One-way trip to Mars planned for 2023

Artist’s impression of the living units that await Mars One colonists.
The inhabitants of these pods will never see Earth again except as a planet in the night sky. (Photo: Mars One)

An announcement I missed in June. A Dutch company called Mars One plans to settle humans on Mars in 2023.  This will be a one-way trip.  No return tickets available.  The participants emigrate, living and working on Mars for the rest of their lives. This is what makes this plan feasible, says the Mars One website. “It goes without saying that we are taking care of the living needs of the settlers.”

Is this a serious operation? It has serious names associated with it. In this promotional video they’ve persuaded the Nobel prize-winning physicist Prof Gerard 't Hooft to endorse the project.


On the Mars One website he says: "The aspect that made all the previous plans so unbelievably expensive and complex, was the uncompromising condition that all Mars travellers must return back to Earth. A return journey would demand launching techniques and manoeuvres that have not been properly investigated, and would double, triple, quadruple the price.”

Eighteen months ago I was surprised to find Paul Davies proposing this one-way trip to Mars thing, and I put together a few thoughts on the ethics of the idea. Would those who sent these colonists be colluding in their suicide?  Read my thoughts here: Can we? Perhaps. Should we? Perhaps not

Mars One mission leader Bas Lansdorp says that by using only previously tested technologies they will avoid expensive research and testing, and keep costs down to about $6 billion for the first settlement of four astronauts.

Mars colonisation meets Big Brother

Now for how they plan to pay for this.  Should we feel queasy when we read on the company's website that media coverage is "a vital component of Mars One's plan"?  With the help of Big Brother creator Paul Römer they will turn the astronaut selection, training, and mission completion into a media spectacle.  "The concept of a 'one-way' mission is both outrageous and exciting," he's quoted as saying. "These aspects are what brought me to the idea of making the mission the biggest media event in the world. Reality meets talent show with no ending and the whole world watching. Now there's a pitch!"

Starting in 2016, supply vessels, solar panels and living infrastructure will be delivered, and in 2018 a rover will comb the landscape for prime locations to place the colony.

Dr. Robert Zubrin, president of the Mars Society and author of The Case For Mars told The Huffington Post: "This is something that has amazing historic value - the transformation of humanity from a single planet species to a multiplanet species  … You only live once. To have the chance to do something like this is profound."

I read The Second Coming

William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)

A recent visit to W B Yeats's grave has inspired me to record this reading of his poem The Second Coming.  In this poem written in the aftermath of the First World War, history’s pattern seems to be breaking up: “Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world”.  Yeats foretells a new cosmic revelation, a destructive god arriving in a ghastly parody of Christ’s coming again to the Earth.

         THE SECOND COMING

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
    The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
    Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
    Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
    The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
    The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
    The best lack all conviction, while the worst
    Are full of passionate intensity.
    
Surely some revelation is at hand;
    Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
    The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
    When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
    Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
    A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
    A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
    Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
    Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
    
The darkness drops again, but now I know
    That twenty centuries of stony sleep
    Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle.
    And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
    Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

There are several versions of this poem. This is the one I did at school for A-level.  

A few years ago the National Library in Dublin displayed some of Yeats’s manuscripts, and The Second Coming was one of them. You could see where in the poem's last line, Yeats originally had “Marches”, crossed out, with “Slouches” written in its place.  One word changes everything.

Was Yeats a detestable reactionary? Perhaps. Does the text refer to the Russian Revolution of 1917, and is this poem Yeats taking the side of the counter-revolutionaries? Maybe. Does any of this matter? No. 

A note about the beast.  This is an allusion to the Book of Revelation, the last book of the Bible: "And the beast which I saw was like unto a leopard, and his feet were as the feet of a bear, and his mouth as the mouth of a lion: and the dragon gave him his power, and his seat, and great authority."   I have more extensive quotes if you need them.

Lot 201: SS La Blanca

This is SS La Blanca, the ship on which my great uncle Axel died when it was torpedoed in 1917. My cousin Anders succeeded in obtaining this image two days ago after much perseverance. A bit spooky to see the ship at last, the more so in that it has a black funnel. This, it appears, is an indication that the ship belonged to the Argentine Cargo Line. 

The painting is by one H. Crane and was auctioned as lot 201 in July 2008 by Toovey's, in West Sussex.   

Cast a cold eye, on life, on death

Ben Bulben dominates Drumcliff churchyard where Yeats is buried

To Sligo a couple of weeks ago, and WB Yeats’s grave in Drumcliff churchyard.  Church of Ireland, the church of the protestant ascendancy.  His great-grandfather had been rector.

