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Some perspective about colonising the planet Mars.

August 29, 2016 — leslie dean brown

Illustration by leslie dean brown. © 2019. All rights reserved.

Imagine if 7 billlion people had always lived on a dust-bowl Mars-like planet with no life outside of the base stations. Imagine if that’s the way it had always been. Imagine if that was humanities’ entire existence, on the red planet…

With that in mind, I’d like to do a little thought experiment. I want you to imagine what would happen if we were to start exploring the solar system, from our home Mars.

The closest other world, Earth, looks very promising. We’ve spent a hundred trillion dollars on this latest space mission, okay. It’s been 30 years in the planning stage alone…

So we go to this new place called ‘Earth’.

And we don’t find another dust-bowl freeze-your-arse-off planet with no oceans, a toxic atmosphere* and a severe lack of oxygen. We don’t find it to be uninhabited. We don’t find the gravity extremely off-putting. We don’t find a desolate, barren wasteland devoid of all life like the home planet. No.

Instead, what we encounter is another world no unlike this one, the one we already know as ‘Earth’, exactly the way it is now, but without all the humans. Without any civilisation.

Imagine if we found 60 amur leopards, 400 Sumatran tigers, 880 mountain gorillas, 1826 giant pandas, 4080 snow leopards, 4848 black rhinos and 10000 blue whales!

Impenetrable jungles! Countless species of insects! Fish! Crustaceans! Molluscs! Birds! Frogs!

“Frogs? What an unusual name. What are they? Oh they’re slimy but harmless critters –amphibians– that thrive both on the land and in the water and use jumping as a form of locomotion.”

Lakes containing fresh water! Glaciers! Too many animal species to list!

“They’ve got a whole interconnected web-like thing scientists are calling an ‘ecosystem’ over there on that other planet. We’ve been trying for close to a millenium to get something like that going over here.”

Meanwhile back on Mars inside our dry and dusty base station, we get a breaking news report about the existence of all these weird and wonderful creatures on the new world. That’s right. Millions upon millions of new species that had never been seen or even reported before and now, as if by magic, all of a sudden they existed! Imagine what the news media would say if that was what we discovered when we weren’t even expecting the most modest and basic life-forms!!

Don’t you think we’d want to “swap planets”?

“No? What do you mean she is still not convinced of going?!

Because on the new planet they have oceans! Water falls from the sky! Food is abundant!

“Mate! You sure you still don’t want to leave here? They’re saying that not only could you breathe without a respirator, but everyone could literally walk outside, without ever having to wear a space suit. Your body would never be at risk of ‘exploding’! No airlocks required. A-fucking-mazing. I’d like to live there. Fuck this Mars shithole I say.”

But they’re not on that other planet, they’re right here on this one, now.

So just imagine if, miraculously, we materialised over there on the new and way cooler planet Earth with lots of life. Yes. Imagine if we didn’t even have to travel through space to get there; no need for a mass-exodus from planet Mars to get over to planet Earth.

“I’m telling you it turns out we don’t even have to travel anywhere Duncan! We’ve all been part of a cruel social experiment. Everyone has been living in a dream world. Just step outside and take a look for yourself. Its all out there”.

Imagine if we just found out about all that’s here, today. Imagine if it was only yesterday that we were totally ignorant and only today that we all just found out about all these new and never-before-described animals.

Giraffes, chameleons, snails, dragonflies, bees, grasshoppers, stick insects, jellyfish, toucans, macaws, catepillars, hermit crabs, barnacles, sharks, barracuda. Not to mention flowers.

Wouldn’t that be incredible? Wouldn’t that thought give you an unbelievable feeling inside? Do you think that would give us some sense of hope that “all is not lost”?

Next, I’d like you to imagine if we were given a second chance at everything. A chance to do things right. Imagine if, despite all the well-documented mistakes we’d made in the past, we were somehow expunged of all of our “conservation inaction guilt”. Imagine if we had a chance of recolonising this planet Earth. Do you think we’d be so naive and myopic as to make the same mistakes all over again on the new planet? No I don’t think so.

I think we’d all say something like:

“no hang on, we tried internal combustion engines on that other planet Earth and it didn’t go so well”.

I think we’d probably be a little more prudent the next time around don’t you think?

