The Best Australian Science Writing 2015 Read Online Free PDF Page B

completely reclaim the surface, leaving no trace of proof that intelligent beings ever existed. All the satellites orbiting the planet will, untended, fall, many coming to rest at the bottom of the sea.
    In 7.6 million years’ time, Mars’ moon Phobos will have come close enough to the planet’s surface to be destroyed by gravity and torn into a ring that will orbit Mars for three million years, after which the debris will smash into the face of our best hope for repopulating the solar system.
    Five billion years from now, our sun will enter its red giant phase and expand to at least 200 times its current size, enveloping Mercury, Venus and quite possibly Earth.
    One hundred trillion years from now, all the hydrogen of the universe will be exhausted so all remaining stars will die. In one hundred vigintillion years, quantum tunnelling will turn all matter left in the universe into liquid. In 10^10^120 years (in numbers too big for our minds to grasp, zeros are added in septillions), our universe will experience its heat death, encountering maximum entropy when there is no longer enough thermodynamic free energy to sustain processes that consume energy – like life.
    By this point, time will have ceased to exist.
    You can right now, if you like, float gently and lovingly over Earth and take in the view from the International Space Station. Anyone with an internet connection can get a lo-fi insight into what astronauts call the Overview Effect, the feeling of seeing the majesty of Earth from space and trying to take in the enormity of it and the tiny, unlikeliness of yourself.
    You may find it pleasantly reassuring.
    * * * * *
    I know that I will have to tell Josh about this: that from everything I can find, Mars One doesn’t appear in any way qualified to carry off the biggest, most complex, audacious and dangerousexploration mission in human history. They don’t have the money to do it. Summoning all the good faith I can muster, I wouldn’t classify it as a scam, exactly – but it does seem an amazingly hubristic fantasy: an absolute faith in the free market, in technology, in the media and in money, to be able to do what thousands of highly qualified people in government agencies have so far not yet been able to do over decades of diligently trying, making slow headway through individually hard-won breakthroughs, working in relative anonymity. I will have to tell Josh that he shouldn’t look to a theoretical future while his chance to be actually present in the privilege of human life passes him by; that he shouldn’t give up on the hard work of making a life with the rest of us here on this horrendously messy, imperfect, unimaginably fragile and steadily warming Earth.
    Late in the day, Josh and I are sitting across from each other, sunk in deep sofas that make us both look small. I ask Josh how he would feel if he made it through to selection, but Mars One didn’t happen.
    â€˜Disappointed,’ he says quietly after a long moment. ‘Disappointed. But in the grand scheme of things, it’s already done.’
    For someone like Josh, it is a quest for true purpose, for belonging; a burning wish to be exceptional. ‘It’s given me direction. It’s given thousands of people direction.’
    As I raise some of the most insurmountable problems with the mission – the lack of money, the lack of contracts, the fact that the selection panel isn’t public – the rational Josh emerges. When I say that Chris Hadfield has serious reservations about Mars One, he isn’t surprised; other astronauts have also expressed their scepticism. Especially that one he has always looked up to: Andy Thomas. ‘He hates it,’ Josh says. ‘Absolutely hates it.’
    Josh knows on some level that what Mars One is proposing is unlikely to come off. At least not in the time frame and budget it has set. But it’s that most minute, most remote chance it