"Previously on Mars." "We had arrived, yet our journey was just beginning." "With Ben gone, I took command." "Mars fought us every step of the way." "They say science and faith don't mix." "Open the door!" "If they fail, I don't care how much you invested, we're out." "But when everything is telling you you already lost." "If they fail, everyone's out." "There's nothing you can do but believe." "We ignored this horizontal entrance because it was clogged with breakdown debris." "So we made one more leap into the darkness." "Easy, easy, easy." "Hoping there was some light at the bottom of the abyss." "The idea that one of the lava tubes could be connected to a tectonic cave is brilliant." "We're deploying the dome." "The flag is planted." "It's official." "Humankind has a home on Mars." "Foucault, Robert." "Kamen, Marta." "Durand, Amelie." "Delgado, Javier." "Seung, Hana, personal entry, Phase 2." "Hi Joon." "_" "Phase 1 was complete and Phase 2 had begun." "Medical lab is now operational." "First patient was Javier Delgado." "He reported cold symptoms which is funny because I," "I didn't see anything wrong with him." "Getting things ready for the arrival of Vega crew has been a mission in itself." "A second ship, the Vega had arrived carrying the supplies and personnel we needed to begin expanding our little domed habitat into humanity's first martian outpost." "I almost slashed through my suit with a laser welder, but the greenhouse is complete now." "Taking responsibility for the construction of the settlement and the safety of my crew, was the greatest honor I'd ever had," "and it was the greatest challenge." "We did it guys." "It took 93 days to lay our cables in the dunes because of continuous sand drift." "but as of 08:00 today both solar arrays and nuclear fission are fully online." "My sister Joon's work at MMC was recognized by the IMSF, and they offered her a position there." "We both agreed it was the best way to serve the mission and she accepted." "Working to bridge the gap between nations and private industry." "Within two years she was Secretary General." "We're experiencing some losses on the lines." "I think it's the copper wire." "no matter how hard we worked to meet MMC's schedule," "Grann kept on pushing for even faster expansion." "This greenhouse is just killing me." "I'm only at half the yield that I'm supposed to be by now, and Cygnus is two weeks from arrival." "As a third larger ship approached carrying experts to aid in Phase 2 upgrades to power and infrastructure, we sought answers to burning questions." "Search for evidence of martian life." "My priority is obviously to find life and that's the amazing adventure." "But Mars was as weary of giving up her secrets as I was of turning the settlements expansion over to a group of experts who had never set foot on martian dust." "No live matter." "Maybe you couldn't blame us." "We had been driven by our visions of what Mars could be, following a dream some of us had our entire lives, but with each new arrival, a new vision of Mars would come, and it was only a matter of time before" "those visions collided." "Members of the committee, madames and monsieurs, madame secretary." "With incredible success of the Olympus Town Settlement over the last four years, we at MMC feel that we're ready to go faster." "With our new freighters almost ready for flight, we'll be prepared to start sending fifty people at a time beginning first quarter of 2041, almost a full two years ahead of our earlier projected schedule." "We are really behind the schedule guys." "Olympus Town power will be temporarily suspended in the greenhouse as construction crews are upgrading the lines." "If you want something done on Mars, you gotta do it your damn self." "_" "The best scientists in the world..." "in the universe..." "But as you know, we need the infrastructure to support those settlers when they arrive, and that begins with power." "With MMC's composite nanowire technology, our power efficiency from nuclear fission will double." "No, no, no, you'll cross the cooling lines." "The north wall sir?" "Power goes on the east wall, east wall, just stand by." "Electrical engineering team please report to the outer west wing to await further instructions by" "Dr. Foucault." "Concentration!" "Initiative!" "Twenty years of study... twenty years to come here and do everything myself." "This upgrade in power will be overseen by the very best; allowing Olympus Town to generate all the water, oxygen, and physical infrastructure they'll need to support our settlers." "With world-renowned nuclear physicist Leslie Richardson entering Mars atmosphere as we speak," "to take a role as director of MMC's Phase 2 expansion." "I have the report for you Commander Seung." "Thank you Jane." "Commander