( music playing )
- Uh-oh. - Ow, ow, ow, ow.
The pain. Ready? Ah!
We're in the middle
of an ancient lake basin,
that scientists think
is one of the most Martian places on Earth.
And we're stuck.
We're stuck here because I had a question.
NASA says the first humans
will set foot on Mars in the mid-2030s.
It will be the most dangerous mission
any human has ever taken.
My question is, what comes after that?
Mars!
Not how do we get there,
but how do we survive, once we do?
( music playing )
Okay, here we go.
We've been dreaming about Mars for hundreds of years.
In the 1870s,
Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli
mapped channels he saw on Mars.
In Italian, channels are
The word was mistranslated into English as "canals,"
implying deliberate construction and flowing water.
Other scientists published their own maps,
feeding this obsession with the idea
that Mars could be a lot like Earth.
People were skeptical, but they sort of wanted it to be true.
It became a public obsession.
The L.A. Times ran this piece in 1907.
And I just love this headline in the New York Times.
They're just reporting on this stuff
as though there are Martians.
This article includes a bit of reasoning.
People just want to believe.
The movies they made in the early 1900s
depict a Mars that's not just habitable,
but inviting.
1918-- this is a silent film.
A couple of guys get to Mars and, oh, surprise--
they find a ton of beautiful women.
They don't hate it.
-
We got a spot like this three miles from my hometown.
1952.
Look at the canals.
This isn't so different than sci-fi today.
But without any real pictures of Mars,
there was still this sense of possibility.
Maybe, just maybe,
Mars would be something like home.
And then this happens.
In 1965, and then again in 1969,
NASA sent spacecraft to fly by Mars
and send back scientific measurements
and close-up photographs.
But the pictures of Mars
showed a world of total desolation.
There were no canals,
no cities, no areas of cultivation.
No possibility of life.
I can't imagine how devastating
that must have been.
I've only ever lived in a time
when we had pictures of Mars.
Those images were concrete proof
that Mars wasn't going to be the second home
that some kind of still hoped for.
But we never stopped obsessing about life on Mars.
♪ Is there life on Mars? ♪
That YouTube clip, David Bowie's music video for "Life On Mars,"
had its highest view-day
when Mars was visible in the night sky
in January 2019.
We're still looking up at the Red Planet
and wondering about life surviving there.
So let me show you what we actually now know about Mars.
( music playing )
We're about to head out into that desert,
because we're accompanying astrobiologist Kennda Lynch
as she does research into extremophiles,
which are microbial life that live in, well,
extreme environments like this one.
And we're going to ride those ATVs,
and I've never ridden one before.
- Uh-oh. - Yeah, we're going to have to stop.
- Nah, he's stuck. Yep. - We'll get out.
Cleo: Since we're stuck, I'm going to tell you
a little bit about where we are.
This place is one of the closest analogs that we have
to the type of environment that Mars used to have.
Mars was once a wet planet.
It had liquid water on its surface.
When all that water went away,
Mars still had an abundance of groundwater that stayed liquid,
and we still think it might be there
in the deep subsurface today-- very, very deep.
So this is a good model for us to understand
how life would've survived in this kind of environment on Mars.
- Cleo: It certainly looks Martian. - Yeah.
Hey, Camille, you want to get some gloves on?
- We're going to do some science here. - All right.
So we're just going to go ahead and take a nice surface core
so we can actually do some really heavy DNA extraction
and look at who's living in these sediments and what they're eating.
And what is it about the microbes that are living in these sediments
and what they're eating that makes it useful for,
potentially, humans to survive on a place like Mars?
Well, if we can understand how life survives on Mars,
then we can understand how better to survive ourself.
We're trying to study these microbes called perchlorate reducers.
On this perchlorate, it's a chlorine molecule
surrounded by four oxygen molecules.
It's toxic to humans, and Mars has a lot of perchlorate.
The number one thing we want to use on Mars is water on Mars,
and perchlorate likes to go wherever there's water.
So we're going to have to figure out how to get the perchlorate
out of the water if we want to use that water.
It would help us to learn how microbes can kind of mitigate
things like perchlorate, and maybe we can use that knowledge to help us
detox the resources that we want
to pull out and use from the Mars environment.
We want to live within the environment of Mars.
We want to utilize resources on Mars to help us live,
because we can't take everything we need with us.
Okay, so Kennda's research will help us
use Martian materials to survive on Mars.
But the soil isn't the first thing
that would kill us when we get there.
Hey.
Ooh.
This is Mars today.
It's about half the size of Earth.
But it has all of the basics
that we think are necessary to support life.
It has an energy source from sunlight, water,
it has ice on the poles.
And it has a few key elements--
carbon, nitrogen, hydrogen, oxygen.
But for us, there's a slightly crucial piece that's missing.
Mars' atmosphere is about one percent as dense as Earth's,
meaning that if you stood on the surface of Mars,
the pressure exerted on you by the atmosphere would be very low.
Now, that might not sound so bad, but it's a big problem.
This is the boiling point of water
as a function of atmospheric pressure.
Okay, so the more pressure,
- the higher the boiling point. - Exactly.
Earth is here.
- Joss: Water boils at 212 degrees Fahrenheit. - Correct.
- And that's at sea level. - At sea level.
That works out great for us
because our resting body temperature
is about 98.6 degrees
- Joss: I know that from a gum commercial. - ( Cleo laughs )
This gap keeps us alive.
- Mars is here. - Whoa!
What this is telling us is that because the temperature
at which water boils on Mars
is significantly lower than our average body temperature,
if you stood on Mars, the water inside of your body
would just start to spontaneously boil inside of you.
- Oh, no! - Which sounds like a really painful way to die.
That's why you need a suit, right?
That's why you need a suit.
The next thing that's going to kill you is the air itself,
because there's not enough oxygen for you to breathe.
And if you didn't suffocate, you'd freeze.
Mars is really cold.
The average temperature on Mars
is -81 degrees Fahrenheit.
Oh, jeez.
So you're freezing, but your blood's boiling
and you can't breathe.
- Yes. Exactly. - Cool.
- Cool. - Let's do it.
Short-term survival in these conditions
is a tough engineering problem,
but NASA's pretty convinced that we can do it.
Basically, they say that we can protect ourselves
as long as we live in enclosed environments
and only go outside in space suits,
kind of like in the movie "The Martian."
You gotta science the ( bleep ) out of it.
There's a lot of radiation on Mars,
and one of the theories is that we could protect ourselves
- by living underground. - Does radiation go through the domes?
- Ideally, not. - Okay.
I asked NASA scientist Chris McKay
about our chances for short-term survival.
Really nice to meet you. Thanks for taking the time.
- I'll just dive right in. - Yeah, please.
How do we know that we can do the short-term survival on Mars?
We've done experiments on space station
where we've put astronauts in space for a year,
which is roughly the time it takes to get to Mars.
So, we're not at the hundred percent confidence level,
but we're pretty sure that we could tough it out,
send a crew to Mars.
They could survive the long trip.
They'd be functional on the surface for some period of time.
It wouldn't necessarily be easy, but it would be doable.
We think all the pieces as we understand are in place.
It turns out the thornier question isn't what happens
after we land and plant the flag,
but how we as humans would consider
long-term survival on a planet like Mars.
And a few scientists have a pretty out-there idea
about how to do that.
There's too little oxygen, no liquid water,
and too much ultraviolet light.
But all that could be solved
if we could make more air.
Transforming the Martian environment itself,
terraforming Mars.
Eventually, you could transform Mars.
into an Earth-like planet.
- Just warm it up. - With a blanket or with what?
There's the fast way and the slow way.
Carl Sagan, Robert Zubrin, and Elon Musk
are the three most prominent figures
who think we can survive on a barren planet like Mars
by changing it into something more like Earth-- terraforming it.
Proponents of this idea say it's a three-step process.
Step one, create the magnetosphere.
Every day, we should all thank the huge magnetic fields that surround Earth.
They make up the Earth's magnetosphere,
which is what stops deadly particle blasts from the sun,
innocuously called solar winds,
from ripping away our atmosphere.
Mars doesn't have a magnetosphere,
which is one reason why its atmosphere is so thin.
But scientists at NASA
think there might be a way to create one.
You could put a satellite that produces
a very strong magnetic field between Mars and the sun
so it protects the Martian atmosphere behind it.
Step two, build the atmosphere.
By adding carbon dioxide into the atmosphere,
you could warm up the planet by trapping infrared light,
just like carbon dioxide is doing in our atmosphere here on Earth.
The question is where those extra greenhouse gases would come from.
Well, there's some carbon dioxide
trapped in the ground and the polar ice caps on Mars.
What Elon Musk means by "the fast way"
is to drop nuclear weapons just above the pole on Mars.
But other experts don't believe there's enough
carbon dioxide trapped there for that to work.
So, "the slow way," proposed by people like Robert Zubrin,
is to build factories that release artificial greenhouse gases
to cause the same warming effect.
Step three, release the bacteria.
Once we have magnetic fields and C02 in the atmosphere,
we could release bacteria that absorb
some of the nutrients that are on Mars
and release oxygen into the atmosphere.
We already know this step would work.
This is how large amounts of oxygen
got into Earth's atmosphere billions of years ago.
Then we wait somewhere between
a few hundred and a few thousand years.
I've been studying terraforming for quite some time.
I think it's a very interesting idea.
We know how to warm up planets.
We're doing it on Earth.
The physics turns out to be easy.
That's a surprise to most people,
and it was a surprise to me when I first worked it out.
"Wow, we actually can warm up Mars."
That's the good news.
The bad news is we're not sure
that there's enough stuff on Mars to make a plan.
We have to go to Mars and find out.
Is there enough C02? Is there enough water?
Is there enough nitrogen to create a biosphere?
How do you feel about the idea of terraforming?
Um... ( chuckles )
It's an interesting idea in theory,
but in reality, I think we're several,
several, several generations away
from dynamically changing an entire planet.
Just because life surviving on Mars is possible,
doesn't mean it's going to be easy.
Because especially with humans
things can always go wrong.
( all shouting )
( music playing )
- What's up, Cleo? - Hello.
- Where are you? - Can you see it?
Christophe: Oh, wow! That's incredible!
- That's the Biosphere? - That's the Biosphere.
- Now I gotta go inside. - Okay, you gotta--
Bye, Christophe!
I've enlisted Christophe to explain why we're here.
From 1984 to 1991, this billionaire, Ed Bass,
spent about $150 million on creating this facility
that would kind of act as a proof of concept
for a self-sustaining habitat on Mars.
Margaret Augustine:
you need to have a total life-system,
and that's what the Biosphere 2 project is all about.
( wind blowing )
This is how they circulate
and condition the air in the facility.
Christophe:
Biosphere 1 is Earth.
Newscaster:
so-called "biospherians,"
to be sealed inside for the next two years.
Bon voyage! Fly your spaceship well.
Once they were inside, it seems like a million things went wrong.
They ran out of food. They ran out of oxygen.
The press was calling this a disaster.
One of the women, Jane Poynter,
actually had to leave and then come back
because she cut off the top of her finger.
Cleo's about to go talk to her.
The thing that I think is most important about Biosphere,
is not the technology that they came up with.
It's not, um, you know, exactly what they ate.
It's the things that the biospherians needed
that weren't food and air
and the stuff that we already assume that we need.
So we're going to go talk to them about
what their experience was like at Biosphere
and why they've kept this mission their whole lives.
Let's air ourselves out.
Every time we record on camera,
we have to turn the air-conditioning off,
and it's so hot.
Jesus!
"Please enter."
- Hello! Nice to meet you. - Hi, how are you? I'm Jane.
- How are you? I'm Cleo. - Hi.
Cleo:
are two of the original eight biospherians.
And after they left Biosphere, they kept this mission
to help people get to and survive on Mars.
We made thousands of thousands of small Biospheres about this big.
Taber: When we figured out how to make these little ecosystems stable,
which was a lot of what we learned from Biosphere 2,
we sent little systems to the Mir Space Station
and we bred the first animals,
those little aquatic animals,
through a complete life-cycle in space.
When I went into the Biosphere, I was very naive.
And I thought-- my experience to that point had shown me
that when you put a small group of people together,
in a fairly difficult environment,
they pull together,
and I thought that's what we were going to do.
No, not so much.
Taber: There we are...
- There we are, except not quite. - ...in our world.
Jane: These aren't the fancy suits, though.
- Oh, they aren't the fancy suits? - No, no, no.
These are the pre-fancy suits.
Oh, these are the jumpsuits.
Jane:
of psychology that NASA has done a lot of work in
called isolated and confined environment psychology.
And we were a textbook case of what not to do.
One of the worst things you can do
is have a team of eight.
The reason is because it breaks down
into factions of four and four
which are extremely stable.
-
it's really hard to describe to somebody
what is that experience
of living in an isolated environment.
So, part of the training
is simply to deal with your personal baggage
so it doesn't become how you interact
with your other crew members, right?
So that was what you start to see happening,
was you start projecting, you know,
that's my sister, my brother, whatever, onto all these--
and the interactions go crazy
because you're carrying this stuff in your head.
Cleo:
that locked people in and taught us about human behavior.
There was one in Hawaii called High Seas,
one in Utah called The Mars Desert Research Station,
one in Russia called Mars 500.
But those experiments were much smaller
and people stayed there for much shorter periods of time.
- I interviewed Chris McKay at NASA. - Oh, yeah, for sure.
And he told me Biosphere 2 is one of the most ambitious projects of its kind.
- Yeah. - And he said there hasn't
been anything done like it since.
- It's true. - Why do you think that is?
You have to think really long-term
before you need a biosphere.
Taber:
have problems for six months.
But after about six months you're like,
"I'm only a quarter of the way through this?"
That's just going to Mars and back fast in two years, right?
So, I'm afraid we're lulling ourselves
into thinking that this isn't such a big deal
when the human psychology of it and getting that right
and getting that team to work right is really, really important.
Cleo:
how to meet all of those human needs.
After all, it's the hardest, longest, most ambitious trip
our species has ever taken.
And it turns out that NASA is actually paying attention to our psychological needs
just like they're paying attention to our physical needs,
and that's because they have to.
They've noticed the same psychological problems
in some astronauts that the biospherians noticed
when they were inside their airtight facility.
So I'm going to play you this clip.
This is astronaut Henry Hartsfield
describing an experience in space
in a 2001 interview.
So, did you-- did you hear what he said?
He was going to open the hatch.
Well, he was just obsessed with the fact
- that one could open the hatch, right? - Yeah.
It's kind of like the feeling
if you're standing on a subway platform
and you're like, "I could push this person."
- Yeah. - I never have that feeling.
Oh, I think about that all the time.
Or being the person pushed. I think about that.
In 2001, which is the same year as that interview,
NASA and Russian NASA, which is called Roscosmos,
came up with this enormous medical checklist
for what to do in various crises in space.
And it turns out-- actually, do you have the highlighter?
- Yes. - It turns out that psychosis
is the second one on the list.
Oh, wow.
Behavioral acute psychosis emergency.
This is page one of three.
"Restrain patient using gray tape around wrists,
- ankles, and using a bungee around the torso." - Whoa!
- Yeah. Yeah. - That's intense.
That's full, like, kidnapping protocol.
Full kidnapping.
"Administer 10 mg of Haldol orally."
So, Haldol is a potent tranquilizer.
And the thing that I find so interesting about this
isn't exactly what you do,
but the fact that they find this so important
in the first place.
And that really surprised me.
I went to Utah and I learned
about how toxins in the soil are something
we're going to need to figure out if we want to survive on Mars.
I talked to Joss and we talked about
how your blood is going to boil
if you stand on the surface of Mars.
And now I find out that actually the thing
that might be most dangerous to us
is just ourselves on a mission like this.
But at the same time, even though I learned all of that,
I also learned that there are possible solutions
to every single one,
and I think that's a pretty good reason to try.
Chris:
Humans will explore Mars. That much we already know.
Whether we will stay there on the long-term
is a question that we have to answer by trying.
Cleo:
we could have a role to play in a mission for survival
that's much, much bigger than just us.
Chris:
the thing that looks like
it could be basis of value
and goodness in the universe is life.
It's the most amazing phenomenon we know.
We're the only species within that domain of life
that can comprehend the concept of planets in space,
so maybe we have a role to play.
Kennda:
I see everything that we're doing now as preparing for humans to get there.
That's almost the essence of life, is to spread to new habitats.
So, it seems like we're just doing what we're supposed to do.
Cleo: And when it comes to Mars, at least as far as we know,
we're the only species that can.
( music playing )
Here we go.
- Man: You getting hot? - Yeah.
- Oh, no! - Oh, let's go!
Go, go, go, go, go.
- Okay. - All right.
- Let's get-- - Yeah!
We're going to probably--
We were not meant to survive out here,
but we did. We did it.