Mars Calling: Manifest Destiny or Grand Illusion

a familiar looking landscape rich with resources some believe Mars is the next home for Humanity a frontier of freedom and prosperity and a backup copy of civilization in case of disaster here on earth but the real Red Planet is a trickster with a long history of fooling us once thought a mythic place of exotic intelligent creatures the true Mars is a failing world much colder than Antarctica bone-dry with a harsh toxic landscape we may soon have the means to get there but will we live there [Music] for thousands of years Mars has been trying to tell us something Earth and Mars come closest together every 780 days or so called a planetary opposition it's the best time to observe the Red Planet [Music] which appears to slow down backtrack then speed forward again puzzled by this capricious motion Egyptians skywatchers personified members as a hawk headed human rated deity flying back and forth between the realms of the living and the dead [Music] Babylonian astrologers believe Mars to be a quick impulsive volatile God observing the moon pass in front of the Red Planet Aristotle deduces that Mars must be higher up and farther away than the moon but he would have been surprised by how much Mars is about two hundred times more distant chemical rockets that take around three days to get to the moon [Music] would take nearly seven months to reach Mars future nuclear thermal rockets could cut that to less than three months [Music] but even that is a very long time to spend confined in a spacecraft far from Earth even with comfort foods along and you can't just return home in a few hours if there's a problem [Music] astronauts in microgravity must exercise often bones become brittle heart muscle gets lazy [Music] how will Mars 1/3 gravity affect human health over the long term Greek mathematician and astrologer Claudius Ptolemy proposes that martyrs and the other four wandering stars must circle earth on a set of spheres around 850 ad Islamic astronomers begin to find problems with Ptolemies epicycles but it will take another seven centuries for the truth to surface in Europe in 1543 Copernicus of Poland finally puts the Sun at the centre of motion now Mars looping behavior makes sense [Music] wealthy obsessive Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe he likes Copernicus geometry but can't quite let go of tunnel Tycho insists the mass of Earth is too lazy to orbit [Music] but massive world's do move in the early solar system Jupiter may have moved toward the Sun as far as Mars present-day orbit gobbling much of the inner solar nebulas dust and gas robbing Mars of its potential the stunted planet could grow to only about half Earth's diameter and barely 11% its mess Tycho is a compulsive data taker but it will fall to his research assistant Johannes Kepler to make sense of Tycho's numbers Kepler bets a friend he can plot Mars orbit in one week after five years and forty attempts he finds that all planetary orbits are elliptical putting the last nail in the coffin of Ptolemies crystal spheres within spheres as the early solar system evolves Jupiter and Saturn displaced billions of tons of icy rocks flinging them inward a deluge of debris lasting three million years the late heavy bombardment today the high country of Mars southern hemisphere has one very large hole punched in it the helis basin the third largest impact crater in the solar system its floor lies ten kilometers below the heights of a nearby south polar cap but Mars may have been hit by something even bigger near its opposite Pole as you fly from south to north the height of the landscape sinks seen here going from red and orange highlands down to green and blue valleys Mars whole northern hemisphere is a sunken ellipse draping over 40% of the planet if this is an impact site the incoming object would have been about the size of dwarf planet Pluto [Music] it would have totally remade Mars possibly shutting off its internal dynamo erasing its protective magnetic field and killing the chances for a life-sustaining atmosphere Galileo Galilei makes the first telescopic observation of Mars he says he's afraid it isn't round Francesco Fontana creates the first known drawing of the planet saying it looks like a very black pill probably due to flawed lenses in his spyglass the Dutch brothers Chris John and Constantin Huygens are innovating better optics Christian sketches an irregular mark on martyrs living in the wetlands of Holland he thinks it looks like a big balk so it becomes known as the Great Marsh syrtis major Huygens uses that shape to measure Mars day length finding it to be about the same as earth's giovanni domenico cassini refines that figure to 24 hours plus 40 minutes very close to what astronomers measure today he also logs the first observation of Mars south polar cap drawn here by his friend Huygens Cassini imagines that Mars is similar to earth [Music] three billion years ago Mars may indeed have been earth-like volcanoes building the atmosphere steam and mist and flowing water filling early oceans with more fluid than the Arctic Ocean on earth the first Mars rover little Sojourner the Pathfinder lands in the outflow of what must have been cataclysmic flood [Music] the Mars exploration Rovers Spirit and Opportunity find stacked strata of rock laid down by flowing water over thousands of years and little rounded iron-rich concretions