Search Results for: Mars

Interview: ‘Poor Teeth’ Writer Sarah Smarsh on Class and Journalism

Julia Wick | Longreads | November 7, 2014 | 11 minutes (2,674 words)

 

“I am bone of the bone of them that live in trailer homes.” That’s the first line of Sarah Smarsh’s essay “Poor Teeth,” which appeared on Aeon earlier this month. Like much of Smarsh’s work, “Poor Teeth” is a story about inequity in America. It is also a story about teeth, hers and her grandmother’s and also the millions of Americans who lack dental coverage.

Smarsh has written for Harper’s, Guernica and The Morning News, among other outlets. Her perspective is very much shaped by her personal experiences: She grew up in a family where most didn’t graduate from high school, and she later chaired the faculty-staff Diversity Initiative as a professor at Washburn University in Topeka. I spoke with her about her own path to journalism and how the media cover issues of class.  Read more…

What Would Happen If We Lived on Mars

Cabin fever might set in quickly on Mars, and it might be contagious. Quarters would be tight. Governments would be fragile. Reinforcements would be seven months away. Colonies might descend into civil war, anarchy or even cannibalism, given the potential for scarcity. US colonies from Roanoke to Jamestown suffered similar social breakdowns, in environments that were Edenic by comparison. Some individuals might be able to endure these conditions for decades, or longer, but Musk told me he would need a million people to form a sustainable, genetically diverse civilisation.

‘Even at a million, you’re really assuming an incredible amount of productivity per person, because you would need to recreate the entire industrial base on Mars,’ he said. ‘You would need to mine and refine all of these different materials, in a much more difficult environment than Earth. There would be no trees growing. There would be no oxygen or nitrogen that are just there. No oil.’

I asked Musk how quickly a Mars colony could grow to a million people. ‘Excluding organic growth, if you could take 100 people at a time, you would need 10,000 trips to get to a million people,’ he said. ‘But you would also need a lot of cargo to support those people. In fact, your cargo to person ratio is going to be quite high. It would probably be 10 cargo trips for every human trip, so more like 100,000 trips. And we’re talking 100,000 trips of a giant spaceship.’

Ross Andersen, in an Aeon magazine interview with Elon Musk, on the future of colonizing Mars.

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Photo: Wikimedia Commons

Elon Musk: How We’re Going to Colonize Mars

Longreads Pick

An in-depth interview with the SpaceX founder on how we could make it to Mars—and why it’s important for us to get there.

Source: Aeon
Published: Sep 30, 2014
Length: 27 minutes (6,900 words)

Honey, I Want To Move To Mars

Longreads Pick

My wife is a semifinalist to board a one-way mission to the Red Planet. I’m proud, happy, and thrilled for her. Now, do you want to know how I really feel about i?

I might have suggested another couple of words in response to that particular question, but I know better than most that the notion that someone can retain privacy once they’ve entered this modestly public life is archaic. When Mars One whittled the 200,000-plus applicants down to 1,058, Sonia got enough media coverage to become a minor celebrity around town. It doesn’t hurt that she is easy on the eyes. I love her, the camera loves her, and now strangers do too.

When we go to parties we hear whispers. “That’s the Mars girl,” people say. Women—it’s always women—approach to congratulate her on her bravery. Rarely does anyone engage her as a space geek to talk about what she hopes to find up there, but if someone did, he or she would open the discussion to Sonia’s innate curiosity and her enthusiasm about humanity’s drive to explore and expand our understanding of what is possible. She honestly does not understand why everyone does not want to go to Mars, though she knows I would last about half an hour before getting bored up there.

Source: Texas Monthly
Published: Apr 3, 2014
Length: 6 minutes (1,730 words)

13 Miles To Marshall

Longreads Pick

Tough times lead very different Michigan high schools to merge:

Seven months ago, De’Jhannique and 159 other teens from low-income, predominantly African-American Albion High School began making the 13-mile journey to middle-class, overwhelmingly white Marshall High School. Since then, they’d hand-jived in “Grease” and twerked at Homecoming. They’d made friends and lost sleep. They’d studied more than ever for worse grades than ever. And they taught their new teachers the meaning of resilience.