Seung, Commander Seung." "Please proceed to the airlock for the onboarding of Cygnus crew." "Chances are we find life before you even meet wife number 4, Robert." "Are you guys up for a welcoming committee?" "That's Robert's department; if you ask me, we're already at capacity." "The Vega construction team are already exhausted just trying to keep up with the day to day;" "I'm looking forward to a little extra muscle for expansion from Cygnus." "It took a month to clear Vega crew for EVAs, we've got a lot of experience to share now, so let's do everything we can to help the third team make the adjustment." "Listen, good luck with the welcoming committee," "I'm not gonna make it." "Ta ta." "So I told him, astronauts are probably the sanest people you'll ever meet." "I mean how many people keep a cool head sitting on 88 tons of high explosives." "EDL sequence is engaged." "Five more minutes Ava, and you and Oliver are home." "Big step Paul." "Luckily for us, Dr. Richardson's decided to bring her husband along." "Okay, I'm okay." "Nobel prize-winning exobotanist, Paul Richardson, will be personally overseeing a parallel agriculture expansion, focused on his own hybrid plant technology that plans to eliminate Mars' reliance on Earth for food by 2048." "Ladies, gentlemen, our dream is now a reality." "No live matter." "Successful transfer of Cygnus crew." "Just want to check your eyes." "Look me in the eye." " There they are!" " I'd ask how you're feeling, but I think I can take a guess." "Base Commander Hana Seung." "It's great to finally meet you in person." "Likewise." " I'll be right back." " Welcome." "Don't worry, three or four weeks and your inner ear will remember which way is down." "You know I'm just excited to not to have go to the damn suction toilet every time I go to the head." "Nice, Oliver." "Classy reunion." " Dr. Richardson." " Hang in there buddy." "I'm so looking forward to working with you in the expansion of Olympus Town." "And, Paul, very nice to meet you, welcome." "I've read your work." "Both of you, we all have." "Your progress on low temperature super-conductant casing is astonishing." "Thank you." "And Paul, Javier Delgado is dying to talk to you about phosphorus levels in our hydroponic mixtures." "You have no idea how excited we are to have you here." "Well, I'd like to see the greenhouse." "Great, as soon as you're settled and have time to adjust." "The sooner the better." "Of course, but we have to run some medical tests, it's base protocol, so let's go do that." " Some help?" " Yep, thanks." "People call us dreamers, but without the dream, the reality of Mars would've never had a chance." "There's a romanticism about going to" "Mars and colonizing it." "And it's a future in which we are building cities." "We humans love a target." "We love to have something to shoot for, to aim for, and to build a plan to make happen." "It's been the case over and over again, whether it's the colonization of a New World, the railroads, the opening up of the West." "All these things are all impossible until we make them real." "What will life be like in an early Mars colony?" "Let's take some stages in terms of how we might do things on Mars." "There is exploration, somebody going out and coming back." "The next stage would be some sort of research station." "You would mostly resupply it from Earth." "You cycle people in and out on a regular basis." "I would contend that that would look a lot like Antarctica." "You don't have to fly into space obviously to go to" "Antarctica, but it's not easy to get to, and it's not easy to sustain life there." "At the very bottom of the world there's a cheerless land where the long night is 125 degrees below zero, and murderous winds howl at 200 miles an hour across a desert as desolate as the moon." "Before we used to send people to Antarctica, they crossed the Antarctic Continent and came back and waited 3 or 4 years before you sent the next expedition." "Then in 1954, a dozen nations decided to man 50 stations built around the continent." "Now, the emphasis shifted to science." "Today you literally have hundreds of people who actually live in the station, throughout the year." "There are more scientists working in" "Antarctica today from more different countries than there probably have ever been in the past." "And what that means is globally we need to think about how we'll collaborate and manage and work together." "I think it's a good model for how policy and engineering and politics can come together to produce great science." "The McMurdo Station is a kind of analog to the kind of activity we hopefully want to do on Mars someday." "Because McMurdo is in fact a city." "This is where you have infrastructure, where you have power, where you have supplies." "We