nicknamed blueberries that formed in cavities of silt under salty water but is there any water near the surface of modern Mars in 2008 NASA's Phoenix finds evidence soft landing in the high northern latitudes it's rocket plumes blow away surface dust exposing some white material the little probe digs a shallow trench revealing more it disappears in a day proving it was water ice [Music] and on the Landers legs drops of liquid appear then change the Mars Science Lab Curiosity rolls through dry stream beds between the banks of ancient water courses and across fans at the mouths of long-dead rivers the robot geologist sees a range of layered landscapes each was built by episodes of flowing mud with dry times in between today's Mars seems a lifeless desert a lonely landscape crying out for company Elon Musk's space exploration company hopes to end Mars long isolation SpaceX begins building a constellation of satellites eventually numbering almost 12,000 orbiting unusually close to earth to move data much faster than today's wired internet and to raise money for making life multiplanetary though christiaan huygens has died his final book cosmos the arrows will excite future generations Huygens argues that the moon and planets Harbor intelligent beings [Music] but do the other planetary worlds of our solar system truly have what it takes to be habitable the moon is rich in aluminum titanium silicon and magnesium asteroids add carbon cobalt platinum molybdenum nickel and other elements Mars has all of these plus abundant iron and many other metals especially near its enormous volcanoes but the key is water it can be split to make breathable oxygen and hydrogen fuel the Mars 2020 Rover will test this idea it'll breathe in carbon dioxide and electro chemically break out oxygen to see if rocket propellant and life support can be made on Mars water from beneath the surface and carbon dioxide from its atmosphere can be rearranged to make methane and oxygen burn the methane using that oxygen and you can launch rockets make that propellant on Mars and you can drop the cost of getting back to Earth by a factor of at least five exactly what SpaceX has committed itself to do [Music] to conjure up space-based civilization launched only what you need to live off the land tools and talent and factories and power generators if everything for space has to be built in pieces on earth then trucked up from the bottom of our deep gravity well and tediously fit together on orbit we'll never get anywhere Giacomo Filippo morality guesses that dark rings around Mars poles might be melted material could the poles be ice caps 80 years later Friedrich Wilhelm Herschel declares yes Mars poles are water ice and he thinks the broad dark equatorial patches are oceans the large syrtis major feature has come to be called the hourglass see Herschel and his contemporaries dream of what it might be like to sail these waters [Music] Mars may have lost its oceans long before life on earth emerged the northern desert lowlands the flattest terrain on any planet or moon look like the floor of an ancient sea up to four kilometers deep Mars polar ocean may have covered 1/3 of the planet in 1785 Herschel speculates that Martians probably enjoy a situation similar to our own but he reports Mars atmosphere must be very thin it is thin the planet is enveloped in sparse carbon dioxide there's very little water in the air but there's plenty not far under the crust Mars also makes tiny amounts of methane which could be coming from hot geology [Music] but those methane levels seem to bloom in certain seasons and that has a lot of experts wondering might there be life below the surface Johann hieronymus shredder believes Mars has no solid surface at all just drifting clouds and Misty Rain he thinks he sees sweeping atmospheric changes right before his eyes Schroders shifting scene probably is due to an atmosphere but it's the unstable air of Earth above his telescope that has spoiled his seeing the true story of Mars atmosphere is becoming clearer go back at least a billion years intense ultraviolet radiation from the Sun and the sputtering solar wind are bombarding the small planet with its low gravity and frail global magnetic field Mars can't hold on to its protective gas envelope most of its air and much of its water are lost to space back in 1830 however none of this tragic history is yet known Johann Heinrich modeler and vilhelm beard make the first truly accurate Mars maps they placed their longitude zero line through a feature that will later be named sinus Meridiani Meridian Bay [Music] the Mars rover Opportunity is working there right now in images Mars looks like a picturesque desert it's easy to imagine yourself standing there gazing at the intricately weathered rocks nearly everywhere you look you see evidence of past liquid water though there are no oceans today there's plenty of ice the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter records eroded cliff faces exposing compacted water ice in some places more than 100 meters thick on passes over the poles Amaro's radar reveals up to two kilometers of ice it seems to have been laid down in layers [Music] does Mars climate cycle between warm and cool orbiting spacecraft have watched dark streaks appear over time usually on the steeper slopes of craters they look just like desert gullies on earth the markings change with Mars seasons many researchers