As our next-door neighbor in the solar system, Mars has long been the subject of earthly fictions, myths and fantasies.
With humans now planning to finally set foot there, the Carnegie Science Center takes its own look at the red planet. And it’s one that’s concerned not just with things like spacesuits and rocket launchers, but also climate change and social justice.
“Mars: The Next Giant Leap” opens to members Fri., Nov. 18, and to the public Sat., Nov. 19. And the $4.44 million exhibit adjacent to the Center’s Buhl Planetarium has a lot of what you might expect.
Ready for a red planet?
Overhead, glowing red, hangs an 8-feet-wide globe of Mars. Below, one display recaps some 150 years of human speculation about Mars, from H.G. Wells’ Martian invasion in “War of the Worlds” (1897) to Viking 1, the first spacecraft to land on Mars in 1975.
In another installation, visitors can remotely operate shoebox-sized rovers that traverse a rocky, simulated Martian landscape, searching for signs that life once thrived there. Nearby, hydroponics trays and eight-foot-tall white aeroponic cylinders sprout strawberry plants and other food and medicine crops, demonstrating how they might be grown without soil on a cold, dusty desert planet whose atmosphere can’t support life as we know it.
But running throughout the 7,400-square-foot exhibit is a perhaps unexpected line of questioning. The tone is set by an illuminated sign at the entrance reading “Why Explore Other Worlds When Our Own Needs Help?”
Science Center executive director Jason Brown said such themes arose from the community-engagement process that gave birth to the exhibit in the first place. The Center’s original idea, he said, was to create a show, in one way or another, about space. But what the students, business leaders, and other community members they surveyed were most interested in was Mars.
Moreover, some of the students were skeptical about space exploration. “They were asking things like, ‘Will there be health care on Mars?’ And ‘If we can engineer a new planet, why don’t we fix the one we’re on?’ And ‘Why do I care about traveling to space when my neighbors don’t have enough money for food?’” Brown said. And this: “ If we go to another planet are we going to take the things that are wrong with society here and just build a new one, or are we going to fix them when we go there?’”
Brian Nolte is a history and sociology teacher at Taylor Allderdice High School who in early 2021 led a group of students in discussions about the then-nascent exhibit. “I was really proud of the students when they brought up the idea of social justice,” he said. “They had brought up the idea of what are we gonna take with us, and I think this was one of the more interesting parts of it. What type of laws, what type of culture, how are we going to be shown or identify ourselves in this new world where we can do anything we want?”
As above, so below
“Fix the planet we’re on” might be what comes to mind in displays that address the urgent problem of climate change. One features a 12-foot-tall screen that depicts an animated Earth and Mars spinning in space; touchscreens allow visitors to see what might happen on Earth under six different climate scenarios, from continuing on the planet’s current pace of warming to halting carbon emissions entirely. (Spoiler alert: The current warming trajectory means increased floods, more heat waves and other extreme weather for much of the planet.)
Other displays prompt visitors to engage with questions of public policy and social justice. The installation titled “Dream Big: Space,” looks like the sprawling set of a Martian model railroad, complete with rusty-red cliffs. It depicts the rudiments of a futuristic human settlement on Mars and lets visitors vote by touchscreen on how it will develop further. Visitors during the first three months will be asked to consider how to power the settlement, and given a choice between wind, nuclear or geothermal energy, with a summary of the pros and cons of each. (Solar is not feasible on Mars because of frequent dust storms.)
The next voting issue will involve education equity, said Marcus Harshaw, senior director of museum experiences.
“The hope is that people walk away [and] they’ll think about how they vote here on earth also has made changes to their built environment and the socioeconomic environment around them also,” he said.
Other non-interactive elements of the display reference examples from popular culture, like the idealistic world of the various “Star Trek” series, to prompt discussion about things like how laws might be formulated on a blank-slate planet.
Space travel thus far has not been a notably democratic undertaking; if nothing else, the resources required to do it have come with a top-down approach. But Nolte, the teacher, said while some of the students he met with were skeptical about the benefits of manned space travel, he said many came to view it as an experiment in creating a better society. “The focus was more on, if we had this new space to work on, then we can treat it kind of however we see fit,” he said.
“Normally in the science center we tell people a lot of information,” Brown said. “But what we try to do in this exhibition that’s different is we ask a lot of questions. We want people to think about what the answers could be.”
Is it worth the trip?
NASA hopes to send humans to Mars as soon as the 2030s. That will first require setting up a lunar base, because it’s easier to fly to Mars from the low-gravity moon than from the gravity-laden earth. But Space travel is costly. NASA’s recent unmanned test flight of a lunar rocket – its launch delayed for months by weather and technical troubles – itself cost $4.1 billion. If global food insecurity, say, is our concern, and knowing how to farm on Mars would help, wouldn’t it be easier to simply imagine Mars-like conditions in a lab and go from there?
The Science Center’s Brown acknowledges that might be technically true. But he notes that space travel has long driven technological change, and that people seem to become more inventive when set to the task. Aiming for Mars, he said, “We will be forced to consider technological challenges that we probably never would have considered had we not committed to going there.”
Or, as astronaut Mae Jemison once put it in a quote posted in the exhibit, “Sometimes we can see things more clearly if we imagine them in the future, somewhere else.”
Much like the new, and neighboring, Moonshot Museum, “Mars” also takes time to emphasize the wide range of jobs in the space industry, even here in Pittsburgh – not just rocket scientists and astronauts, but designers, writers, lawyers and more.
“What we really want people to take away is excitement and inspiration about what the future holds for humanity,” said Brown. “But, a big piece of it being that they have agency in that, and they can play a role in what that future looks like.”
The lead funders for “Mars: The Next Giant Leap” were the Howmet Aerospace Foundation and the PNC Foundation.