have everything from people who cook the food to people who prepare science cargo." "We all live and work together and we have essentially one goal and that is to support the science." "What happens in the Antarctic is what will likely happen on Mars." "We'll create a kind of early version of community, and what we really want to do is make sure that we understand how humans can cope with the next level of risk, living on Mars." "Trying to feed everybody, and coping with different visions of what should happen next." "And that's going to require a much different level of understanding how to do this." "We'll get there, we just gotta move to it in steps." "Seung, Hana, personal entry." "Hi Joon!" "_" "Cygnus crew arrived safely." "Medical examinations reveal only expected challenges from transfer." "Everyone's okay." "It's so great to see Ava and Oliver." "I think they became an item on their way here." "Hell of a place for romance." "God love them." "Paul Richardson seems intense." "Right this way." "We had hoped to have the second facility up by now, but we've been running into trouble every step of the way." "How long until they're completed?" "It's hard to say, we're currently using all the power we produce, which is driving our construction schedule." "Well we're prepared to upgrade all of the outdated copper lines to maximize output from the nuclear fission reactor within six weeks." "And how long would you need to take the reactor offline to complete this?" "My team's been drilling in the SIM for months." "Once the lines are laid we just need one short power cut for each junction box." "With all due respect," "SIM is no substitute for Mars surface." "It took us three months to install the lines, the dunes are constantly shifting due to sand drifts." "We're prepared for that." "I'm sure your people are excellent," "I know they are, but no one is a hundred percent while adjusting from micro-G's." "I would feel much more comfortable holding off until after dust storm season has passed." "No, no that's two months away," "I've barely enough amps in here to power my LEDs." "We'll never drain more than two percent of backup power during changeovers." "Dr. Richardson, if we can just..." "No, I value your opinion, I do, and I know you've been through a lot up here." "But I have an assignment and I would really appreciate your support in executing it." "There are two primary drivers for going to Mars at present." "One is for the settlement." "Can we open up the human future." "The other is science to find out if life ever developed on" "Mars and how far it got and what it was like." "The history of science in the last few hundred years has been the understanding that the sciences that we know on Earth are the same sciences that happen out in the universe." "Physics on Earth, it's the same physics that governs the motions of planets and stars in the cosmos." "Chemistry on Earth is the same chemistry out in the galaxies and the gas clouds and all these things that formed in stars." "But there's a fundamental science that we do not know if it's the same out there as it is here and that's biology." "Is biology that we have on Earth the one way to do biology?" "We have been talking about life on Mars forever." "It's been part of movies, and in shows;" "and I think it just has that mystery." "Back 100 years ago there's kind of this widespread acceptance that there's probably life on Mars." "Will we find a yellow farm of vegetable life, or will there be mechanical robots controlled by super-intelligent beings." "That happened up through the 1950s." "And then we flew by in Mariner 4." "Liftoff." "When Mariner 4 flew by, it had very low resolution cameras, and it only took a few dozen pictures." "It was barren, like the moon." "Cratered and dead." "It may just be that life is more unique than many have thought." "That was kind of a crushing disappointment to a lot of people who just assumed there would be something there, anything there." "But, we haven't abandoned the idea that there's life there." "There's almost a religious belief that we will find it eventually if we just keep looking, and it's based upon faith and not knowledge, in the same way religion is based upon faith and not knowledge." "Marta, mission entry, Phase 2." "Search for evidence of martian life." "No live matter." "I have found many more places where it does not exist." "No microbes in the samples." "The conditions for life must have existed here, but there's a lot of red sand to sift." "End report." "I'm working please." "Dr. Kamen, do you have a moment?" "I don't mean to interrupt your work, but it seems to be never ending so I thought I would just drop by." "Ah, sorry I forget myself." "I'd offer tea but um, I've broken my second cup." "Let me." "It's