thought they might be flowing salty water new analysis suggests at least the larger ones are dry streams of rounded sand grains tumbling over one another flowing like liquid in the low gravity of Mars but the small ones seem truly wet another slippery Mars paradox [Music] astronomer Camille Flammarion picks up the intelligent alien torch and runs with it eventually publishing eight books on the topic the plurality of inhabited worlds becomes an all-time bestseller with the publication of Charles Darwin's origin of the species from a tree all has realized that differing conditions on various planets should cause creatures on them to be unlike those of Earth the building blocks of life are in fact plentiful on Mars curiosity has found abundant oxygen carbon nitrogen phosphorus and sulfur as well as complex organic macromolecules clay minerals would have filtered salts and harsh compounds from the primeval flowing waters many microbes now living on earth would likely have survived on early Mars [Music] but no photos fossils or chemical evidence of life as yet turned up [Music] the Vatican becomes concerned about the state of grace of the marshal's father Pietro Angelo secchi of the Roman College Observatory starts to charge where they might live it gives the hourglass sea a new name calling it the atlantic canal that word simply means channel say Qi intends no reference to intelligent design but his turn can a delay will cause much confusion in the coming decades over in England astronomer William Dawes is making Mars maps of his own he's extremely nearsighted but his charts are more detailed than any made before smelling a great story science writer Richard Anthony Procter blasts the Dawes maps out to the public [Music] the Suez Canal is completed in November of 1869 making news around the world the Panama Canal is being planned many people make a connection between the straight canal e on Mars Maps and these great works of engineering on earth there are in fact many ancient water channels all over Mars but there's no evidence of technology in their shapes Mars comes once more into opposition but this time many new telescopes are pointed at it one belongs to Nathaniel Greene on the island of Madeira an artist by day an astronomer by night Greene paints the most accurate Mars chart yet over in America the self-taught astronomer Asaph Hall sees something no one else has two tiny movements fobos and damos may be bits of Mars flung into orbit by giant impacts long ago or they may be asteroids captured by the planets gravity as Mars comes close within 56 million kilometers of Earth Giovanni Schiaparelli is ready though he like Dawes is nearsighted and colorblind chaparral II is able to extract more from the telescope than others heetu calls the lines he sees on Mars Canali and he gives them whimsical names from classical literature like Pyrrhus Cerberus and piri Phlegethon labels still used by Mars mappers today why are some Mars opposition's closer than others while Earth's orbit around the Sun is nearly circular Mars orbit is much more elliptical only Mercury's is more eccentric during Mars southern ottoman winter that hemisphere is tipped away from the Sun and the whole planet is farther away making those seasons longer and colder another close opposition and Schiaparelli comes to believe he's seen pairs of straight Canali [Music] Harvard College Observatory director William Henry Pickering declares the canals of Mars are only rendered visible by plants growing along their banks and the surrounding lap any science-based speculation about large engineering projects by smart Martians will die abruptly on the night of July 14th 1965 as NASA's Mariner 4 flies by Mars in the probes 21 images Mars looks much more like the moon than the earth and worse Mariner can't find a protective magnetic field harsh solar wind and cosmic radiations scour the planet it's hard to imagine how even primitive plant life could survive here and water seems to have flowed only in the ancient past back in 1892 Camille Flammarion has filled his imaginary Martian canals with water speculating maybe the rectification of old rivers by the inhabitants for the purpose of general water distribution and the actual habitation of Mars by beings superior to our own is very probable Pickering adds fuel to flow Maryland's fire asserting that he has seen 40 lakes at about the same time a wealthy world traveling American diplomat is feeling like he needs a career change and a personal passion project Percival Lowell has read Flammarion books and he makes plans to look for Martians during the coming opposition of 1894 Pickering helps Lowell ring two telescopes on a hilltop in Flagstaff Arizona the new Lowell Observatory is trained on Mars all summer long at the telescope Lowell sees what he believes and sketches a complex irrigation system transporting billions of gallons of melted polar snow to equatorial desert oasis the irrigated agriculture projects of an advanced race but during the same opposition Edward Barnard wielding the California lick observatories larger refracting telescope cannot find a single straight line anywhere on Mars and when the licks William Campbell examines Mars with a spectroscope he sees not a trace of water in the atmosphere English astronomer Edward maunder demonstrates how straight lines on Mars could be optical illusions undeterred Percival Lowell Sprint's across America on a