The Universe s03e07 Episode Script

In the beginning, there was darkness and then, bang giving birth to an endless expanding existence of time, space, and matter.
Now, see further than we've ever imagined beyond the limits of our existence in a place we call "The Universe.
" Mars-the god of war's brooding namesake has long held sway over the hearts and dreams of the scions of Earth.
In the future, robotic rovers will be replaced by manned missions.
But the first human explorers will just be blazing the trail for a permanent settlement, a Martian metropolis.
Scientists and engineers are already designing everything we'll need to survive in this space colony of the future.
This is the only way to ride on another planet.
Despite cutting-edge technology, living full-time on this alien world will be a relentless battle for survival.
We're going to be staring out at an environment that's lethal to us.
These are the technologies, the dangers, and the wonders of "Living in Space.
" It's the dawn of the 23rd century and man has established a full-fledged colony on Mars.
It hasn't been easy.
On Mars, we are the invaders and the angry red planet has declared war on us using its very nature- scorching radiation, razor-thin air, and lethal dust storms- to ensure life here will be a constant struggle.
So why bother to live in space at all? Why did these brave pioneers not simply stay huddled together where it is safe on terra firma? We should be at least a two-planet species.
In other words, it's simply too dangerous to put all our eggs in one basket.
Mars is our closest neighbor.
It's the one that's, for better or worse most similar to our beloved Earth.
And it's the one that has the most possibilities.
It's not just the 25-hour days and the similar composition of seasons that made the fourth planet from the Sun the ultimate destination for mankind's second home in the cosmos.
There is one resource in particular that clinched Mars as the runaway favorite for our colony of the future.
One of the first missions for our astronauts is to get energy.
And one form of energy is actually underneath their feet in the permafrost.
Right into the ground of Mars there is frozen water.
We can purify it for drinking purposes.
Also, we can separate out the oxygen and the hydrogen to create rocket fuel in order to create fuel cells which will then energize our colony on Mars.
The colony itself is an engineering marvel.
While there were a few scenarios considered for constructing a permanent Martian settlement including an underground habitat it was the most familiar and timeworn that was chosen for the 23rd-century colony.
Domes are ideal structures for extreme environments say, the desert, or particularly Mars and the reason is the dome creates the largest environment, enclosed space with a minimum amount of structure and mass which is very important.
Also they're very, very strong.
The base is more like a metropolis a series of smaller domes rotating out from one central dominant hub like the spokes on a wagon wheel.
I love the idea of one large dome being the central plaza, the central place the place to be at, surrounded by smaller domes.
This high-tech oasis in the middle of the Martian desert is built like a fortress.
The material we use has to be able to withstand the cold and also the radiation.
The surface of Mars gets sterilized bleached by harsh sunlight because Mars has no protective ozone layer.
Certain kinds of fiberglass and Plexiglas materials would have to be reinforced reinforcement bars placed within the glass in order to get a structure that is structurally strong enough to withstand the enormous strains and plunging temperatures on the Red Planet.
Temperature and pressure within the dome have to be strictly regulated.
If it gets too warm the expanding air pressure within the habitat will cause it to explode like an over-inflated hot air balloon.
But so far, the dome has done its job of protecting the ever-expanding band of pioneering earthlings.
Despite the grand scale of the dome our colonists awake each morning to accommodations that are decidedly Spartan.
The life on Mars is actually very stressful.
The living quarters are very small and very stark.
But imagine if you're living that way for years.
It's very claustrophobic, and it's very foreign from Earth.
You've lost touch with the grass and the trees and the sky.
But the tradeoff is spectacular- the chance to live under a crimson sky.
Mars is about one and a half astronomical units out from the sun.
The Earth is one, so it's half again as far.
It's dimmer when you get there and the sky on Mars is not so blue.
It's red because all of this oxidized dust that's aloft and these winds blowing all the time.
To make this alien world feel more like home our travelers have brought with them artificial ecosystems.