okay, uh," "I need to rebuild muscle after the transfer." "So you can enjoy our tennis courts." "They might not be so far away." "Every seed knows its time." "I'll start with a bigger lab." "We can make that happen." "Within two months we'll have enough power to double the size and capacity of your facilities." "Hana approved this?" "Uh, I informed her, yes." "Your work is very important to all of us and I want" " to help however I can." " Thank you." "May I?" "Soil, single particles." "Terrestrial?" "The spores were hitching a ride after an earthquake stirred it up in the American Southwest." "This one carried a fungus from Africa to the Caribbean." "That's quite impressive." "I don't see any life in that one." "Neither do I." "Mars regolith." "We have seen radiation-resistant spores on Earth that can resume life after a" "25 million year dormancy." "What if, what if interstellar clouds of dust could possibly play the same role in transporting organic molecules." "If the right conditions were waiting on a planet's surface." "Evolution could begin again." "Am I chasing ghosts?" "But if you did succeed, if you find evidence of a second genesis, imagine, we would have the funding to do whatever we wanted up here." "I'm sure you and your husband could write an excellent book about it." "Thank you for coming by, Dr. Richardson." "She's brilliant, no one questions that, they both are." "But intelligence and wisdom are not the same thing." "I don't care how many sims they've done, they don't know Mars." "I'm worried, Joon." "Mr. Ed Grann is here to see you." " Hey." " Hi, how are you?" "I'm fine thanks, and you?" "Good, please, any coffee or anything?" "No thanks." "Well?" "It was a hell of a show, committee was impressed." "Can you sell them on it?" "I think you've already sold them on it." "The question is if they should have buyer's remorse." "How real is this thing, Ed?" "I've sent the best people and the best equipment in the world." "Of course you have." "Then what's the problem?" "It's a little too ambitious right now." "Well, you don't go to Mars without ambition." "A permanent presence on Mars depends on what kind of permanent presence we're talking about." "Are we talking about a presence like something in" "Antarctica where ultimately the long term goal is science?" "Or are there people actually living there, trying to make lives there?" "I think there are many reasons to go to Mars." "But I group them into reasons for exploring." "But if you want to stay there and not go back, you need to grow your own food or make sure there's a continual supply train." "When we first go to Mars, we probably will be more Earth-reliant than we will be down the track." "It's very similar to the McMurdo case, you know, it is reliant on resupply coming from other parts of Earth." "The problem is, suppose a resupply ship doesn't arrive like it's supposed to." "What happens then?" "On the International Space Station today, we're literally hours away from having a supply vehicle come up and bring more food, bring more parts if you break something." "When you're on Mars, the closest someone is to you is a year or two." "It will become necessary for a Mars colony to become increasingly self-sustaining." "You know, this is what we do, the entire history of life on Earth is one of transforming barren environments into those that are friendly to the development and propagation of life." "Until we get to the time when Mars is terraformed, agriculture is going to have to occur inside of greenhouses." "And therefore there will be a tremendous driver for plants that are absolutely as productive as possible." "Uh, here I am on Mars." "As you can see, um, the greenhouse is up and running, greenhouse, singular." "Um, the plants are adapting better than we hoped." "They weren't ready, but the feed systems are up and running and, I'm very happy with the work." "Um, what wasn't ideal was the, uh, was the trip." "I was warned, uh, what 7 months, how that would affect me." "The landing, absolutely terrible." "We knew I wasn't going to be a natural." "Um, anyway, I've successfully reared the Emmer and Einkorn, and they're growing twice as fast as anticipated." "I have received the pictures." "I have some instructions, so please take notes of some concerns." "Begin with the Majesty Plant on the 3rd floor, the one labeled 15C." "It's in the guest room," "I can see you forgot the epsom salts." "Um, the next is the Photonia, the one the cat likes to chew on, you have to pinch off more of those flower spikes." "It weakens the shot of the leaves." "And finally, the English Ivy." "Now this one troubles me the most." "It's the aphids, they're still there." "Can you make sure the water's dry before you apply the alcohol?" "And then spray under the leaves." "That's