background: Official logo for Generation Mars
Video clip 08: Frontier creativity
background: illustration for Scratching the Surface by Luis Peres
Video clip 07: Unpredictable but certain
background: Dawn Colony mission badge
Video clip 06: Mars has what we need
Not to mention a 24 hour day and enough atmosphere to provide some modest protection from solar radiation and stabilize daytime temps to between -50C and 10C.
It’s not a paradise, but we can work with it.
background: NASA/JPL-Caltech
Video clip 05: Luck
We need a backup.
background: NASA/JPL-Caltech animation showing known asteroids from 1999 to the present.
https://images.nasa.gov/details-JPL-20180716-ASTRDSf-0006-All%20Known%20Asteroids%202018-Feature%20version.html
Video clip 04: Mars is waiting…
background: NASA/JPL/MSSS; processing and mosaic: Olivier de Goursac, 2013 (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Martian-Sunset-O-de-Goursac-Curiosity-2013.jpg)
Video clip 03: Unmanned
Our unmanned efforts in space deserve great credit, but they aren’t enough.
background: NASA Juno Mission Collection 2 excerpt (https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/juno/multimedia/junoanimations.html), NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center MAVEN animation (https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/11024)
Video clip 02: Apollo Memory
Next up: a hazy memory of the Apollo era.
Background video footage: Apollo 11 montage from NASA
Video clip 01: Two Kinds of People
I got together with a friend and a green screen recently to shoot for a promo video. I can be chatty, so we ended up with more footage than I need, much of it quite good. I’ll throw some clips against the wall here over the next couple weeks and see what sticks.
background: Illustration for Scratching the Surface by Luis Peres.
Back cover text
One day, in the near future, children will be born on Mars. The environment they grow up in will be very different from yours. And yet, they will still be human children, just like you. They will have dreams and worries, just like you. They will go to school; they will play; they will cry; they will laugh: in so many ways just like you.
But their sky won’t be blue. They will never see an ocean. They will never go to an amusement park or go camping in a forest. They will never hear the sound of rain.
Instead, their sunsets will be blue. They will see the tallest volcano and the deepest canyon in the solar system. They will ride in rovers and rockets, and this will be normal for them. They will walk through rocky red landscapes that haven’t changed for billions of years. They will see, and be part of, the development of an entirely new branch of human existence.
And, once in a while, they will look up at a particularly blue evening star in the sky and know that on that planet so far away, there are billions of children, just like themselves, some of whom might, at that same instant, be looking up at a particularly red star in the sky.
Which will they call home?
illustration by Luis Peres (work in progress)