The Best Australian Science Writing 2015 Read Online Free PDF

step was the application fee. A number dropped out there. Then there was a video you had to make and questions you had to answer. And that’s also where a lot dropped out.’
    I ask if in the course of fact-checking this story he will allow me to see the full list of applicants to verify the number.
    â€˜Of course we cannot share the details of the applicants with you because that’s confidential, private information.’
    I offer to allow the names to be redacted.
    â€˜Ah, no. I’m not interested in sharing that information with you.’ He emails later, with an invitation to come at my own expense to Mars One’s office in the Netherlands and see the list in person, though cameras will not be allowed, and he will need to see my article before publication.
    I tell him that of course that won’t be possible.
    * * * * *
    Why?
    What could possibly drive someone to leave Earth to die on a barren rock in the frozen depths of space? What tangible good would come from us spending tens – even hundreds – of billions of dollars on sending a tiny group of people to live 18th-century lives there? Could we not find more effective ways to spend that money here if the ultimate goal is protecting the future of the human race?
    I’ve now been working on this story for more than a year, and I’ve interviewed people at government space agencies who are literal geniuses. I’ve come away in awe of people at NASA, with an appreciation of why space exploration is so damn expensive: because it is incredibly difficult and incredibly dangerous. Bas Lansdorp had told me it’s ‘just about getting this done’. To damn the consequences – both the life-or-death consequences space flight presents and the personal consequences for anyone pinning their Mars-bound hopes on a fantastical, responsibility-free project – for me, ethically and morally this is an unacceptable proposition.
    Yet what really drives this enterprise is the ancient, unbearable anxiety of death. Building a colonial outpost on Mars is aquest for immortality – for those who succeed, it’s the chance to live on in human history; for humanity, it’s the chance to stave off the inevitable death of our species, at least among those who believe we can upload human consciousness to a frequency sent out into space, or just recreate our unlikely habitat on another planet that happens to be next to ours.
    Walking on the beach that day with Josh, I thought of something I once read online, a ‘timeline of the far future’, postulating a collection of speculative theories about life and the universe beyond our comprehension of time. When I reached the end I had suffered a panic attack of such intensity the walls of the room appeared distended, and I momentarily lost my hearing. Then I lay on the floor of my office and cried for a very long time.
    * * * * *
    If you are ever standing in the narrow path of the shadow of a total solar eclipse, when the moon passes between Earth and the sun in a configuration known as syzygy, you will see the stunning effect of the sun’s corona flaring from behind the moon in broad daylight, as the circumference of the moon fits precisely inside the circumference of the sun from our terrestrial perspective.
    This happens only because the sun’s distance from Earth is roughly 400 times the moon’s distance, and the sun’s diameter is 400 times that of the moon: an almost exact ratio.
    The odds of this configuration occurring anywhere in the universe, least of all at a place and time in which intelligent, self-aware life is present to observe it, are so minuscule as to be incalculable.
    Six hundred million years from now, Earth’s tides will have pushed the moon too far away from the planet for total solar eclipses to be possible.
    If human life were to disappear from Earth tomorrow, it is estimated that it would take the planet only 100 million years to