Talking To Astronauts: The Real Life Horrors Of MARS
There are times where being a hack fraud fake journalist has its perks. I’ve flown to Vancouver and New Orleans to visit the sets of shows. I’ve talked to enough film personalities and TV stars to cause whole roomfuls of fangirls to have collective heart attacks. I’ve been to Comic-Con, WonderCon, E3, and all manner of film festivals. And for the life of me, I can’t remember the exact moment where it became a chore. I used to dance through the halls of the San Diego Convention Center, elbow deep in sweaty nerds and happy as a pig in shit. I remember the wonder I felt when I sat in my very first press room (Wayward Pines, a year before the first season dropped), eagerly awaiting the cast to sit and bathe me in wise insight and hilarious anecdotes. I was still hungry, alive, ferociously gnawing my way at the barriers to the next level of fame and glory. Now, it’s a job. Like any other, I punch in, grind away at the wheels of obligation, and put my head to my pillow weary, spent, and wondering where all the magic went.
“Uh, hey buddy,” my imaginary strawman best internet friend says, placing a caring arm around my slumped shoulders, “You doin’ okay? That’s a… kind of depressing intro for an article about cool space stuff. You need a hug, man?” NO! No, I say! I need none of your hugs. For you see, I’ve found the solution. In an effort to restore my sanity and faith in my creative process, I’ve been looking for new and unique takes on horror, far removed from the perpetual bickering of preferred Voorhees or most personally insulting remake.
So when the folks at Nat Geo called with an opportunity to sit in on a panel for Season 2 of Mars, my brain started churning. Space is scary, right? People have been scared of the unknown since there were things we realized we didn’t know! And there’s no greater unknown than space. There must be some interesting takes on real-life space horror. Plus, they told me I’d be talking to an astronaut. And when Nat Geo calls and says they have an astronaut that wants to talk to you, you show the fuck up.
So up the fuck I showed, and sitting in the room were a number of space experts. Here they are, listed by height:
Leland Melvin: Former Astronaut
Casey Dreier: Director of Space Policy at the Planetary Society
Stephen Petranek: Science Advisor to the show and author of How We’ll Live on Mars
Antonia Juhasz: Journalist, Oil, and Energy Analyst
What follows is, without any exaggeration, one of the most interesting interviews I have ever done.
Dread Central: Alright, get ready for your easiest interview of the day. Let’s start with a simple one. Other than Space Ghost, what are some other famous extraterrestrial spirits people need to know about.
Casey Dreier: So I know the question is a joke, but there actually is something called the Great Galactic Ghoul. It’s a term used by the NASA Jet Propulsion Lab to describe all of the probes that just vanished when trying to explore Mars (Note: the term was originally coined in 1997 by the late Donald Neff). It’s rather hard to land on Mars, and about 1/3 of everything sent up there either just didn’t get there or catastrophically crashed without a trace. So either space exploration is very difficult and there’s a high chance that things don’t go according to plan, or there’s some kind of intergalactic creature hanging out between Earth and Mars. I know where I stand on the issue.
“The people need to know. The Great Galactic Ghoul is real. For eons he’s kept the divide between the Elysian Fields of Earth and the Hell Portals of Mars apart. He’s willing to let us travel the channel and harvest Hell’s vast energy. But he will exact a dreadful toll.”
DC: Well, I wasn’t expecting to actually get a good answer to that one. Now I’m excited for this next question. Leland, you’ve been in space. People rarely think about the day-to-day of life in space. When you were sleeping up there, even though you were totally sealed in, did you ever hear a bump in the night that made you go, “what the hell was that?”
