I'm Dr. Nicolaus Greyhavens. I'm a postdoctoral associate in the Earth Department of Atmospheric
Sciences at Cornell University. I work on both late Paleozoic climates and also I work
on meteorology in past climate of the planet Mars. I like to think that Mars is sort of
the way of looking outside of the box of the Earth, the way of getting rid of all of our
assumptions about the way things work, looking for familiar patterns of course, but also allowing
it to challenge us, allowing us to really think about what we see on the Earth in a completely
new light. We've had a few presidents now talking about going to Mars, but it never
gets any traction and it never goes anywhere and it's something that the human race is
going to do eventually. I read one of Zubrin's books and you know, I did it whenever I was
working on the script, of course I always wanted to know what the hell I was talking
about. What should the goal be? As Dr. Huntress has said, it should be humans to Mars. Mars
is the next step. Mars is where the science is. Mars is where the challenge is. Mars is
the future. Mars is where the future is. As far as how it can be done and the most workable
ways to do it, I was very fascinated by Zubrin's methodologies and you know, sending two separate
rockets and you get your own fuel on the surface and you, hopefully there's water there.
Our best thinking is that in the high latitudes of Mars, they come down to the Arctic and
an Arctic circle. There are deposits of ice, ground ice. In some cases, it would look like
an exposed frost. In some places, it would just be this sort of icy, slushy kind of,
it would be a pretty hard slush mixed into soil that you'd probably have to heat up
and try to get off the water. Or if you've done before 10, 20, 30, maybe more meters,
you could hit substantial deposits of actual ice, things that people would recognize as
you know, nearly out of your freezer. It's funny because when I was reading the book
there was one part of it that he talked about and I was like, I don't know if he's got this
covered and it actually came out in the script, in the storyline and I thought this before,
which is the radiation side of it. I was like, he's got some vague ideas about how to deal
with the radiation but it kind of seemed like between the lines he's saying like, yeah,
well...
There are ways to mitigate the effects of radiation on the surface.
A lot of solar flares and transits. You're always talking, go, go, go, look what happened.
I didn't send in there.
The people who did this, they'll all eventually get really bad cancer and die so that'll be
a drag but we should do it anyway. And I'm like, that part we gotta work out.
There are a variety of possible habitats but the strongest one and perhaps the easiest
one to find on Mars, there are pictures that look potentially like they exist, are plow
tubes. This is basically Earth Caves.
I can't believe they'd be able to dig out underground habitat. Do you have any idea
the weight requirements for a drill that size?
Natural caverns, the drilling could be minimal.
You go into these caves and you get a shield from radiation.
And all these ways of actually making it work are really fascinating. I really love to read
about it and he really made it seem doable.
And I do think that there's something too that is a difference between Walzer and Zubrin
or maybe it's just more exaggerated and Walzer is that in spite of the fact that he's like,
we gotta look at the hard cold facts and be realistic about everything, he does have a
way and it comes out with Alexei of some of the hard cold facts that are not real convenient.
He's willing to just sort of brush those aside.
If we can prove that this water came from Mars, then maintaining life on the surface
would be possible.
More than possible, where there's water, there's potential for life.
He lets his biases about the way he wants to definitely affect his scientific method
a little bit.
It would be huge news if all of a sudden there was a manned mission to Mars.
It would be like it was back in 1969, people would be riveted by it.
And it's something that, you know, like I said, something humanity is going to do and
it's something we need to do.
It's possible that we might not explore Mars until we have a completely different architecture
for doing these kinds of missions, but I think we need to do it.
Mars is a new world.
I feel that it's sort of a museum, it's something that hasn't been messed around with plate
tectonics for billions of years and it's sort of stopped at a point.
It's like a window into what the early years of our own planet might have been like.
We all, in our jobs, want to have noble aims and, you know, I think that what you're trying
to do is the very kind of noble aim that we go into the business doing.
We want people to be excited about these things.
As scientists reading science fiction, we don't care about accuracy.
We don't read science fiction to see the world as it is.
We want to see the world as it could be, as hypothesis, as potential, as a way of stimulating
our imaginations.
I don't know what your future looks like, but these six episodes, at least, I'd like
to show them to people in my field and say, you know, these guys working with a low budget
are really doing what good science fiction television should be doing.