Their journey is a story of race, poverty, community pride, and the Titanic-hits-iceberg dynamics of school funding in Michigan. Their story matters because their success or failure will likely play out again and again across Michigan, as school districts are forced by financial crises to collaborate, consolidate or close.

Author: Ron French
Source: Bridge Magazine
Published: Mar 25, 2014
Length: 20 minutes (5,163 words)

Mission To Mars

Longreads Pick

How Rob Thomas—creator of the beloved TV series Veronica Mars—used Kickstarter to bring his show to the big screen:

On the morning of March 13, 2013, Thomas hit the “Launch Project” button on his laptop screen. He’d also installed the Kickstarter app on his iPhone, with the notifications option turned on. For the next several hours, his phone vibrated continuously, never pausing long enough for him to change the settings on the app—a new backer was joining the project literally every second. About an hour in, Thomas realized what was happening. “I finally felt absolutely like we were going to get to make the movie,” he says. “That’s when I got hit by just a tidal wave of endorphins or adrenaline. I felt woozy.”
They raised $1 million in four hours. By the end of the first day, they had $2.5 million and had set several Kickstarter records, becoming the fastest project to reach $1 million and the fastest project to reach $2 million (eleven hours). In the end, they raised $5,702,153, making Veronica Mars the third-largest Kickstarter ever and the highest-funded film or video project (the previous record was $808,341, for a web TV series).

Source: Texas Monthly
Published: Mar 1, 2014
Length: 16 minutes (4,230 words)

Amanda Marshall Cracks Down on Child Prostitution

Longreads Pick

U.S. Attorney Amanda Marshall is making a career out of going after sex traffickers:

“Marshall says she has a few high-ranking priorities, national security among them. But one stands out as unusual for her position: child sex trafficking. In her short time so far, Marshall has directed her staff to get more busts, more indictments, and more convictions for a crime that typically victimizes teenage girls in metro areas. It’s very rare for a federal prosecutor to emphasize child sex trafficking, according to Lewis & Clark law professor Tung Yin, a close observer of federal law enforcement and a former clerk for several federal judges. Marshall has directed three attorneys to focus on the issue and integrated the fight against trafficking with her office’s anti-gang work: a significant upgrade in attention for a crime usually left to local cops and prosecutors.”

Published: Oct 11, 2012
Length: 11 minutes (2,977 words)

6 Guys in a Capsule: 520 Days on a Simulated Mars Mission

Longreads Pick

In a secluded area on the ground floor, six brave young men (three Russians, an Italian, a Frenchman, and a Chinese national) are simulating a mission to Mars. For 520 straight days—that’s more than 17 months—the volunteers will be sequestered in a tubular steel stand-in for a spacecraft whose 775-square-foot living area is so cramped and spare it might have been designed by Dostoyevsky himself. Mars500, as their mission is called, is jointly sponsored by the Institute for Biomedical Problems and the European Space Agency. It seeks to answer a question that looms as the EU, the US, Russia, and India all look to put a man on Mars by the 2030s: Can the human animal endure the long isolation and boredom implicit in traveling to a planet that is, at its closest, 35 million miles—and roughly six months of rocket travel—away? Will one of the volunteers crack before the faux mission’s scheduled conclusion on November 5, 2011?

Source: Wired
Published: Oct 21, 2011
Length: 16 minutes (4,136 words)

Obama Is From Mars, Wall Street Is From Venus

Longreads Pick

[Not single-page] Psychoanalyzing one of America’s most dysfunctional relationships.

Published: May 22, 2010
Length: 25 minutes (6,437 words)

Mars or Bust

Longreads Pick

While the aerospace community waits for February when President Obama will announce the 2011 budget, effectively setting NASA’s direction for the near future, aerospace engineer Robert Zubrin agitates for a manned mission to Mars.

Published: Jan 1, 2010
Length: 14 minutes (3,625 words)