What you’d like to hear me tell you is what we could and should be saying:

“Yes we already know from our land survey data that there are plenty of coal & oil reserves on this new planet Earth. But knowing what we know about the alternate timelines, sooner than dig all of these fossil fuels out of the ground and burn them, we’d be better off building massive solar power stations instead. Better to utilise electric cars and have them recharged with renewable energy…”

Wouldn’t you agree that the new Earth colony could very easily put a government mandate in place that prohibits the use of fossil fuels and other toxic materials?

But that’s precisely what we are not doing, isn’t it?

Because we’re waking up every single day hoping that this problem will all just somehow “go away” all by itself.

We’re waking up every day with this second-chance-option, every single day, and we’re not taking it.

We already know that many animal species are threatened with extinction. Many people find this news very depressing/distressing (myself included). But they’re not extinct yet. No not just yet. I don’t mean to say that they won’t ever become extinct. I’m not saying that at all.

Last of all, imagine if we learned that instead of thriving on this new planet, the survival situation for quite a few of those species was more than a little precarious. Many of them are doing okay and still breeding fine but some niche species aren’t coping very well at all.

Now imagine we’d spent all that money to get to this other planet, one hundred trillion dollars, and then imagine we’re too fucking stingy to save even a few of the thousands of endangered species. What do you think would make news headlines on that day?

My point is, we haven’t even spent a hundred trillion dollars on some ridiculous space mission. Not yet.

Rather, it’s more a case of “they’re already here and we’re already there”. That new planet is this planet.

So to me it looks like the majority of humans are either stingy, lazy, stupid or a combination of all three. Most people have this “can’t be fucked attitude” about a problem we ourselves created.

We’re not stingy when we’re buying the latest generation mobile phones though are we? No, it seems we all have plenty of money for that.

See, I think we’re acting worse than a typical teenager who doesn’t want to clean up their own mess. They expect that someone else will do it for them.

But we’re not teenagers. We’re adults. And you’d think that we would have more responsibility for our own actions.

Instead, we’re treating dear planet Earth a bit like our first proper girlfriend or boyfriend —the one we used to hold on a pedestal, the one we looked up to, the one we tried so hard in the beginning for, the one we never imagined would end— and by foolishly and repeatedly not respecting the others’ limits and boundaries, we inevitably lost them. We then suffered the unimagineable heartbreak of the completely avoidable relationship breakup.

So in this rather unusual post, I’d like to remind everyone that we are taking what we have here for granted. Massively so.

We’re making the same mistakes we always make. And it really makes me rather sad. I feel like I shouldn’t even be living in this timezone…

Because scientsists are warning everyone, the entire world, that we might not even be able to recover from this particular “relationhip breakup”. It’s going to be far worse than our first-ever divorce. It’s going to be that hard and way harder still.

I don’t think we can make it on our own. I don’t think we’re ‘smart’ enough.

We still need this world. And I hope this blog makes people aware of that.

The way I think of it is this. Mars is just another example of a ‘shithole’ (meaning uninhabitable) planet in our the solar system. Why do I say that? Well I don’t see too many 5-star resorts being built in the middle of a deserted wasteland thousands of miles from civilisation. No. See, we already know that there’s this consensus that the nicest places to be and more importantly stay at are generally the ones where there’s either a city, a river, a lake, an ocean, a beach, a mountain or a forest. Or preferably combinations of them.

Mars has none of that. Who the fuck is going to want to voluntarily live there? Slaves? Miners? People with no imagination for what it’s actually going to be like living there on a day-to-day basis, sign some contract and get stuck there? Poor people who can no longer afford to live on Earth. Probably the latter. Maybe this is what this is all about. An ultra-rich class of people wanting to find a new home for all of us poor people.

Forget Mars. Earth is where it’s at. We’re already on the good planet Elon. If you want to go and live there, by all means, go. I think you’ll be back. You’re realise it was a bad invesment

What this scientist thinks of NASA’s 2035 mission to Mars…

May 11, 2016 — leslie dean brown

The 2035 Mars space mission is said to cost an estimated US$1.5 trillion.

What are my thoughts on this? That sounds like an aweful lot of money to me — to keep four to six people alive on another planet— in my view it’s money that could be put to far better things, like keeping 7 or 8 billion alive on this one.

