#can you believe we’ve sent more rovers to/know more about mars than our own moon? isn’t that fucked up?

[ace-and-ink]

oh, sister red. you weren’t even named

for your namesake, but for the blood

he would shed. do you miss the times

from before we met? when you were just

a speck across this interstellar dance hall

and we were just faceless bodies

that neither of us could name? when all we

could do was stare and dream? we are

the greenest, after all, and you

can tell from the envy we watch you with.

we push past our own little silver

sister, our own recently known flesh

and blood. how could we not

feel guilt, pushing her aside

in our pursuit of you? mysterious, red

maiden of the sky and stars. you

must’ve loved it before we knew you. before we

sent scout after scout, rovers only

there to tell us what we wanted

to know. before we mapped out every one

of your mountains and valleys and your

hot plains and cold poles. before we ran

our hands all over you so much

that they’re stained with the red dust

of your freckles. and we take more

pieces of you home. and more. and more. i don’t

think you can be whole again, but i don’t

want to tell you that honestly. but i can

tell you this: we don’t want

to take you home. we want to

move in. we’re so enamored

with you. we’re so enraptured

by your beauty. we’re so amazed

by the potential you have. that’s what it is,

that’s what i can tell you. it was

wonder, once. but it’s not love. we don’t

explore you because we love you. we are

greedy. we aim to amend

a wrong we have done upon ourselves

with you. if we can leave ourselves

behind in favor a future we can carve

into you, we’ll be content

for all of five centuries.

we see you and we want you

wholly and entirely.

i’m sorry.

— sister red

[thatone-churro]

can you believe we’ve sent more rovers and know more about mars than we do our own moon??? there’s something about that that’s almost sad to me

[ciaranlawrenceaub]

Edited Transcript Final

Editied Transcript - from 2800 to 1800 words

I had a tough time cutting this transcript down 1000 words. I didn't want to take away any of the important information and didn't want to take away from the message that he was trying to give. I found a middle ground and cut out most of the stuff that I believed wouldn't be so important to communicate across.

Strap yourselves in, we're going to Mars.

Not just a few astronauts -- thousands of people are going to colonize Mars. Some of you will end up working on projects on Mars, and I guarantee that some of your children will end up living there.

That probably sounds preposterous, so I'm going to share with you how and when that will happen. But first I want to discuss the obvious question: Why the hell should we do this?

We are incredibly vulnerable to the whims of our own galaxy. A single, large asteroid could take us out forever. To survive we have to reach beyond the home planet. Think what a tragedy it would be if all that humans have accomplished were suddenly obliterated.

Exploration is in our DNA. Two million years ago humans evolved in Africa and then slowly but surely spread out across the entire planet by reaching into the wilderness that was beyond their horizons. This stuff is inside us. Some of the greatest advances in civilization and technology came because we explored.

Think for a moment, what we had when John F. Kennedy told us we would put a human on the moon. He excited an entire generation to dream. Think how inspired we will be to see a landing on Mars. Perhaps then we will look back at Earth and see that that is one people instead of many and perhaps then we will look back at Earth, as we struggle to survive on Mars, and realize how precious the home planet is.

Mars is not our sister planet. It's far less than half the size of the Earth, however the surface area of Mars that you can stand on is equivalent to the surface area of the Earth that you can stand on, because the Earth is mostly covered by water. The atmosphere on Mars is really thin, 100 times thinner, than on Earth and it's not breathable, it's 96 percent carbon dioxide. The average temperature is minus 81 degrees, although there is quite a range of temperature. A day on Mars is about as long as a day on Earth, plus about 39 minutes. Seasons and years on Mars are twice as long as they are on Earth. Mars has a lot less gravity than on Earth.

Now, as you can see, Mars isn't exactly Earth-like, but it's by far the most livable other place in our entire solar system.

Meanwhile, our track record of getting to Mars is lousy. We and the Russians, the Europeans, the Japanese, the Chinese and the Indians, have actually sent 44 rockets there, and the vast majority of them have either missed or crashed. Only about a third of the missions to Mars have been successful.

And we don't at the moment have a rocket big enough to get there anyway. We once had that rocket, the Saturn V. It was the most magnificent machine ever built by humans, and it was the rocket that took us to the Moon. But the last Saturn V was used in 1973 to launch the Skylab space station. The biggest rocket we have now is only half big enough to get us anything to Mars.

How soon will the first humans actually land here?

These days, NASA seems to be saying that it can get humans to Mars by 2040. Maybe they can. I believe that they can get human beings into Mars orbit by 2035. But frankly, I don't think they're going to bother in 2035 to send a rocket to Mars, because we will already be there.

We're going to land on Mars in 2027. And the reason is this man is determined to make that happen. His name is Elon Musk, he's the CEO of Tesla Motors and SpaceX. Now, he actually said that we would land on Mars by 2025, but Elon Musk is very optimistic, but you've got to ask yourself, can this guy really do this by 2025 or 2027? SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket, lifted six tons of supplies to the International Space Station. 10 years ago, SpaceX had not launched anything, or fired a rocket to anywhere. The person who created an entire rocket company in less than 10 years will get us to Mars by 2027.

