Journey to Mars

Activities to try

1. 1

   Debate 'Where is everybody?' with an astrobiologist

   Why it works: The Fermi Paradox is an open problem with many competing, unproven resolutions; your job is to build the strongest case you can and defend it against real counter-evidence, not to find an answer key.

   1. Respond to the opening provocation: 'The galaxy is ~13 billion years old and full of stars — so where is everybody?' by offering your own explanation for the silence.
   2. When you offer 'maybe they're too far away', answer the follow-up: then explain why not one probe, not one signal, in all that time.
   3. Name and argue at least TWO contrasting resolutions, e.g. (a) life/intelligence is extremely rare or a 'Great Filter' lies behind us, versus (b) civilisations are common but hard to detect or short-lived so we never overlap.
   4. Take a position on whether a Great Filter lies behind us, still ahead, or whether there may be no strong filter at all, and defend it against counter-evidence raised in the exchange (SETI's limited coverage of sky/frequencies/time, the vastness of distance).
   5. Relate the two halves of the topic: consider how the difficulty of crossing even the comparatively tiny distance to Mars illuminates why contact across light-years might be so rare — and weigh which is the harder problem, surviving the Mars journey or detecting life light-years away.
2. 2

   Prioritise the RIDGE hazards with a mission director

   Why it works: A crewed Mars mission is a categorically harder, largely self-reliant problem than a lunar trip; the RIDGE hazards must be weighed and traded off, not solved all at once.

   1. Face the challenge: 'I can't shield the crew from every cosmic ray without grounding the rocket — so what do you protect, and what risk do you accept?'
   2. Work through NASA's five hazards (RIDGE): Radiation, Isolation and confinement, Distance from Earth, Gravity fields, Hostile/closed environments.
   3. For each hazard, state a cause, a quantified effect where possible, and a mitigation — e.g. galactic cosmic radiation is hard to shield and raises cancer/heart-disease/cataract risk (Earth's magnetosphere and atmosphere normally protect us); under the Gravity-fields hazard, reduced gravity causes BOTH weight-bearing bone mineral loss (~1-1.5% per month) AND muscle wasting, experienced across three different gravity environments (Earth gravity, microgravity in transit, and Mars gravity).
   4. Use the Distance figures — Mars is ~140 million miles away on average, with up to ~20-minute one-way comms delays — to explain why the crew must diagnose emergencies themselves and carry all supplies.
   5. Prioritise under conflicting constraints: decide what you protect first and what residual risk you accept, and justify the trade-off.
3. 3

   Build-a-Mars-mission trade-off sandbox

   Why it works: The Mars hazards form a felt system of constraints you cannot all maximise at once; the Drake equation organises our uncertainty rather than telling us how many aliens there are.

   1. Allocate limited mass and budget across radiation shielding, food/water reserves, crew size and transit time.
   2. Watch a live dashboard recompute crew health risk, launch mass and mission-success odds as you move each control, and find the trade-offs that the numbers force.
   3. Open a Drake-equation explorer: set each factor yourself and watch the estimated number of contactable civilisations swing across orders of magnitude.
   4. Explain in words why small changes to uncertain factors cause huge swings, and connect this to why the 'are we alone' question stays open.