Just to be clear here: you are correct, there are no colonies on Mars yet. Therefore I am not yet a Martian colonist. Not only have I not been to an as yet nonexistent Martian colony, I have not even been to one of the fabulous Martian colony simulators which we have here on Earth. So I am not (yet) a Martian colonist. What I AM is an applicant to Mars One, a candidate for the job of Martian colonist. I am also a thinker. I think, I ponder, I muse, and I ruminate on a wide variety of things. For the last year most of my contemplation has been about Mars and most specifically what my life will be like should I get to live there. What you are about to read are just a couple of lessons which every Martian colonist will know and which I wish very strongly that every human being on this planet knew.
I have had to make a couple of changes to my life in order to remain in the hiring process with Mars One. For example, I had to quit smoking. I should have quit long before and at many times over the years I had said that I was going to, but being a Mars One applicant moved that from the simply important category to important and urgent. I don't think it came as a big surprise to anyone who applied with Mars One that smoking would not be allowed. People don't smoke in space. There's no smoking on the ISS, there was no smoking on the Space Shuttle, and there won't be smoking in a Mars Transit Habitat. While the blame often goes to the dangers of open flame on a space ship, I believe that there is a much more important reason behind the no smoking rule and that is this:
Lesson One - Everything you do affects everyone around you. When you enclose the entire world of a group of people, all of the air, all of the water, all of everything locked up in a small space it becomes obvious that what you do affects everyone else. If I exhale smoke into the enclosed environment of a space habitat the other people living there will be breathing it soon. Best case scenario it gets filtered out in the atmospheric system and we have to change the filters sooner because of my clogging them with all of that nastiness. Because our planet is so big we seem to think that this rule doesn't apply here but we need to realize that this place we call Earth is simply a really big spaceship. Earth is an enclosed system and nothing goes away. When our factories put out large amounts of smoke it doesn't just hang in a cloud around that factory and leave everyone else alone, it spreads through the atmosphere and affects everyone who lives on the planet.
Part of planning for a Mars colony is listing all of the things that the people living there will need and getting them shipped there so that your colonists can live when they get there. The mission designers have to know how much water the colony will need and find a way to either ship it or produce it there. The same with food, clothing, medicine, shelter and so on. it is rather expensive to ship things to Mars. You can't just UPS it there, you have to have a rocket with enough power to get it off of Earth and then push it toward Mars and then land it on Mars when it gets there. It is a very complicated - and therefore very costly - operation. Because of this supplies will be somewhat limited. When we only have one ounce of chocolate sauce left we can't just pop down to the corner store to get another bottle. When it's gone it's gone, and when it's gone we are going to have to learn to live on what we can produce ourselves. Guess what people of Earth:
Lesson Two: Resources are finite. Earth is a really big place and it seems like there is a lot of stuff here, but it just isn't so. Right now a tremendous proportion of our energy needs are met by the use of fossil fuels and we continue to use them as though there were no end in sight. The trouble is that there is an end in sight. You can probably name half of the reasons why using fossil fuels is a less than ideal way to do things, but let's go over a few of them quickly: Air pollution from burning these things, Water pollution from mining, Wars over control of the limited supply, and may I harp on the inefficient and roundabout way of doing things this is. If you follow the trail back, all of this energy ultimately comes from The Sun. Plants ate the sunlight, animals ate the plants, the ground ate the animals and turned them into oil and coal and now we are using those things to get the energy back. Guess what folks, The Sun is still there putting all of that energy out, and we have the technology to use it much more directly so why don't we cut out this loop of middlemen? The sad fact is that we are going to run out of fossil fuels anyway and then we will HAVE to learn to use something else, so why wait until there's a crisis?
Just a side note on this issue of finite resources: I suspect that when there are only four or eight people living alone on a planet and the issue of finite resources comes up you will find that the options of sharing and saving are the choices that people make. When there are only a few of you, nobody will want to be the douche who used the last of the chocolate sauce. Why is it that when there are a few billion of us we don't do things that way?
Mars One is very deliberately and intentionally setting up this mission as an international mission. They have put together standards which will ensure that this is not an American colony or a Russian colony or any other subdivisional colony. This will be a HUMAN colony full stop. Mars One recognizes the one simple lesson that all the Earth needs to figure out:
Folks, we are in this together. At the end of the day, when you strip away prejudice and ideology and divisional concepts like race, religion, and nationality what we all are is human beings. What I do affects you, what you do affects me, what we do affects every one of the other seven billion inhabitants of this habitat called Earth. Why don't we start acting like it?