lecture to promoting his book named simply martyrs a story thirsty public buys his tales of Martian water works by the thousands the real Mars is a parched planet though tilted rocks tell us there were lakes here long ago with no liquid water to irrigate plants and no plants to hold the soil dust devils swirl across the barren terrain Curtin's of desiccated grit sweep up into the hazy sky from rugged Canyon cliffs sandy landslides garnished steep crater walls and clump on the floors Percival Lowell begins observing with an even bigger refractor but still cannot see his glaring error Lowell will carry on for 20 more years inventing over 450 canals with vegetation he pictures a desperate civilization bravely combating global climate change as their dying world cries to a planetary desert in fact Mars climate did change radically but it happened long before Lowell's time without a large moon to stabilize it Mars wobbles tens of degrees over hundreds of thousands of years much more radically than earth when Mars points a pole toward the Sun billions of tons of co2 are released unleashing a box of greenhouse warming melting subsurface ice flooding the planet HG Wells publishes War of the Worlds a dying race of Martians wants to conquer earth to make it more like Mars [Music] in 1976 earth will send two Viking landers not to subjugate but to investigate [Music] they will find very active intriguing surface chemistry [Music] but no obvious life [Music] [Music] but back in 1905 at Lowell Observatory Carl lamp 'land claims he's photographed thirty-eight canals [Music] Alfred Russel Wallace who originated the idea that natural selection drives evolution realizes that craters observed on Mars must be the impact sites of large meteorites Rovers opportunity and curiosity finds several small impactors sitting right on the surface [Music] these rocks from the sky tell a story of a planet with a thick atmosphere long ago at the muda Observatory near Paris Eugene and Tony Adi realizes there are no straight canals on mars american novelist edgar rice burroughs releases the first of his 11 volume tale depicting heroic john carter on a fictional Mars the desert planet Barsoom a century later Disney director Andrew Stanton will bring it to the screen curiosities Mars is a desert world too the rover tricks around a wide field of dark sand dunes rolling like waves on an ocean the sandy mounds slowly migrate across the landscape [Music] [Applause] [Music] Mount Wilson Observatory astronomers measure surface temperatures on Mars finding them to swing wildly they range from 15 degrees Celsius at midday to minus 85 degrees Celsius just before sunrise Russian filmmaker Yakov protozoan makes Aelita an earth man flies by rocket to lead a revolt against the rulers of Mars and win the love of the Martian Queen [Music] but the prospects for civilization on the planet grow dim as astronomer Walters Sydney Adams can find only vanishingly tiny quantities of oxygen and water in the Martian atmosphere at Yerkes Observatory 13 years later Gerard Kuiper detects abundant carbon dioxide rocket pioneer Wernher von Braun rights project Mars it's a sci-fi novel a full of factual engineering [Music] gray Bradbury's Martian Chronicles puts a human colony on Mars to escape a nuclear war devastated earth through the rocketship XM it's a stranded astronaut crew against Stone Age humanism remnants of a Martian global nuclear war [Music] the first thermonuclear bomb is tested in the same year von braun publishes das mars project a comprehensive technical workup for a large-scale space program that will become the blueprint for NASA's Mercury Gemini [Music] and Apollo projects in 1955 Paramount Pictures releases conquest of space it too is based on von braun's planetary plans I can give you a confounded little reason for this attempt to reach Mars and no assurance at all that it will even be successful at Los Alamos National Lab Project Rover begins it's an effort to harness nuclear fission to drive spaceships at constant thrust [Music] project Orion a different approach to nuclear rockets starts testing hardware the idea is to detonate atomic bombs behind a ship to push it along it's called post plasma-wave propulsion [Music] outrageous as it seems this method could offer rapid transport to Mars and the rest of the solar system the u.s. nuclear engine for rocket vehicle application Nerva program accumulates 17 hours of live engine test time it raises hopes for Mars missions and moon bases [Music] in the Soviet Union engineers are working on nuclear thermal rockets of their own Soviet leaders have the specific goal of making Mars a politically red planet [Music] the Soviets try several times to send probes to Mars [Music] but they get no closer than 197 thousand kilometers and achieve very little science [Music] someday a manned trip to Mars and return may become the mission assignment to answer that challenge craft Araki a visionary German American engineer introduces the idea of ganging together clusters of nuclear rockets he argues that his modular approach could bring Mars and Venus within reach as early as the 1970s Erik a passionately believes that human expansion throughout the solar system is a fundamental right and that we are at our most dignified when we apply the laws of physics to elevate and protect human freedom [Music] just days before Apollo 11s lunar landing a monstrous moon bound Soviet n1 rocket