Leland Melvin: It always happened. You go to sleep, and there’s all these bangs and bumps. I slept very well and deep in space, so when something wakes you up and you’re floating there it takes a bit to figure out what’s going on. Your body just isn’t used to that. Normally you wake up and just look around, but in space, you have to try to orient yourself and then push off of something to see what’s up. The crazier thing that happens is the high energy particles that hit your optic nerve. These particles make you think that you’re seeing green flashes of light. So your brain is trying to process this while you sleep, so you think you’re seeing these little green men even though your eyes are closed. So if you’re dreaming and then coming out of that state of sleep, it can be very hard to differentiate what you’re seeing from actual reality. It’s easy to mistake it for aliens.
“They’re real, Leland,” The voice was Sparky’s, but the intent behind them far more sinister. “Just keep smiling, Leland. Soon they’ll all know.” They had gotten to his lifelong friend. All the horrified astronaut could do was crack a wide grin, as terror lurked just behind his eyes.
DC: That’s the craziest shit I’ve ever heard.
LM: Something less glamorous is the biological stuff. I mean you’re in a sealed environment, and the bathroom is right there. I know it’s all very well calibrated, sterile, and sanitary, but it’s a germophobes worst nightmare. You aren’t sure what particles are floating around you, and they aren’t going anywhere.
DC: I can think of a few people who would definitely rather be eaten by a giant space ghoul than stuck in a capsule with poop flakes. It’s one of the practical concerns that people don’t really consider when imagining the future. But we’re quickly approaching the point where science fiction is becoming science fact. My next question is a longer one. Throughout history, our scary stories have always been based on our terrestrial understanding (or lack thereof) of the world around us. What’s lurking beneath the surface of the ocean, what is waiting beyond the edges of the forest, what evils lurk within our neighbor’s heart, etc. As we move into this new frontier, when the colonists of tomorrow sit around the campfires of Mars (or equivalent colloquial term for a social gathering hub), what tales do you think they will tell each other about the monster over the hill?
CD: I’ll go first. I think that a consistent theme with space is confronting the immensity. Throughout human history, much of our spiritual core comes from our relationship with infinity. Space confronts you with infinity in an immediate and inescapable way. It is just so vast, and so fundamentally hostile to you. Space/Mars is fundamentally always trying to kill you. Trying to adapt to that is going to take a shift in how we think. So what I see are the stories we tell our children to help them acclimate to that. To teach them about their new natural world. Most fairy tales, at their core, are survival lessons dressed up with adventure and intrigue. So I predict something like equipment gremlins that will mix your oxygen wrong, or unfasten your gear. So you’ll always have to be very careful to check all of your tubes and canisters because if you don’t then the equipment gremlins will get you.
Stephen Petranek: I’ll build on that a little. A lot of people are going to die on Mars. Much more than we are predicting in our little optimistic fantasy scenarios. And the ways they are going to die are brutal and horrific. Explosive decompression, suffocation, being absolutely and inescapably trapped in a fire, things like that. The effect that is going to have on the survivor’s psyche is very similar to the PTSD we see from soldiers returning from combat on earth. There are just some things that change you when you see it. That will be everyday life on Mars. That’s going to affect how people tell stories. The cautionary tales of Mars are going to be a new level of terrifying.
“Fools!” Stephen bellowed, as the doors screeched shut and the engine of the magic bus roared to life, “Your brains cannot possibly comprehend the sheer scale and terror of death they will witness on Mars. Nothing your feeble Earth mind has ever witnessed compares to the likes of what Mars has in store. We simply haven’t the words to describe it.” Ever since Stephen took over the class from the tragically late Ms. Frizzle, learning wasn’t quite as fun. But Stephen would be damned if any of these kids forgot a single one of his science lessons.
Antonia Juhasz: I was thinking horror stories in terms of William Gibson. We all see it in movies like Elysium or Altered Carbon. Science Fiction has brought up this question for decades: when we go into space, will it be the same corporate driven and destructive model that has devastated Earth? Will we strip Mars the same way we are stripping our planet? Or will we look back through our thousands of years of history, and learn how to live sustainably on Mars? If not, I think the horror stories of the future will be how we sacrificed our world and our selves to the corporate Gods. This isn’t some far-fetched environmentalist nightmare; name one science fiction story where the corporation is the good guy. Unless we learn our lessons, we are destined to repeat them.