But the plants aren't there purely for comfort.
They serve a vital function in creating and sustaining a closed environment for the habitat.
We're going to be growing more than food on Mars.
We are getting the oxygen we need from the plants the plants will be getting the carbon dioxide they need.
It's a beautiful synergy between humans and plants in that regard.
That symbiotic relationship is reflected in every aspect of life on Mars.
Like an aquarium on Earth every resource is recycled, nothing is wasted.
We can think of an aquarium with fish and algae growing in it.
And if you could seal that off you could get a nice food/waste cycle converting wastes to renewable resources.
That's what carbon dioxide and oxygen are.
And also the nutrition.
The fish eat the algae, they excrete solid wastes and these degrade from bacteria in the water and those become nutrients for the algae to take up again.
Unlike an aquarium we're not going to be able to keep importing fresh supplies of seawater, fresh supplies of air.
Our space-dwelling descendants are going to have to have mastered the art of self-contained environments ecological life-support cycles that recycle all the water recycle all the air.
If they do it well they should be just as happy as the fish in a tank.
But in the 20th century it wasn't well understood how happy humans would be in such a closed-loop system, sealed off from the outside world.
The concept was put to the test in the desert outside of Tucson, Arizona in a facility called Biosphere 2.
Its original purpose, among other things was as a trial run for a self-sustaining colony on another planet.
Biosphere 2 is a large, environmentally controlled facility that can be completely closed and sealed from the outside environment and the inside environment can be completely manipulated so that different climate regimes and different biomes can be controlled within the facility.
Biosphere 2 is a collection of five different ecosystems, or biomes each gathered from a different corner of the Earth.
They include a desert wetlands savanna grasslands a tropical rainforest and even a miniature ocean.
This ambitious project was put to the test with its first sealed mission in 1991.
But it soon ran into serious problems.
At one point, the crew began exhibiting recklessly impaired judgment and even split into rival factions.
The entire mission was in jeopardy until it was discovered that a lack of oxygen was the trigger for the crew's belligerent behavior.
It was eventually traced back to a seemingly insignificant detail.
The cement inside the structure hadn't been allowed to cure properly.
As a result, the cement structure was absorbing far more oxygen than the plants could replenish.
This drawdown of breathable air reached levels equivalent to those found at an altitude of 18,000 feet.
Similar effects are endured by mountain climbers at lethal heights.
Eventually, fresh air had to be injected into Biosphere.
No such aid is available for our intrepid Martian colony where a small oversight like failing to cure cement would prove fatal.
Despite its inherent dangers the closed environment of the dome is the safest place to be on Mars.
But sometimes the colonists must leave this comfort zone and step outside.
As the Sun rises over Mars a few colonists strike out from the dome to fulfill their research assignments and maintenance duties for the day.
Their commute will take them across the empty, rusted plains of the Red Planet.
In order to accomplish this mission efficiently the inhabitants need an alternative to crossing the terrain on foot.
When we go to Mars we really don't know that much about the planet and if we just land in one place we're going to learn a lot about that one place but maybe not a lot about the planet.
So we definitely need the ability to have mobility and go long distances.
The rover used for this purpose on the Apollo Moon mission was a convertible, essentially just an amped-up dune buggy.
The lunar rover served its purpose beautifully.
It allowed the two human explorers to not get too fatigued walking around but instead allowed them to rove around the lunar surface and explore out to a greater range.
But at the same time, this was clearly a short-range, short-duration mission solution.
But there's much more real estate to cover on Mars.
Meet the Chariot the most advanced model to emerge from the minds of NASA's 21st century engineers.
In addition to the gold plating and Jules Verne look this space truck has some features that streamline the cruising experience in outer space.
Each one of the wheels can rotate 360 degrees so we can actually drive it perfectly sideways or forward or in any direction.
This versatility means that it can conquer most interplanetary topography and that's not all.
Spacesuits don't bend very well in the middle.
So even though we think of seats as the obvious way to ride a car around town it really doesn't make sense.
So we built this upright interface.
There's a ring here where the suit plugs in.
All the weight of the suit is taken by this upright turret.
This is the only way to ride on another planet.
Mars, though, is a vast planet and to search its more distant corners our colony's scientists need to ride in style.
They prefer to work in jumpsuits rather than having to remain in an unwieldy spacesuit for hours on end.
This is only possible if they can maintain an environment with atmospheric pressure akin to that found on the home world, Earth.
That's where the Small Pressurized Rover comes in.
I would call it sort of a combination of a spacesuit and a sports car.
It's a sporty rover.
It's got great maneuverability.
The chassis of the Chariot actually forms the base of the Small Pressurized Rover.
The cabin on the Small Pressurized Rover would start about here and run all the way back to about here leaving the rear of the vehicle kind of like the bed of a pickup truck so that's available for carrying additional payloads.
We can upgrade the machine and turn it into all kinds of pieces of equipment out in the field.
On the rear of the vehicle we can plug a number of different implements for example, bulldozer blades just something practical like a winch, backhoes, and other tools.
The Small Pressurized Rover, orSPR is only slightly bigger than the Apollo rover.
It has a top speed of about six miles per hour.
The SPR can be deployed for missions lasting from three days up to two weeks and covering distances of over 500 miles.
Certain enhancements also make it the spaceman's transportation of choice.
A pair of spacesuits hangs on the exterior of the Small Pressurized Rover.
The passengers in the pressurized interior of the vehicle can enter the suits through a rear hatch and be walking along the planetary surface in as little as ten minutes.
A scientist with the NASA Ames Research Center, Dr.
Pascal Lee explores another vehicle that is a precursor to one being designed for Mars.
He joined forces with Nick Baggarly executive director of Drive Around the World a travel adventure organization.
Vehicles like this are fantastic because you can use them for analogs for pretending like you're traveling or traversing on another planet.
So we built it so it could kind of go anywhere.
This is a vehicle that's being prepared for an expedition to Greenland and then later on to the South Pole.
You can see here that there's going to be room not much though, but room for all of the equipment and supplies that you will need to explore the Moon and Mars.
But it's giving engineers and scientists at NASA some real firsthand ideas about how to design a pressurized rover for exploring Mars.
This robustly designed vehicle has a unique set of wheels.
The tracks use this set of road wheels but this round hamster wheel is what actually drives the track.
It spins around, connected to the spindle of the vehicle and pushes on these rubber lugs to propel the track.
Each one measures which is over 500 square inches of rubber on the road.
Because each track has a built-in suspension system it can actually articulate and follow the curve of the terrain that it's on.
So this entire apparatus can pivot so if you're going over a boulder the track will actually get up underneath the boulder and then just crawl up and over it.
Mars is a gritty planet.
Dirt, dust, and grime get into everything.
This is especially true of a wheeled vehicle with moving parts where the mechanisms can easily be corroded.
The danger is having a track over-rotate and when it does you have a field repair situation on your hands.
Fixing a vehicle on the road is risky under the best circumstances but in outer space, there is zero margin for error.
And if you break down or get into any kind of trouble help is a long way away, if it can reach you at all.
You realize that at that point, if you couldn't breathe outside if you couldn't just step outside of your vehicle and somehow start working on it you might be just watching yourself breathe your last breaths of air as your life-support system allows you to survive a few hours at that spot but this is where you're going to die.
Fortunately, NASA has a contingency plan in mind.
One of the nice advantages of the Small Pressurized Rovers is that, because they're relatively small and light we can actually launch two.
So we operate with a system of two together sort of like a buddy system where there's two astronauts in each rover and they go out long ranges.
And if one of them should break down then all four astronauts can get in the other one and come home.
As for the price tag of one of these Red Planet hot rods People also ask me how much it costs and I can only say that it costs more than a Ferrari.
Colonists are not only racing the Martian landscape in style they'll be sporting a cutting-edge design in space outerwear that looks remarkably like a superhero's.
As one of their daily research assignments our Martian colonists of the future explore the largest volcano in the solar system, Olympus Mons.
But even while performing routine chores Mars is waiting to ambush and kill any intruder.
Layers of protection are a constant requirement for Earthlings.
When not in the safety of the dome colonists must be in a pressurized rover or in the crushing confines of their spacesuits.
Having done four spacewalks and spent over a 24-hour period in spacesuits the suits are hard on you.
They're stiff as a board, and they're pressurized to the same pressure as a football.
It's like 4.
3 pounds per square inch.
So every time you go to close your hands and move your gloves you're working against that inflation pressure and it can be very fatiguing.
It can cause fingernail damage and other trauma from the suits.
A spacesuit must defend the fragile human inside from the numerous threats of outer space.
We need to pressurize them, we need to give them oxygen we want to control for temperature and humidity so we do all of that within a spacesuit design.
While it must accommodate human needs a spacesuit must also be a constant shield against an unforgiving universe.
One lethal weapon in Mars' arsenal is a commonly occurring micro-meteor shower emitting tiny meteors any one of which is enough to puncture a suit leading to a gruesome death.
Insulation with layers of neoprene and Kevlar is critical to keeping the astronaut safe from every encounter with a treacherous planet.
Carrying a life-support system results in a suit that is so bulky and cumbersome to wear it can take up to three hours for an astronaut on the International Space Station to don an MMU, or Manned Maneuverable Unit.
That includes 30 minutes of pre-breathing the pure oxygen atmosphere that the astronaut will be inhaling.
But at MIT, scientists are using robotics to help create a new, more streamlined spacesuit straight out of the pages of a comic book.
The future of spacesuits is all about locomotion and mobility and dexterity.
So we needed a completely different design pretty much a revolutionary design from current suits today.
When we explore on Mars in a Bio-Suit we're going to be like an extreme athlete.
The reason we're going to Mars to explore is to search for the evidence of past life.
So on Mars, we need to bend down and look for fossils, look for life.
So the primary design principle of the Bio-Suit is to afford the astronauts maximum mobility while maintaining a minimum energy consumption.
This is just a mechanical system but imagine that this wire was made out of a shape-memory alloy.
So you can see, as I twist this up, the wire comes in and it tightens up the suit around me.
What that means is we're applying the pressure directly to the skin.
That's also why we call it a second-skin suit.
The life support system for the Bio-Suit is modular making it much more comfortable than the current unwieldy spacesuit.
A hard torso shell connects to the backpack that contains the life-support system.
The helmet visor will be painted gold like contemporary spacesuits in order to defend against the blinding illumination of the sun.
The helmet will also contain a heads-up display, or HUD that can relay vital information to the explorer.
We envision the astronaut looks through their helmet and they'll see the displays, their physiological displays- heart rate, blood pressure- but also all the navigation information that they need so a 3-D topographical map.
Normally, designers only worry about spacesuits being safe and functional.
But the Bio-Suit inventors also wanted to make sure that their creation was aesthetically pleasing.
We hope that the Bio-Suit looks really beautiful and wonderful.
It wasn't intentionally made to look like a Spider-Man suit.
The Bio-Suit is just one futuristic technology that may someday make an appearance in the Martian colony.
But no matter what spacesuit you're wearing a stroll on Mars will never be a walk in the park.
Martian colonists may dress like superheroes but they aren't all-powerful.
Sometimes they need to rely on a robotic sidekick: The Robonaut.
Robonaut is a robotic astronaut assistant.
In this particular case it has an all-terrain-type rover for a lower body.
It's our interpretation of the ancient Greek myths of a horse with a human body on top.
The Robonaut project fuses human ingenuity with mechanical muscle through its telepresence operating system.
You can think of it as a very advanced puppeteer mode where you put on a set of virtual reality gear and then control the robot directly.
His motions get translated into robot motions.
An LCD helmet with two screens map directly to the two cameras in the robot's head and in that mode, we can perform a lot of tasks in a very natural way.
The cameras are protected by a helmet modeled after Roman centurion armor.
The robot can also operate in an autonomous mode where it employs its own artificial intelligence to carry out pre-programmed assignments.
Since it will be blazing trails where people dread to set foot Robonauts' size and shape are crucial.
Robonaut is designed to help humans do human tasks so the human form is a natural way to achieve that goal.
If you want to be able to work with the same tools work in the same environment having roughly the same size appendages certainly helps.
One example of this is using Robonaut to take over the more routine tasks inherent to running the colony.
The best role to give robots is to have the robots cover what is either too dangerous for humans to do or things that are simply better done by robots.
But the Robonaut is not merely a technician.
His talents are critical to the success of the mission.
Another very important role that we are seeing for robots is to go out there and scout for dangers but also for interesting scientific sites to really explore in-depth.
The robots are still very convenient tools for reconnaissance.
Like the rover, the Robonaut runs on a solar-powered lithium-Ion battery.
While charging the machine is a simple task fueling the human settlers is not nearly as straightforward.
Starvation will be a constant shadow looming over the colonists and if a precarious balance is not maintained the end is always near.
For our fearless Mars colonists of the future satisfying even the most primal needs proves to be a daunting hardship.
Take what may be the most basic need of all-food.
It costs about $140,000 a pound to transport anything from Earth's surface to Mars' surface.
That can be food, it can be water, it can be air.
So, given the prohibitive cost of importing several tons of prepackaged food every Martian pioneer is also a little bit of a farmer.
Even then, growing plants on Mars isn't as easy as simply sticking a seed in the ground and watering it.
The Martian soil, or regolith, is an inconsistent resource.
Even a minute trace of toxic material can spell instant death to the crops and doom for the colony.
They cannot rely on Mars' soil to nurture plants from Earth.
On Earth, there are a couple of different ways that we grow plants.
We grow them outside in the open field.
We also grow them in a greenhouse.
This is what greenhouses are like on Earth.
They're located on the surface of the ground they use natural solar radiation and they operate year-round without danger from meteorites or ionizing radiation from space.
On Mars, the greenhouse is a controlled growth chamber an environment that provides the five cardinal factors plants need for growth.
They need light, they need temperature they need water, they need nutrients and they need atmosphere, carbon dioxide and oxygen.
So with a growth chamber in a habitat you can grow food all year round.
For the most part, they are grown hydroponically a term that literally means "water culture.
" Plants grown hydroponically are grown without soil in a nutrient bath suspended in water.
But plants still need light and room to flourish and space is at a premium.
Researchers have gotten around this requirement in the tight confines of a space far away by using the cool light-emitting diodes or LEDs, shaded to the colors of the spectrum that stimulate plant growth.
While Mars' sunshine is fine for plants whose sole purpose is to produce oxygen these types of growth chambers provide food for the colony.
Another concern to plague the colonists- on Earth, insects pollinate plants.
Does that mean that we'll be taking bugs with us into space? It's actually really difficult for bees to navigate under conditions that are not found on Earth because they use the UV light from the Sun to navigate and they use a lot of other cues and we wouldn't have those same cues on Mars or in a space colony.
A little invention works wonders.
We have these vibrating wands that will act like artificial bees or using air movement like a fan that's blowing the pollen around from one flower to another.
We think, though, that the astronauts or the colonists of another planet are actually going to really enjoy tending the plants.
But there's still one huge factor to growing plants on Earth that's missing on Mars and it's something that even technology can't overcome.
It's only about three-eighths Earth's normal gravity on Mars so there'll be less pull on the plants.
On Earth, gravity drains water away from the roots of plants allowing them to take in oxygen.
With reduced gravity, water doesn't flow efficiently leading to saturated roots, unable to absorb nutrients and air.
There'll be maybe a tendency for them to grow weaker.