rises 200 meters only to shut down and crash completely destroying its launch it is one of the largest non-nuclear explosions that humans have ever made the n1 might have ferried six cosmonauts on Mars missions lasting 630 days using nuclear-powered upper stages but when the u.s. wins the moon race the Kremlin's interest in the red planet seems to evaporate [Music] Mariner six flies within 3437 kilometers of Mars equatorial region this same year and Mariner 7 sails past Mars South Pole finding the temperature of chilly - 125 degrees Celsius with two moon landings fresh in mine the public expects NASA astronauts to go on to Mars but when Apollo 13 nearly ends in disaster President Richard Nixon fears the political consequences of another failure and tries to end the moon voyages [Music] Mariner 9 the first craft to orbit another planet finds conclusively Mars has no canals no cities no forests no as Apollo wines day no fun Brown proposes that Saturn five rockets lift the pieces of a pair of reusable nuclear-powered ships they would carry orbiters and surface expedition vehicles across the great void to Mars but Nixon shrinks the budget to only a space shuttle confining the human space program to low-earth orbit for what will turn out to be half a century in that time for United States Presidents will ask for Mars related programs [Music] but none will get much further than the planning stages there is growing suspicion among space advocates that large government space programs might be too slow and inefficient to ever get to Mars Engineers Robert Zubrin and David a Baker proposed Mars direct travel light they say and live off the land [Music] by making rocket fuel from the planet itself [Music] explorers could insure themselves a ride home [Music] by 1993 key ideas from Mars direct are finding their way into NASA's Mars design reference mission NASA will update the design for more times but consistent support for a direct affordable approach never fully materializes [Music] it's the private sectors turn the mars-1 company starts taking applications for one-way journeys to colonize the planet so called Mars to stay programs could dramatically reduce travel outlays but at what cost in human terms the big established aerospace companies prefer to bring their crews back [Music] boeing's affordable Mars mission would send a solar electric sailing ship to reconnoitre from low orbit when all is ready explorers would descend protected by an inflated aeroshell touching down like the Apollo missions to find a previously landed habitat waiting [Music] they'd return like last century's moonwalkers for the long trip home [Music] Lockheed Martin proposes a Mars orbiting base camp it's smartly built by stacking pairs of modules two habitats two tank farms two rocket propulsion units redundancy for safety far from Earth [Music] astronauts make sorties to the surface with a single-stage lander but this surface to orbit shuttlecraft doesn't depend on fuel made on Mars Elon Musk goes public with his plan to settle Mars SpaceX has been developing a big reusable booster the Falcon heavy [Music] which could launch Apollo style missions Blue Origin led by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has been quietly developing large boosters of its own blue intends nothing less than extending civilization into space [Music] Elon Musk super-sizes his already large vision SpaceX will build a big Falcon rocket it's designed to quickly fly between points on earth [Music] called massive payloads around the solar system and to transport people as many as 100 at a time to the surfaces of planets asteroids and of Mars SpaceX envisions complete terraforming of our neighbor world [Music] dream projects like these may make it to Mars but the old trickster planet lies in wait its surface is loaded with toxic caustic perchlorates the chemicals that give fireworks their bay and with a constant rain of cosmic rays and solar flares hurling highly energetic particles settlers would have to spend most of their time underground might it be better to investigate Mars through augmented reality [Music] or teleoperated robots artificial intelligence perhaps machines smart enough to terraform Mars on their own pioneers of the future could find a more comfortable planet ready-made for them [Music] in 2033 Mars will come into particularly favorable positioning for launching human exploration will we be ready to answer its call of nearly 50 missions launched to Mars more than half have failed the ones that succeeded conveyed the indelible impression of a desperate struggling planet the technically engineered salvation of this desert world as imagined by Percival Lowell may yet come to pass but if Mars is to live again it will be up to us we face a long difficult battle to reboot an entire world and Mars will no doubt change humanity even as humans change Mars [Music] [Applause] [Music]

Channel: SpaceRip

Views: 1,269,716

Rating: 4.49334 out of 5

Keywords: mars, solar system, spaceflight, curiosity, rover, percival lowell, carl sagan, orbit, rocket, h.g. wells, cassini, kepler, nasa, space rip, mars planet, mars documentary, red planet, mars calling, black hole, cosmic journeys, milky way, elon musk

Id: mrEczg72V4M

Length: 54min 1sec (3241 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 23 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/chickenandbiskets]

This format is driving me nuts.