To put things into perspective, it’s the equivalent of spending 94% of Australia’s Gross Domestic Product… for what? A dozen or so people to have the trip of a lifetime… at the most? That’s one hell of an expensive postcard!

If I personally had US$1.5 trillion dollars to play with and I wanted to ENSURE the future surivial of the human race, why, do you know what I’d do? I’d buy up all the wilderness areas up in poorer countries. I’d abandon that silly space mission. That’s what I’d do. And this is coming from someone that liked reading Carl Sagan’s cosmos… [Read more…]

Be the change you want to see in the world.

May 8, 2016 — leslie dean brown

There’s a lot of pessimism at the moment about our long term future. Will we still be here in a 100 years’ time? 1,000? 10,000?

It’s clear that we need some pretty significant changes if we’re going to survive as a species for that amount of time…

What do most people do about it? They go home and watch TV because they’re depressed about the whole predicament. I’m not even going to label the problems. But my point is that most people distract themselves any way they see fit. They fall into the trap of hopelessness. They end up doing jack shit. In short, they don’t change. [Read more…]

Why do you buy?

April 20, 2016 — leslie dean brown

Just a few decades ago, the reason we gave to buy something new was because our product simply broke and it could no longer be repaired. So we had to replace it. Fast forward to today, and we find that many products are no longer repairable because to do so is deemed ‘uneconomical’. These days, the art of repair seems to be all but completely forgotten.

Not too long ago, when we needed to replace something, sometimes we could even replace it with an identical model. How many times does that happen today? Never. Why? Because even if we wanted to, a product’s life cycle is so short that it is no longer possible to buy the exact same item even only 1 or 2 short years later.

Nowadays we have to buy a completely new replacement product. We have no choice. We can’t buy the same item even if we wanted to! We’re increasingly forced to live in a more ‘disposable’ world!

But what about our environment? Redesigns require more design time, new moulds and new machinery. Redesigns require new instructions, new packaging.

I am going to argue here and elsewhere that all product cycles which are shorter than necessary are sheer environmental folly. I am going to argue that product cycles need to be much longer, that the products themselves should be user-serviceable wherever possible and that replacement parts should be freely available (and for a very reasonable cost).

I think product designers have a special ethical obligation to design for the long-term not the short term. Just because you can create something new doesn’t mean that it is any good. I believe that a great design will stand the test of time. I believe that customers will return to reliable, trustworthy brands –even decades later– provided that their products have been shown to endure.

And I think consumers have an equally special ethical obligation to keep things for as long as possible. Not only is this much better for the environment, but I think we’d actually be happier for it because we’d get more satisfaction buying things that we actually need, when we need to. I almost never throw something out because I get bored with it. I always try to find a new home for my old products. I’m hoping that you will too.

You might complain that the cost of a new replacement battery or charger or whatever hardly makes it worth your while. “…for only 15 dollars more I can get a brand new XYZ…”, I hear you say. The reason for that is partially because of supply and demand. If more people bought just the replacement parts instead of the whole darn new thing, the cost of the replacement bits would surely plummet, due to the economies of scale.

This is Pluto speaking here.

April 10, 2016 — leslie dean brown

>sign the petition to reinstate Pluto‘s full planet status<

Hello.

This is Pluto speaking here.

Look, I wasn’t very happy when some scientists took away my “full planetary” status in 2006 without even consulting me directly. And I’m not alone.

I’ve been thinking about it – and this whole ‘dwarf’ designation has never really sat well with me ever since. And my moon Charon is not to thrilled about it either… because that would make her the moon of a dwarf planet, aka a “dwarf moon”.

Especially when you say that I’m a dwarf planet, and then go on to say “which is not really a planet”. Imagine how Jupiter would react if you said: “Jupiter is a gas giant planet… which is not really a planet!” !!

And then you gave me a number. What do you call it? “Minor planet designation”. Wait a second. Let me look that up. Let’s see here, what have I got, I knew I had it somewhere… “134340”. That’s it. “134340”. That doesn’t sound very special to me. One minute I’m named after a God. And the next thing someone has placed this completely arbitrary bogus number IN FRONT OF my name. Not after it mind you. BEFORE! Like this: 134340 Pluto. One-three-four-three-four-zero-pluto. To a planet, this is invective! [Read more…]