Category Archives: Mars Colony

Jeff BezosJeffrey (Jeff) Preston BezosOn The Money: House Democrats line up .5T in spending without budget | GOP takes aim at IRS | House Democrat mulls wealth tax What will Elon Musk and Richard Branson do about Jeff Bezos flying into space? Republicans open new line of attack on IRS MORE, the founder of Amazon and the CEO of the space launch company Blue Origin, caused a social media sensation when he made the following announcement of Instagram:

Ever since I was five years old, Ive dreamed of traveling to space. On July 20th, I will take that journey with my brother. The greatest adventure, with my best friend.

Bezos proposes to achieve several things besides fulfilling a childhood dream shared by uncounted people on planet Earth. He will prove the safety of the New Shepard rocket ship by betting his and his brothers lives on it. The Amazon founder will change his personal brand from that of a monopolist into a private astronaut pushing back the envelope of the final frontier. Finally, Bezos will show up his rival, Elon Musk, whose rockets regularly go into orbit, but who has not yet personally flown into space. However, Virgin Galactics Richard Branson may steal a march on Bezos.

The New Shepard rocket, which has flown unpiloted over a dozen times in the skies over Texas, is due to make its first flight with humans on board on the anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing. One of the seats will be occupied by the winner of an auction, the proceeds to which will go to charity. Bezos and his brother will occupy two of the other seats. The New Shepard passengers will fly just past the edge of space to experience a few minutes of microgravity and the greatest view of Earth ever before descending back to soft land on Earth.

Bezos will not be the first rich guy to fly into space on his own dime. Dennis Tito has that honor, thanks to a flight in 2001 to the ISS arranged by Space Adventures on board a Russian Soyuz. Since then, a number of the well-heeled and adventurous, including Iranian American businesswoman Anousheh Ansari and computer gaming magnate Richard Garriott, have taken similar rides. But Bezos will be the first to ride in a rocket ship he developed and owns.

What shall SpaceX CEO Musk do in response? The bitter rivalry between the two space entrepreneurs is no secret. Thus far, Musk has been beating Bezos hands down on both business and personal branding. SpaceX rockets regularly take both cargo and people into low Earth orbit. Musk has won the NASA contract to build the first crewed lunar lander in over 50 years. Musk has proven to be pretty endearing and cool with his recent stint as a Saturday Night Live guest host.

Musk has used the Crew Dragon to start a space tourism service. A fundraising flight, called Inspiration 4, will be the first off the launch pad. Meanwhile, Axiom has arranged for four private space flights to the International Space Station on board the Crew Dragon. A few minutes suborbital hop is one thing. A week-long or longer voyage to the International Space Station (ISS) is quite another. In theory, Musk could grab a seat on one of those flights and thus do Bezos one better in the rich space adventurer game.

Does Musk have the time to take a week off (or more, including preparation and training) for a space-faring vacation? He is, after all, running both a space launch company and an electric car company, among other enterprises. Will adding private astronaut to Musks personal brand be enough to take him away for a while from the serious job of disrupting both the aerospace and automotive industries?

Then again, Musk also has harbored dreams of space flight from childhood. He plans to build a Mars colony and spend his later years there. Musk is building a rocket called the Starship that will fulfill that ambition. Perhaps a ride to-and-from the ISS will be a practice run for the months-long interplanetary voyage to Mars, followed by the rest of his life on the Red Planet. Musk might think, what is the point of being one of the richest humans on the planet if one does not indulge oneself with the ultimate adventure vacation?

Musk cannot pull such a flight off before Bezos. However, Richard Branson might, perhaps on July 4. The private sector space race has just gotten personal.

Mark Whittington, who writes frequently about space and politics, has published a political study of space exploration entitled Why is It So Hard to Go Back to the Moon? as well as The Moon, Mars and Beyond, and, most recently, Why is America going back to the Moon. He blogs at Curmudgeons Corner. He is published in the Wall Street Journal, Forbes, The Hill, USA Today, the LA Times and the Washington Post, among other venues.

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What will Elon Musk and Richard Branson do about Jeff Bezos flying into space? | TheHill - The Hill

Its important that you have some idea of where you want to go, some kind of dream, says Rutger Bregman, 33, a Dutch historian and author who has written about utopian thinking. Dont underestimate the power of outlandish ideas. Throughout history, many significant milestones democracy, the abolition of slavery, equal rights for men and women began as utopian dreams. It always starts with people who are first dismissed as unreasonable and unrealistic, Bregman says.

To engage in utopian thinking, you cant be myopically focused on the present. Theres nothing inherent about our current political, economic and social realities; people made these systems and can make them anew. To envision something novel, read more history and less news. A sensationalistic daily news cycle can constrict your ability to see the world as anything but dangerous, violent and mean. Theres nothing as anti-utopian as the product that we call the news, Bregman says. Let your interests be expansive. Read philosophy and psychology. Look around and think, It doesnt have to be this way. Take something like poverty; why does it exist? he says. Weve heard things like the poor will always be with us, but is that really true? What if poverty werent taken as a given? Sometimes it helps to imagine what future historians will make of us. What will they see? How will they judge us?

Utopianism doesnt require you to be optimistic. In fact, that kind of dont worry, everything will work out view can lead to complacency. Instead, be hopeful in a way that moves you toward action. To be a utopian takes grand, ambitious thinking. But when it comes to implementing these ideas into policies and practice, Bregman suggests a humble, tinkering approach; overzealous attachment to utopian blueprints can be dangerous.

