Redshift

Elena Saavedra Buckley recounts her two-week stay in the Mars Desert Research Station, a nonprofit research facility in Utah whose residents pay a few thousand dollars to immerse themselves in a simulated Martian colony. There, she puts a few of the “Big Questions” to her fellow researchers: “Why go in the first place? Were we really so sure it would be a good idea? What would be the worst consequence of not going?” I’m not interested in going to Mars, but I’m fascinated by the varied human perspectives, flawed and earnest, that shape the idea. Buckley’s dispatch is humane and richly observed; it’s also the best way I’ve found to explore the minds of would-be Martian colonizers and explorers. (If you dig the day-to-day at the research station, check out The Habitat, Lynn Levy’s podcast for Gimlet Media.)

I got the sense that what motivated my crewmates was, above all, a conviction that Mars would transform us, no matter what kind of society would eventually take hold there. This belief was rooted in cynicism about the prospects of radical change ever happening on Earth, but they held out hope that if such change could happen on Mars, it would somehow trickle back down to the rest of us. The Martian dream posited that the future, which felt prematurely foreclosed, could open back up, and that the entropic path our species seemed to be on could still change course for the better. Maybe this was why it was difficult to talk about what we would find once we got there.