where the aphids hide." "I don't know why it's so difficult, it's only ivy." "Okay, mum, give my best to dad." " I'm sorry." " It's okay." "I forgot how loud everything was after seven months in space." "A couple more weeks and it'll pass." "Thanks." "Your Emmer and Einkorn are growing faster than I've ever seen." "It's incredible." "First crops raised in ancient Mesopotamia and now look... a return to the cradle of civilization for the dawn of a new one." "I love the symmetry." "Without agriculture, there'd be no civilization." "Without plants." "You know, I used to stand in the doorway of the farmhouse where I grew up looking out at all the crops thinking about all the people they'd feed." "One day, there's gonna be rows and rows of greenhouses right here, filled with these hybrids, thriving as far as the eye can see." "Without plants, we're nothing." "I love your work." "Thank you." "I'll leave you alone." "Finally I don't do everything myself..." "Richardson, Leslie." "Phase 2, we have begun replacing the old copper lines with our nanowire upgrades, as detailed in my written report." "I have divided my own team to maximize efficiency and turnover with crews of two dispatched to each junction box." "Base Commander Seung put Javier Delgado and his construction crew at our disposal to assist." "End of report." "How old?" "Almost four." "My parents are taking care of her but uh," "I almost gave up my spot on the Cygnus, didn't know if I could let her go." "Jesus, that must have been hard." "Yeah, I remember the first time I saw her." "She came right up to the door of the cage at the pound and she just looked at me." "Ears like pigtails, little nub tail wagging on the floor." "People think I'm crazy when I talk about it, but you gotta have them to know, you know what I mean?" "Yeah, I know." "You gotta be a pet person." "Yeah, yeah, that's a thing." "That's a real thing, definitely." "Man, sometimes I wake up at night and think" "I can hear her little name tag bumping up against the edge of her bowl like it did when she'd get up for a drink," "then I realize it's just the goddamn scrubbers again." "Buddy, you're sure you don't have the spanner up there?" "The what?" "The spanner." "Ah!" "Oliver, talk to me, Oliver!" "Warning, rupture detected in EVA suit." "Javier!" "Temporary pressure compensation is engaged." "I tore my suit." "Warning, temporary pressure compensation failure." "I'm decompress..." "Warning, please assist Oliver Lee, rapid application of field patch is required to prevent catastrophic injury or death." "Medical, prep for decomp!" "Return to a pressurized environment immediately." "The shift in control at Olympus Town left us vulnerable to inexperience." "On the frontier, mistakes don't go unpunished." "In trying to establish a survivable community, lots of people throughout the history of exploration have either died out completely or had, you know, high casualty rates." "Well Mars is gonna be a lot tougher than anywhere on Earth." "Uh, with the exception perhaps of Antarctica..." "It's the coldest place on Earth, so cold that 95% of all the ice in the world is here." "At one point the ice was 14,000 feet deep, not a tree nor a blade of grass grows upon the Antarctic Continent." "The humidity is as low as the temperature and the raging blizzards are much like desert sand storms." "Mars is probably about as indifferent to human exploration as Antarctica is to human science and the moment you stop paying attention to Antarctica, and the moment you stop paying attention to the weather and the landscape, that's when it becomes dangerous." "Accidents happen." "And so when the wind is howling, when it's minus 20 or 30 degrees," "it's enough to make me start thinking about having frostbite, or hypothermia." "Despite being dangerous and extremely cold, and windy and having hazards all around you, there are questions we can answer here that we just can't answer anywhere else." "It's that combination of cold, dry, salty and irradiated which makes this the harshest place on Earth for life." "And my work here is to find it." "So we're heading to a water track in the first circ in Beacon Valley." "We're going to the one oasis in the middle of that big valley that might support microbial activity and finding ways that life can survive in Antarctica is gonna help us look for life on Mars." "Why are we going to Mars?" "Number one reason is because we are looking for signs of life elsewhere in the solar system." "That is incredible, dramatic, just think about what it would mean if you found a single cell microorganism on the surface of Mars?" "Assuming we find life on the surface of Mars, we have two roads." "One road is that it turns out to be DNA-based life, just like ours." "The second option is it's different." "It