?’ I asked him. ‘It must be so . . . cold.’
‘They move them about. Bus them around,’ he told me. ‘We’ve had a lot come in from all over Utah. Troubled folks, my man. A lot of pain.’
At the silent station, I shook the driver’s hand. ‘Good night,’ he said. ‘God bless.’
My train turned out to be a bus – Temporary substitute service for train – ‘It’s been like this for months.’
As we crunched towards another freeway the ghostly camp flickered through the window. On and on and on. Then gone.
We were due into Green River at 8:15 a.m.
—
The rest of the night passed as a set of strange dreams. I slept only lightly, waking often, face close to the window, glimpsing a town, some lights, blurred raindrops, striated mountain passes, always vaguely wondering where we were, where I was. The city of Provo passed me by but I was awake for the fifteen-mile crawl up Price Canyon and over Soldier Summit to Helper, a town named after the banking engines stationed there to help the coal and freight trains climb the steep and prolonged grade of the Wasatch Plateau.
There was no dawn as such, the night just paled until, an hour out of Helper, there seemed no point denying that it was another day.
I focused on the layer cake of sandstone cliffs which had been a constant for a while – a 2,000-foot wall, peach with sooty feet – and noted that its current flank and profile resembled the sort of proud silver-orange locomotive I’d romantically imagined piloting me down to Green River in warm sunshine.
I checked my phone. There was an email from Dr Rupert at MDRS:
Hi, Dan – Just wanted to let you know it has been raining heavily here all night, which makes moving around a bit sticky. The clay soils swell when it rains and I don’t know if you will even be able to get in here unless it stops very soon.
Please give me a call when you arrive in Hanksville and I’ll come to town and get you if the roads are passable.
Best,
Shannon
I leaned into the aisle to look down the bus. The road ahead ran dead straight, blacktop on xeric. The sky was puttycoloured, equal parts water and spite.
—
Green River was a rainstorm. Whereas everyone else, both of them, hopped into waiting cars, I shouldered my bag and walked up to the main road, then a mile further on to a gas station. There were two; I chose the one with an Arby’s diner in the direction of Hanksville but a little questioning revealed that hardly anybody had heard of it. It’s not really a place, someone told me. I bought a lousy coffee. Whilst muzzily spilling cream at it in a doomed attempt to improve its essential evil, I felt a tug on my arm.
You a hitchhiker too? asked the tugger. He was a short beaverish man who smelled like he ate and washed in cigarettes as well as smoking them. The word ‘too’ immediately struck me as dangerous, not in terms of peril but association.
Where are you headed? I asked him.
Vegas, he said.
Ah, I said.
Lucky place, he said.
There was a pause.
Always been lucky for me, he said.
Good. I said. Good luck! I’m trying to get down to Hanksville.
It’s not really a place, you know, he told me, and went outside to smoke and try to get lucky with a truck.
An hour later I had scared a dozen upright citizens with my polite requests for a lift. I was Hugh Grant stumbled onto the set of No Country for Old Men. I was also wet and tiring of being asked if I was okay and being offered cell phones to call for help.
I have a phone, I explained. I don’t drive, you see.
You should have hired a car, they said.
Everyone was incredibly kind and concerned but nobody gave me a ride.
The beaver man was having no luck either and now sat in a diner cubicle smashing his mobile to bits on a table whilst swearing high and hissy through his teeth. I took my third horror coffee back out into the rain, huddled under an Arby’s awning and began emailing everyone I knew who might know someone in Utah, anyone who might know an American who drove, then I phoned my mother in Bath just to, you know, say hi, pretend everything was okay and ask if she knew any Utahans. She didn’t.
I rang my friend Roz in Shanghai where it was midnight.
Hello, I said, I’m in a bit of jam. Do we know any Americans?
We did.
We’d gone to university with Katy Corneli.
Katy lives in Price, Utah, Facebook told me once I’d rung off from Shanghai.
I called her up. She was working as a palaeontologist at the USU Eastern Prehistoric Museum. She sounded surprised to hear from me after fifteen years and her surprise became incredulity when I explained that I was holed up in Green River and needed a lift to Hanksville. She knew all about MDRS, ‘That’s actually a prime spot for Utahraptor fossils,’ she told me . . .
Katy couldn’t help immediately, she couldn’t drop her dinosaurs and drive me down herself, but she asked around and her friend Amber volunteered to take me. So, four hours after arriving into Green River, I was on my way down to Hanksville with Amber.
In the time it had taken her to reach me I had read up on the Utahraptor or ‘Super-slasher’ as it’s charmingly nicknamed; a three-metre-high Jurassic beast with big death-dealing claws and knife-like teeth, ‘one of the most ferocious killers ever to walk the Earth’, my phone told me. And the desert surrounding MDRS was full of them, apparently.
