Do you ever fantasize about becoming a Martian and joining Earth’s great endeavor of colonizing the red planet? To venture into the skies that you’ve spent your entire life looking up at and to gain terrifying but profound perspective on how tiny and insignificant our existence really is in this great vast universe? Well, do you also enjoy mushy food, overwhelming heat, wearing the same clothes for an entire week, and claustrophobic spaces?
In a white-board animated video, AsapSCIENCE explains what it takes to get to Mars and any romantic notions of space travel I might’ve had are now completely shattered. I mean, don’t get me wrong. I’m not under the impression that I would ever in my lifetime become one of the heroic women to go down in history in making a trip to Mars or that any of it was simple (cue Ben “Why was it easier to train oil drillers to become astronauts than it was to train oil drillers?” Affleck), but it was nice to fantasize.
The video goes through the conditions to withstand launch, the 150 days of the trip, and arriving on Mars. It’s essentially one big, “Oh, so you think space is pretty? Are you willing to remove your appendix and gallbladder for it? To just go temporarily blind because of your body fluids moving during weightlessness?” AsapSCIENCE looks at you and your galaxy wallpaper and says, “To enter, you pay the toll in your bones and loneliness.”
“Well, that’s only for the trip,” you say optimistically, “actually being on Mars will be a brand new slate for mankind and a new Utopia.” Cool, are you good with living in a tiny habitat with people you have to repopulate with keeping genetic diversity in mind or underground like some overheating mole people? Let’s just take better care of our Earth, ya’ll, it’s the only one we have.
Do you have what it takes to go to Mars? I certainly don’t.
(via Nerdist, image: screencap)
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