isn't DNA based, or it's a radically different" "DNA-based life form." "And then did we have genesis?" "You know, the creation of life occuring independently on two planets?" "And what does that say for the potential of life on hundreds of billions of planets throughout our universe?" "As I think about the understanding of our universe and what's the next level of connection that we need to make, that's people on Mars, right?" "I mean that's where you get the true awe, the true awe of understanding what else is there, how it got there, why are we here?" "Those are all questions that I think everybody has at some level and I think that's a great reason to explore." "Our societies value exploration, they value overcoming adversity." "They value answering hard questions in hard ways." "and that's the story of exploration." "The first explorers come to Antarctica, suffered terrible hardships, and great loss of life." "And those are the hard steps that got us to where we are today." "I like to think that geology is destiny, where there's the right combination of rocks and water and nutrients and atmosphere, you're going to create a habitable environment and something is going live there." "What we're here trying to find in the dry valleys of Antarctica is that very brief period at the very end of summer where we've stored up just enough heat from the sun to cause a little bit of melting and a little bit of a" "habitable environment before it freezes off in the winter." "Martian climate goes through the exact same kind of extreme swings." "Really, the McMurdo dry valleys are about as close as you can get to Mars without needing a space ship." "So see how there's sort of a change in texture?" "I think this actually may be the spillway for the pond." "So the challenge is a little further down, that's where the water track starts." "Some recent research said is that if you look at" "Deacon Valley as a whole there's no sign of microbial respiration or cellular processes." "And so the reason we're here is because I think that might not be the case." "Alright, I'm ready." "77.79763." "We're here collecting soil samples to take back to Texas to answer is that soil habitable, is there evidence of microbial activity in that soil." "I mean, this is as basic as basic research gets." "What is the limit of the most important thing to us?" "I think respect for life and an interest in life is a kind of fundamental human value really." "Look at this sample." "Get those guys right here." "And so exploring the very ends of our planet is worthwhile, it's noble and it also serves society's needs, not just for scientific answers but also for a frontier to work in." "Sometimes people look up into space for that and sometimes they look south to Antarctica and it's the same frontier." "Antarctica is a place to look to to say well, if we can do that, we can do anything." "I think of the Earth as a living organism." "And we humans are the reproductive organ of Earth." "And the Earth is about to bud, we'll do it driven by the desire to explore, the desire to look for resources, the desire for the unknown, because it's part of our human soul." "And you'll have no shortage of people willing to risk their lives to become part of the Mars citizenry, the first people to colonize." "The first expeditions to Mars will certainly have a very heavy scientific agenda." "But once we get past the stage of McMurdo Station then this" "Mars base can grow into a bonafide human settlement." "Into an embryonic, new civilization." "and if we do this, let me tell you, we'll not just bring life to Mars, we're gonna bring Mars to life." "Seung, Hana mission entry, Phase 2." "Javier Delgado and Oliver Lee were carrying out expedited expansion orders as directed when an accident occurred." "Both men are being treated by Amelie presently." "Transformer 013 is down." "Another ten seconds and Oliver would have lost that arm; if you hadn't been there he would have never..." "Commander Seung, Dr. Foucault is asking for you." "I'll be back." "You need to rest." " No." " Yes." "We've got to get back out there and power up those lines, Robert and I can go right now." "You're exhausted and dehydrated, you need bed rest and fluids." "Come on, please, give me a break." " You need to take it easy Javier." " No!" " I'm sorry." " No, it's fine." " Don't be angry please." " I'm not, I just..." "I don't know, I just..." "Robert, I know we have no power without the lines, but I have injured crew in the..." "That can't be right." "I don't think we're going to get a chance to get that reactor back online." "We had trained for a worst case scenario." "Thousands of hours in simulations." "The best minds on Earth working together to prepare us for any eventuality, but this wasn't Earth."