Today I am visiting the 'Moving to Mars' exhibition at the Design Museum. For all my exhibition gallivanting, this is my first time visiting this particular gallery. It's a very cubic building, with a rocket parked outside, so all-in-all, pretty difficult to miss as a venue.
The first room is a wall-full of astronomical titbits such as a description of something called Restrospection, which is the fact Mars appears to move further east each night but once every two years it appears to move back again. There's also some stuff I'm not smart enough to understand and some other stuff I'm too easily distracted to even attempt to understand.
Shortly thereafter we find ourselves in a room with a large screen depicting the red, rocky landscape of mars. The screen talks us through the better known mountains and craters in the landscape as well as the talking us through the general martian atmosphere.
Education in this room included: Earths atmosphere is comprised largely of nitrogen and oxygen while Mars' atmosphere is predominantly carbon dioxide and is both toxic and radioactive to us. It has a lower gravity, which means we would be able to throw further and jump higher etc on its surface, but the impact upon our muscles and heart would be catastrophic. As it's atmosphere is thinner Mars' weather is considerably colder, there is no surface water (although there is evidence that there used to be, and there are still some few locations of ice under the surface) violent wind storms are frequent and the rocky landscape is covered by an icing-sugar-fine dust called Regolith. Because it is so fine it damages our equipment by getting into those little crevices despite our best attempts.
Now that we have been educated on where Mars is and what it is like, the following room discusses what it is like to be an astronaut in space. Because there is no gravity, anything that isnt bolted down floats. The astronauts themselves float so easily that there is no sense of up or down. A circular table is provided for them to share their meals at to give a sense of normality and equality among a small team. Food rations now come in just about every kind of flavour but continue to come in the form of squirty tubes. 3 hours of strict exercise is rota'd every day to counter the muscle wastage that is otherwise inevitable in an atmosphere where muscles are no longer used as readily as they are down in our gravity.
The next room discuses what is to be found in Mars once we move there.
Because Mars has no protective magnetosphere against the sun, the atmosphere is radioactive. The carbon dioxide makes it toxic to breathe. Consequently we would be resigned to full body suits and completely sealed architecture. Because Mars is approximately 246 million miles away from Earth and it would take anything from 150 to 300 days for us to travel there each time with our current technology, it would be better to build from the resources available on Mars than to transport them from Earth. Therefore the range of proposed building structures (some models displayed at this exhibition) mostly centre around the the Martian dust (Regolith) bound with sulphur, which is also common on Mars.
Once the external architecture is considered, the next section considers the internal components of Martian living. Various methods of closed loop systems making sustainable use of waste are being carefully considered and plants figure very heavily into the converting carbon dioxide back into breathable oxygen, as well as providing a sustainable food crop. One of the fore-running architectural designs is a system of identically shaped circular modular rooms, each fitted with customisable 'bookcases' that wheel around the perimeter of the room, tailored to the requirements of the room. An example of the interior of such a room is set up near the end of the exhibition, next to a wall sized monitor 'window' showing a future martian landscape.
The exhibition ends at a video discussion on whether the move to Mars should be considered or whether our time and resources are better spent on making a future on preserving our future on Earth. A number of views are made, but I - and I hope others too - fall more into the camp that Earth automatically has all the resources we require to thrive, while Mars would be hard-ass work just to survive at a fundamental level, and that all energies should go into the preservation of Earth.
I caught this one early, so nabbed myself a 'Pioneer's Ticket' at £10.50 rather than the full £16 entrance fee. At this price I felt the exhibition was well worth a fly-by. At the full £16.00 as I understand it to be, I consider the price to be a wee bit disproportionate, but it was an interesting couple of hours out most certainly.
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