“Well, it’s official,” Antonia declared with firm resolve. “They’re here. They have marked us. There’s no going back.” Her outward demeanor was calm and collected, but inwardly she reeled. For decades, she had warned that the warming climate would attract the intergalactic symbiote plague. Now, they were here. The only option left? Scorched Earth. Literally. We would have to destroy this world, and conquer another. Ironic. Once one of Earth’s strongest voices for halting climate change, she would now have to accelerate it. It was a gruesome task, but necessary for the survival of humanity.
DC: Last question. What are the chances that any of the bacteria or life we find on Mars is going to look like what we see in the movies? Give me the odds on zombie plague, Xenomorph, or the blob monster from Life.
SP: Everything changed with the recent discovery of water on Mars. Microbes can survive the travel from Earth to Mars, so there’s always the chance that life existed there. But with the discovery of terrestrial water on Mars, you’ve upped the chances of life existing there astronomically. It used to actually be very hard to find an astrobiologist that thought there was a high chance of life on Mars. It was always a maybe, but highly unlikely. We’ve done all kinds of experiments just to try to answer this fundamental question. But water changes everything. Now, when we do likely find life, the question becomes if it’s like us, or entirely different. We have no idea how life started on earth, or how life starts period. It’s conceivable that long ago, life came to Earth from Mars or vice versa. So is it like Mars, or is it like us? That opens up an entirely new realm of speculation.
CD: We’ve been in an arms race with bacteria for billions of years. Bacteria evolves to try and infect us, and we evolve to fight it off. So with alien bacteria, it’s impossible to say what would happen. We could be completely unequipped to deal with it, and it could wipe us out. Or it could not even be able to infect us. Frankly, no one knows. The real question is what kind of risk you want to take. This is where NASA’s planetary protection comes in. It’s to both stop us from seeding Mars with life that might destroy whatever is there, and to stop anything from coming back that could destroy us.
DC: It’s easy to see a future where quarantines set off all kinds of international conflicts. And that’s how the space wars start. On the topic of space wars, and while I have a room full of experts to call on, I just want to ask about the Space Force. What is it, and who are we fighting?
CD: I can give you the political/bureaucratic answer, which is always the sexiest of course. Space Force as it has been described would take the Air Force as it already exists and break off a portion to dedicate itself to space defense. It would have its own command structure, it’s own line of bureaucracy. It’s not an attempt to make an offensive force, but a defensive line with its own dedicated structure. That’s the boring, but accurate answer.
AJ: It’s not the one described by the powers that be. Trump has proposed a radical shift in the way we think about space. That is to weaponize it and use it as a tool of offense. Which is a fundamental and very dangerous shift in the way we think about space.
SP: There are two places that we have been remarkably good at cooperating, and that is Antartica and Space. We’ve kept weapons out of space, we’ve kept weapons out of Antartica. In Antartica, one military force could easily wipe everyone else off the continent. In space, one bad actor with one satellite could wipe out tons of people. You could wipe out more people with weaponized space than you could with nuclear war.
So there you have it. Great Galactic Ghoul, little green men, and exploding eyeballs à la Total Recall, all in the same article. Seriously, this is the real future here. When your kids are playing their Pokémon: Galactic on their Nintendo Tetracubes on the Second Moon of Jupiter, you’ll be able to look back and tell them tales of when we didn’t have to worry about space gremlins unhooking their oxygen tubes. We’ll be the first generation of old people whining to our kids about how back in our days, shit was actually less complicated.
Anyways, watch Mars. It’s a one-of-a-kind show that combines drama with real-life experts to create an entirely unique TV experience. It airs Mondays at 9 P.M. ET. That means tonight! So show some love for something a little outside our normal wheelhouse, because if you do then they will make more space horror. And I want more space horror.
Categorized:Editorials