Exactly what kind of food are our space farmers growing? Potatoes and lettuce, to name just a few.
Given all of these ingredients here's what's on the typical menu for a Martian diner.
For breakfast, it's scrambled eggs and hash browns.
Lunch is a sandwich tempeh made from soy or portabella mushrooms with a side of strawberries.
Pasta with marinara sauce for dinner, salad and sweet potato pie for dessert.
This is a strictly vegetarian diet so the carnivores in the crew are out of luck.
Even though you could probably produce meat from various types of animal sources I have a feeling the astronauts would get so attached to them they wouldn't want to eat them after they grew them.
Keeping the crew healthy and strong is essential when just a routine day's work requires a superhuman effort like harvesting an interplanetary jackpot that lies just beyond the Martian horizon.
The cost of mounting this long-term expedition to Mars is astronomical.
But the biggest payoff may actually be beyond Mars where there's a cornucopia of extremely valuable untapped resources floating beyond the Red Planet.
The largest source of meteorites on the planet Earth come from the asteroid belt.
And we find that roughly 85 percent of them are mainly made out of silicon, similar to the surface of the Earth but also five percent or so have iron in them.
We could use that iron in order to create steel in order to create structures and buildings and cities and even a civilization.
Harvesting the asteroids smoothes the progress in assembling and expanding the Martian outpost.
Constructing new facilities and spacecraft as well as maintaining and updating the older ones is accomplished utilizing the raw ores refined and processed from the belt.
Instead of taking the minerals from the asteroid belt and bringing it all the way back to the Earth, that's a waste.
It's much better to mine the asteroid belt in order to create materials for Mars.
But there's also another reason to grind up these deep space boulders.
If you were to melt them down, you would get, it's estimated from a one-kilometer asteroid all the world's steel production for a year all the world's gold and silver production for ten years all the world's platinum group element productions for 1,000 years.
So that's where the riches are if that's your main motivation.
An asteroid with a diameter of a little over half a mile would have a mass of about two billion tons.
That's equal in weight to An asteroid of this size could contain enough nickel, cobalt, and platinum to be valued at over $150 billion.
And this is just a small asteroid.
Some monster rocks approach the dimensions of a real planet.
Mining an asteroid is something that we've never done before.
However, perhaps there are ways in which to dig into the asteroid's soil which we don't think is going to be that hard.
One way is laser beams.
We can use high technology to create laser beams that'll slice right through the asteroid material.
But hollowing out a megaton rock in the airless void of space is by no means an easy proposition.
Radiation in the asteroid belt is quite harsh especially because Jupiter itself releases an enormous amount of radiation.
This means that miners on the surface of an asteroid belt may have to live underground inside the asteroid itself.
That would give them some protection from the radiation from the Sun radiation from Jupiter, and radiation from outer space by living inside the asteroid itself.
Maybe this is a job better left to men of iron.
Because the asteroid belt is so distant perhaps 300 million miles away we may have to use robots.
Robots are going to be relatively cheap they don't require life support and they don't have to come back.
For the first interplanetary colony humanoid robots, working together with their astronaut partners is the only way to minimize risk and maximize survival.
In everyway, daily life on Mars will be the ultimate extreme adventure.
You get up in the morning, you've had an hour extra sleep you bound out of bed because there's half the gravity then you suit up to go outside because you have an hour of duty, checking on the robots that keep life possible.
And then on your way home, you stop on a ridge and you look across the valley into the canyons.
And you look up at the Martian sky with the amazing sight of stars twinkling through.
Exploring the surface of Mars is going to be a fantastic adventure.
There are landscapes that are of unimaginable beauty some completely alien to us.
There are thousands and thousands of kilometers of terrain to cover in every direction.
It's going to be a fantastic wonderland for scientists.
This view of a working colony on Mars is, for now, fiction informed by the best of 21 st century science.
But in all likelihood, one day in domed cities entrenched in alien soil rather than being little green men our celestial neighbors will be us.