Mission to Mars Archives

Why we need to go to space

When I had my first PC in the 90ies I was into making music for a while. I had a software where I could arrange samples (little snippets of audio) into tracks. Over a short time I gathered hundreds of samples from tracks I came across and liked. Out of these I composed over a dozen songs – it was supposed to be my first album. Then the disaster happened: my hard drive failed. The data on it was not readable anymore.

Back then hard drives were very expensive. You would have had only one in your computer most likely. Everything is stored on that one drive. Same for backup-solutions: they were very expensive. You might have had a ZIP drive or even more primitive forms of storing large amount of data. But this was almost exclusively used in companies who could not afford to lose it’s data. Even today having a backup data outside a company is rare. The problem slowly disappears today with everything moving to the cloud. But remember, we talk about the 90ies.

Let’s rewind back to 1996

I did not have a backup back then. Hours and hours of my labour of love was just gone! Friends tried to help me; they hooked up my disk to their computer to see what’s still readable. They even ran some tools trying to recover bits that got lost. But there wasn’t a lot that could be done. I lost most my files and almost all my samples. All that was left was maybe a hundred samples and a handful of songs.

Lessons learned

Duplicate what’s valuable and store it somewhere else. That’s how it works everywhere nowadays, not only in IT: everything of importance is duplicated or has a failover.

Backup for humanity

We need a backup plan for humanity. We need a failover if something goes wrong with our current population. What could go wrong? How to create a backup of mankind?

Nils

Founder ?and investor ?
Environmentalist ? and futurist ?

Here I think out loud and talk about things. Opinions are my own but happy to share.

Life on Mars. Sort of.
The true story of six volunteers picked to live on a fake planet.
This is a short review for the podcast series The Habitat by Gimlet Media

Show intro

On a remote mountain in Hawaii, there’s a fake planet Mars. Six volunteers are secluded in an imitation Mars habitat where they will work as imitation astronauts for one very real year. The goal: to help NASA understand what life might be like on the red planet—and plan for the day when the dress rehearsals are over, and we blast off for real. Host Lynn Levy has been chronicling this experiment from the moment the crew set foot in their habitat, communicating with them through audio diaries that detail their discoveries, their frustrations, and their evolving and devolving relationships with each other. From those diaries, Gimlet Media has crafted an addictive serialized documentary: the true story of a fake planet.

My opinion

The journalist handed over a recorder to the crew before they started the experiment and were locked away for a year. She gets to ask them questions and then they send the recordings back to her. They talk about the live on Mars, the live in the habitat. And the little things. Such as their rooms. And they talk about what they do. And about what they can’t do.
It’s very nice to get to know the crew members in this loose interview style. They get to talk about what they want and how they want. This way you get to know their personalities but more importantly, how things are playing out in there on this simulated Mars ?

What I Like about it

It’s about space! Kind of… it gives you an idea of how it could be
Very “snack-able” episodes, most of them are less than 30 min
Makes me dream about how it could be

Check it out The Habitat by Gimlet Media