Private companies are leaping into space and they will be happy to take you to Mars.

NASA may not be able to get us there until 2040, or we may get there a long time before NASA, but NASA has taken a huge responsibility in figuring out how we can live on Mars.

Here's what you need to live on Earth: food, water, shelter and clothing. To live on Mars you need all of the above, plus oxygen.

So let's look at the most important thing on this list first. Water is the basis of all life as we know it, and it's far too heavy for us to carry water from the Earth to Mars to live, so we have to find water if our life is going to succeed on Mars. And if you look at Mars, it looks really dry, it looks like the entire planet is a desert. But it turns out that it's not. The soil alone on Mars contains up to 60 percent water. And a number of orbiters that we still have flying around Mars have shown us that lots of craters on Mars have a sheet of water ice in them.

Orbiters tell us that there are huge amounts of underground water on Mars as well as glaciers. If only the water ice at the poles on Mars melted, most of the planet would be under 30 feet of water. So there's plenty of water there, but most of it's ice and underground.,/p>

WAVER is a device cooked up at the University of Washington back in 1998. It's basically a low-tech dehumidifier. And it turns out the Mars atmosphere is often 100 percent humid. So this device can extract all the water that humans will need simply from the atmosphere on Mars.

Next we have to worry about what we will breathe. Michael Hech has developed Moxie. It's a reverse fuel cell, essentially, that sucks in the Martian atmosphere and pumps out oxygen. And you have to remember that CO2, which is 96 percent of Mars' atmosphere, CO2 is basically 78 percent oxygen.

The next big rover that NASA sends to Mars in 2020 is going to have one of these devices aboard, and it will be able to produce enough oxygen to keep one person alive indefinitely. But the secret to this is that this thing was designed from the get-go to be scalable by a factor of 100.

What will we eat?

We'll use hydroponics to grow food, but we're not going to be able to grow more than 15 to 20 percent of our food there, at least not until water is running on the surface of Mars and have the capability of planting crops. In the meantime, most of our food will arrive from Earth, and it will be dried.

And then we need some shelter. At first we can use inflatable, pressurized buildings as well as the landers themselves. But this really only works during the daytime. There is too much solar radiation and too much radiation from cosmic rays.

Now, it turns out that the soil on Mars, by and large, is perfect for making bricks. And NASA has figured this one out, too. They're going to throw some polymer plastic into the bricks, shove them in a microwave oven, and then you will be able to build buildings with really thick walls. Or we may choose to live underground in caves or in lava tubes, of which there are plenty.

Clothing

On Earth we have miles of atmosphere piled up on us, which creates 15 pounds of pressure on our bodies at all times, and we're constantly pushing out against that. On Mars there's hardly any atmospheric pressure. So Dava Newman, a scientist at MIT, has created a sleek space suit. It will keep us together, block radiation and keep us warm.

So that leads to the next big really big step in living the good life on Mars. And that's terraforming the planet: making it more like Earth, reengineering an entire planet.

First we've got to warm it up. Mars is incredibly cold because it has a very thin atmosphere. The answer lies here, at the south pole and at the north pole of Mars, both of which are covered with an incredible amount of frozen carbon dioxide -- dry ice. If we heat it up, it sublimes directly into the atmosphere and thickens the atmosphere the same way it does on Earth.

And as we know, CO2 is an incredibly potent greenhouse gas. A way of doing this is to erect a very large solar sail and focus it, it essentially serves as a mirror, and focus it on the south pole of Mars at first. As the planet spins, it will heat up all that dry ice, sublime it, and it will go into the atmosphere. It actually won't take long for the temperature on Mars to start rising, probably less than 20 years.

What we're shooting for is a runaway greenhouse effect: enough temperature rise to see a lot of that ice on Mars, especially the ice in the ground, melt.

As the atmosphere gets thicker, everything gets better. We get more protection from radiation, more atmosphere makes us warmer, makes the planet warmer, so we get running water and that makes crops possible. Then more water vapor goes into the air, forming yet another potent greenhouse gas. It will rain and it will snow on Mars.

We'll still be left with the complicated problem of making the atmosphere breathable, and frankly that could take 1,000 years to accomplish. But humans are amazingly smart and incredibly adaptable.

There is no telling what our future technology will be able to accomplish and no telling what we can do with our own bodies. In biology right now, we are on the very verge of being able to control our own genetics, what the genes in our own bodies are doing,and certainly, eventually, our own evolution. We could end up with a species of human being on Earth that is slightly different from the species of human beings on Mars.

It will be the most disruptive event in our lifetimes, and I think it will be the most inspiring.

Children who are now in elementary school are going to choose to live there.

Remember when we landed humans on the Moon? When that happened, people looked at each other and said, "If we can do this, we can do anything." What are they going to think when we actually form a colony on Mars?

Most importantly, it will make us a spacefaring species. And that means humans will survive no matter what happens on Earth. We will never be the last of our kind.