The average citizen is not a part of the game on Mars. It is difficult to get people and equipment to a planet 140 million miles away. They are undeterred by the situation. On a Bristol wharf, next to the M Shed museum of the city's history, they have installed what they call a "people's version of living on Mars". The toothbrush on a typical real-life space programme is paid for by their expenditure.
The structure is perched on a shipping container. There are heritage shipping masts, culture and retail buildings, and preserved cranes of a former industrial zone. 50 people could stay for months and more in an imaginary community that could be built on the planet. The aim is to explore how to survive in a place of scarcity and danger.
The concept of the least amount of space in which people can decently live is taken to a new level of tininess
An element of realism is present. The artists asked Hugh Broughton, an architect best known for designingAntarctic research stations, to design the structure because he has worked in some of the most hostile places on Earth. Working with Owen Pearce, an architect formerly employed in his office, who has now set up a practice calledPearce+, Broughton has come up with techniques that, although untried, have some practical plausibility.
The bug is a lightweight structure of gold-coated foil that would be shipped from Earth to be filled with regolith. Habitable space below it would be made by exploiting the lava tubes that are believed to lie beneath the planet's surface. Resource use would be as efficient as possible. The mass of material above them would protect them from the harmful rays of the sun.
Good and Kent came up with their ideas when they visited the Mars Desert Research Station in the Utah desert and consulted with an Earth and planetary scientist at the University of Bristol. Their interest is not as technical as they think. They want to know what you need to survive in isolation. What are you going to eat for breakfast? It takes up to 20 minutes for a message from Mars to reach Earth, and the same thing for the reply to come back again. If it breaks, you have to fix it on your own.
They held education workshops and will hold more in the future. They want to offer a hopeful vision. They want to show how high levels of resourcefulness can be used in extreme circumstances. Participants in the workshops are unlikely to ever get to the red planet, so whatever discoveries are made are likely to be more relevant to an environment that is already challenged.
This work takes place in the interior of the structure. The wellbeing and mental health of people in challenging circumstances can be brought to bear on the Mars/Bristol endeavor. It comes with features designed to cheer up or at least its dwellers, and to put them in touch with nature: a window on to distract the dusty landscape and a double-layer roof light. The average temperature is minus 60C. Plants grow well around the astronauts.
You get a sense of the limited dimensions available to space travelers. You can see how tight the sleeping quarters are on the lower level. There was a concept in 1920s German architecture that described the least amount of space in which people could live.
The project would show more precisely what would be built on Mars if humans ever got there. The Hi-Seas project in Hawaii has been pursuing this subject with substantial resources and expertise for a decade. Well-funded exploration of their findings would be something.
There is value in the glimpse that can be found in Bristol. It shows a famous saying of William Morris. The Victorian designer told them to have nothing in their houses that they don't know to be useful or beautiful. It would be the same on Mars.
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