A lot could be said about Yeats, some good, some not. I recommend BBC's In Our Time, on Yeats and Irish politics. [1] He was proud of his protestant heritage. As a member of the newly created Irish Senate in 1925 he made his We are no petty people speech. “We . . . are no petty people. We are one of the great stocks of Burke; we are the people of Swift, the people of Emmet, the people of Parnell. We have created most of the modern literature of this country. We have created the best of its political intelligence.”

I lean on Yeats's headstone

Yeats penned his epitaph a year before he died:

    Under bare Ben Bulben's head
    In Drumcliff churchyard Yeats is laid.
    An ancestor was rector there
    Long years ago, a church stands near,
    By the road an ancient cross.
    No marble, no conventional phrase;
    On limestone quarried near the spot
    By his command these words are cut:
        Cast a cold eye
        On life, on death.
        Horseman, pass by!

And here's Eileen at the Yeats statue in Sligo town. His clothes are covered in his poems.

 Soon:  ...   I read The Second Coming.

[1] If you want to download the episode, do it from this page. Search for “Yeats”

A day I hoped to see but never thought I would

A significant day ... Coulson, Brooks and 6 others charged with phone-hacking. Two years prison is a possibility.  Rebekah Brooks was courted by a Blair, Brown and Cameron. All were desperate for Murdoch’s backing.  It's getting close to Cameron now!  He made Coulson the Tories' director of communications, six months after being News of the World editor, and after one of his reporters was already jailed for phone hacking.

We need to remind ourselves this story is more than just good knockabout fun.  Two years ago, The Guardian reported that MPs had backed down from summoning News of the World editor Rebekah Brooks to testify to a parliamentary committee after being warned their own personal lives would be investigated.  The issue was the same then as now: illegal phone hacking.

So Murdoch was beyond the reach of politicians.

Thank goodness for The Guardian then!

A beetle and a deformed tomato

 

A shield beetle has caused this New Zealand tomato to become deformed.  

My uneducated guess is that its full name is the Australasian green shield bug which according to a website devoted to New Zealand arthropods is native and widespread in North Island, where Albert took this photo in February.

In southern Britain, the Southern Green Shieldbug attacks various food plants including tomato. It arrived there in 2003 (not sure about Ireland). Native to Africa, but frequently imported in food produce.

Southern Green Shieldbug

I think the two bugs are one and same species, and it's the same bug known in the USA as a Southern Green Stink Bug.  Latin names aren’t as helpful as they should be because the same bug seems to have at least three different ones.  Can't be sure, and I've given up researching, don't actually know why I've even gone this far!  I wonder if this beetle has been spread around the world by human trade? That's something that would be worth knowing ...

Wikipedia

Austerity widens inequality - latest

Income of Ireland's poorest households fell between 2009 and 2010 by over 18% in a single year, while the income of the richest rose by 4%. This is the fruits of the Irish government’s austerity programme according to Social Justice Ireland, a Catholic think tank.

They have issued a policy briefing today; though it doesn't seem to be available yet on their website.  This news was on today’s Morning Ireland programme.  (Link includes an audio clip also a video.)

I think we can be confident that austerity programmes have this effect everywhere.

TUC After Austerity conference

Next. In this 8-miunte video from The Guardian, the American economist Dean Baker and the TUC's Nicola Smith discuss why the UK's economic gains of the past 30 years have gone disproportionately to the wealthiest section of society. They weigh up the arguments for tax credits, capping executive pay, and increasing the minimum wage. Interviewed by Tom Clark at the TUC's After Austerity conference.

Irish inequality deepened spectacularly in 2010

Next, one from the Irish Central Statistics Office (CSO). Probably covering the same ground as the Social Justice Ireland briefing paper, the CSO found that inequality deepened in Ireland spectacularly in 2010. The likelihood is that this worsened in 2011 and will again this year. The Survey in Income and Living Conditions data for 2010, published in late March 2012, showed a devastating disparity in the impact of austerity.  The survey measured impact on people in the lowest income decile (the 10% of households earning least) and the richest decile (the richest 10% of households).

The report states: “Those in the lowest income decile experienced a decrease in equivalised disposable income of more than 26%, while those in the highest income decile experienced an increase in income of more than 8%.” (Equivalised income is derived for weightings, whereby one adult in a household is rated at 1.0, other adults 0.7 each; children 0.5 each.)

Foregoing extract from the CSO report courtesy of Vincent Browne writing in The Irish Times on April 4th, under the heading “Fiscal treaty will increase gap between rich and poor”.  Through the EU, he argues, Ireland has bought into a system of inflicting the costs of austerity on to society's poorer sectors.