As soon as Amber arrived on the forecourt I’d broken cover and jumped into her car to avoid attracting the attention of ‘super-smasher beaver man’ and within an hour we’d made it the sixty miles down through Hanksville – a town that was almost actually a place if you squinted – and up to the spot where my map said Cow Dung Road began.
My gateway to Mars was an actual gate with a Snoopy style mailbox on a post. Dr Rupert’s phone went straight to voicemail. Amber peered mistrustfully at the red track which wound sharply down into an umber gulch. Beyond and all around us strange rock-forms reared, hoodoos, hillocks, tumps and scarps, with massive mesas further off; a land of towering fists and fingers. Is this it? Amber asked. I reckoned so. Climbing out, my boots sank an inch into claggy clay. I told her I could walk from here, I didn’t want her getting stuck. We shook hands; another amazing auto-Samaritan, Amber gingerly did a three-point turn and drove away.
—
Perhaps it was apt that I’d spent several hours in a service station. The month before, I’d spoken to Lucinda Offer, Executive Director of the Mars Society as well as Education & Outreach Officer at the Royal Astronomical Society, at a TGI Friday in Berkshire, UK – a similarly nondescript identikit space to the Green River Arby’s. Over daft cocktails we’d discussed Mars and the several science expeditions Lucinda had undertaken with the NASA Ames Research Center and their Spaceward Bound programme.v
‘We’re always looking for extreme lifeforms,’ she told me enthusiastically. ‘You’re probably familiar with tardigrades?’
I wasn’t, so got a crash course. Tardigrades are minute animals – aka water bears / moss piglets – resembling eight-legged sumo beavers with faces like crushed Coke cans. They are found all over the world, incredibly resilient and capable of lying dormant for eons until conditions improve. If anything might have stuck it out on Mars and made a go of it whilst being baked, swamped or frozen in an atmosphere of carbon dioxide, tardigrade-like critters would seem a solid bet.
Microscopic moss piglets: the happier alternative to Martian super-slashers.
Lucinda told me how she’d gone looking for tardigrade in the Mojave. That involved scooping up a bit of brackish desert pond water and looking for life under a microscope. The same team then went to Abu Dhabi for about a month to look at Martian analogues in Empty Quarter salt flats, exploring the low parts of the dunes where flats had been exposed by the wind’s constant shifting and sculpting of the sands.
‘We dug down to get a nice fresh sample about three or four inches thick and were astonished to find very distinctly coloured layers, each a different set of micro-organisms or algae. There was a top layer of white salt that you would typically see on a salt flat. Under that there’s maybe a green layer forming, and then a pink layer, and then a brown layer – different organisms living at different depths depending upon how much light they were getting.’
The whole salty sandwich resembled a hamburger with special sauce, apparently. Yum.
Lucinda also told me about how NASA Ames had recently been out in New Zealand investigating geothermal vents similar to the geysers and hot springs I’d seen in Iceland and Bath, looking at life in bio-mats in areas of scaldingly hot percolating water. On the same trip they scrutinised some three-and-a-half-billion-year-old stromatolites in Australia.vi
So that’s the sort of thing the first Mars explorers will look for? I asked. Water bears and stromatolites?
Yes, she said. It’s an exciting time to be a Martian tardigrade enthusiast. The idea of sending humans to Mars is being taken seriously again: ‘The Mars Society used to be the ones screaming in the crowd but now it’s all over the world and we’re really excited about that. India has ISROvii starting their own mission, China is about to go to the Moon and they’re also interested in going to Mars, UAE is interested in going to Mars – the whole world is taking part so I think that it is going to be a team of people and not just the United States – although I think they’re all waiting for the US to make the first move because that’s what we’ve done in the past . . . and that’s the whole idea of Dr Zubrin’s book: that we could all get on and do it within a decade if we have the same energy focus as JFK had when he said “go make it happen”.’
Dr Robert Zubrin, aerospace engineer, nuclear physicist and all-round polymath, is President of the Mars Society and his book The Case for Mars: The Plan to Settle the Red Planet and Why We Must details the Mars Direct scheme to get humans to Mars in the near future. It covers risks, costings, timelines, crew makeups, mission imperatives, vehicle and base designs, terraforming – all in a confident, accessible way, reading at times like a marvellous How To / Can Do manual for yer average Martian frontiersman or woman – which isn’t actually as far-fetched or glib as it might sound because the idea of prospecting is one of the main Martian draws for those immune to tardigrade charms.
It’s notable that whilst both Musk and Zubrin talk about Mars as a great adventure, the next step in essential human nature – to go, quest, dream, and learn – and both extol the science and trickle-down of advanced technologies from any research and development programme, neither SpaceX nor Mars Direct are altruistic enterprises – they mean business. ‘Because it’s there’ will not cut it regarding Mars; ‘because it has untapped mineral, metal and gas deposits’ plays better with investors, and The Case for Mars suggests that Mars colonisation may be a highly profitable enterprise for two reasons: a high concentration of precious metals and deuterium, the heavy isotope of hydrogen:
