Brian O’Leary, Mars, and a World of Abundance
I wish that Brian had lived to see the Mars shows coming from Hollywood in the past decade.
I rarely comment on the popular culture, and usually do it to point out how it will be different in the Fifth Epoch, when scarcity and fear no longer dominate human affairs. It is time to write about Brian O’Leary and Mars a little, in conjunction with popular culture and what life can be like in the Fifth Epoch. Brian avidly read Wernher von Braun’s articles on space exploration as a child, Mars was always von Braun’s ultimate goal, and NASA hired Brian as an astronaut, at von Braun’s behest, with Mars in mind. Being the first human officially asked/ordered to go to another planet was Brian’s unique distinction. Soon before Brian died in 2011, sending people to Mars became a cultural phenomenon, and Brian joked that he might finally get his chance at age 90. In the years since then, I have happened upon a number of humans-on-Mars shows, such as The Martian, The Expanse, and my wife and I finished watching all of the existing shows of For All Mankind last night. Because I was a space brat who lived in Houston, For All Mankind resonated on a few levels with me, and some scenes took me back nearly 60 years. I’ll go to my grave with vivid memories of my visit to my father’s “office” – the mission control room – so seeing it in every episode of For All Mankind was poignant.
For starters, they are all Hollywood productions, which always take liberties with reality to make the plots more dramatic. The Expanse might have been the most faithful to actual Mars conditions. At 1% of Earth’s atmospheric density, Mars never has the kind of dust storm depicted in The Martian that stranded Matt Damon’s character, for instance, and I sympathize with the technical problems with depicting the low gravity of the Moon and Mars compared to Earth in For All Mankind. That said, Eugene Cernan was a fan of The Martian (“Duct tape – don’t leave Earth without it”), and I will always wonder how Brian would have reacted to these Mars shows. I wish that he had lived to see them. Brian was a pioneer in advocating space colonies and mining asteroids, so For All Mankind in particular was right down Brian’s alley. I am amazed at how realistic Hollywood’s special effects have become. Several years ago, I was no longer able to distinguish them from reality.
Of the many technical issues that I had with those shows, probably the leading one is that we are not going to colonize Mars with chemical rockets. Elon Musk recently said that current costs of going to Mars are 10,000 times greater than what is practical for colonizing Mars, and that is all about energy. Without the free-energy and antigravity technologies that are older than I am, colonizing Mars will not be feasible. I am well aware of the conspiracist scuttlebutt that there already is a base on Mars, and I’ll await the day that robust evidence of that becomes publicly available, if I live that long.
I guess that since those shows were all based on chemical rockets, it is somewhat understandable that all of them were firmly placed in the Fourth Epoch, with its attendant scarcity and fear. Even Star Trek never really escaped it, with command structures, resource wars, and the like.
The Fifth Epoch, as I envision it, will look nothing like those shows, as they were all mired in scarcity, and energy scarcity in particular. The world will end as we know it with the arrival of free-energy and antigravity technology for public use, and I have never seen one Hollywood production that gives some justice to that idea. Star Trek, the Next Generation, probably came the closest that I have seen. Probably the closest thing that I have seen to what I envision the Fifth Epoch to be is Michael Roads’s visit to a future Earth in which its inhabitants chose love. I know psychonauts who have taken similar journeys, so I do not regard Roads’s account to be fiction, but he depicted a reality that awaits those who choose love. Enlightenment as humanity has never known will come with it. My life’s work is about helping humanity get there.