You can be a utopian and still enjoy dystopian fictional narratives. Dystopias tend to be much better entertainment, Bregman says. Notice, though, if those plotlines start eroding your view of human nature. To think like a utopian, it helps to believe that humans are fundamentally decent. Be cautious if your utopias all involve technological fixes or escapist colonies on Mars. The work of imagining futures is hard. In this era of climate breakdown and the extinction of species, its obviously easier to think of how it all could end than how it could become much, much better, Bregman says. That better world, that is the work.

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How to Think Like a Utopian - The New York Times

If youre looking for a sign of the End Times, heres one: Las Vegas, the city where seemingly anything and everything is condoned, has made grass the ornamental kind illegal.

Much of the West is experiencing the worst drought in decades, a megadrought that has kindled early wildfires and severe water shortages and the seasonal heat has hardly begun. Theres a 100 percent chance that it gets worse before it gets better, Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles, tells the graphics editor Nadja Popovich in The Times today. We have the whole long, dry summer to get through.

Lake Mead, which sits on the Colorado River (behind the Hoover Dam) and provides 90 percent of the water supply for Las Vegas and southern Nevada, this week reached its lowest capacity since its creation in the 1930s. And several states that draw their water, in strict allotments, from the Colorado River must absorb stark restrictions on its use in cities and for farming.

Were kind of at an existential point right now in the West, said Kyle Roerink, executive director of the nonprofit Great Basin Water Network, in a phone conversation. Even basic terminology that once was a given now were seeing a shift in the nomenclature toward saying, well, were not in a period of drought, were in a period of aridification.

Enter aridification, exit grass. Gov. Steve Sisolak of Nevada just signed into law bill AB356, which requires the removal of all nonfunctional turf from the Las Vegas Valley by the year 2027. The effort will conserve about 10 percent of the regions annual allotment of water from the Colorado River. Its a really good time to have put forth something like this, said Mr. Roerink, whose organization was part of a bipartisan coalition, including the Southern Nevada Home Builders Association, that supported the bill.

The Southern Nevada Water Authority has not yet formed the committee that will actually define nonfunctional turf. For now, the category loosely describes the few thousand acres of grass carpeting the regions street meridians, office parks and housing developments, and amounts to roughly one-third of all the grass in the region.

The best way to describe it is, its the type of grass thats only used when someone is pushing a lawn mower over it, Mr. Roerink said. Other shorthand that became commonspeak during this legislative session was useless grass. (That other ostensibly useful grass at parks, schools, golf courses and single-family lawns is still allowed, at least for now.)

Nonfunctional turf the very phrase is an existential knot. Is it redundant, or an oxymoron? Either way, it perfectly encapsulates our contorted relationship to nature: Some grass is good, some grass is bad, and all of it (except the kind that grows wild in meadows) is engineered and curated by us.

The challenge isnt excess grass so much as excess people. Southern Nevada has had explosive growth in recent years, and water usage has increased by more than 9 percent since 2018. Eliminating useless grass was a good first step, Mr. Roerink said, but he worried that the water savings would simply be translated into an argument for new development (doubtless with more useful grass).

What are the Mojave Deserts limits? he said. You know, in some of the areas where Vegas wants to develop is desert tortoise habitat, and theres not a lot of good desert tortoise habitat left. Whats the future of that going to be?

The fundamental question is: What counts as a functional or non-useless species? Humanity seems dead-set on finding out. We have a knack for seeking out the harshest environments and trying to plant ourselves there, from the Amazon to Antarctica. Lately its outer space, with Mars as the ultimate destination. On Monday the billionaire entrepreneur Jeff Bezos announced that he would soon be venturing into space, beating the billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk to the punch (unless the billionaire entrepreneur Richard Branson gets there even sooner).

It bears noting that Mars has no grass, functional or otherwise, nor discernible life of any kind. (Earths deserts, including the Mojave, are where Mars rovers go for practice.) If Martian colonists are fortunate, they might dig up something akin to the microscopic, multicellular rotifers that scientists recently retrieved from Siberian permafrost. The tiny animals resistant to radiation, extreme acidity, starvation, low oxygen and dehydration had been effectively frozen for 24,000 years, yet they bounced right back to life and began to multiply.

Theyre the worlds most resistant animal to just about any form of torture, Matthew Meselson, a molecular biologist at Harvard, told The Times. Theyre probably the only animals we know that could do pretty well in outer space.

The last time the rotifers were up and about, woolly mammoths roamed the planet, including in what is now the Las Vegas Valley. To the extent that mammoths thought anything, they probably held very strong opinions about who was and was not a functional species. Alas, well never know.

Science in The Times, 90 years ago today

MALINTA, Ohio A terrific shock jarred six Ohio counties today, rocked houses in dozens of towns in this state and Indiana and roused thousands of sleeping persons. Tonight the crowds of people who came to Malinta as the center of the shock were mystified as to whether it was caused by an explosion or by the fall of a giant meteor.

Sensing that something far out of the ordinary had happened, hordes of motorists drove from many places to find out the cause. A strange hole, half a mile from Malinta on State Route 109 was the focus of the crowd.

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Where the Grass is Greener, Except When Its Nonfunctional Turf - The New York Times

Doja Cat dropped her new single and music video, called Need To Know, with an appearance by featured friend and fellow musician Grimes. Given the futuristic nature of the music video, it only makes sense to bring in an artist who seems like theyre from another planet.

In the Need To Know video, the evening starts with lounging around, drinking, and playing video games. Grimes joins Doja Cat with her other friends, Jazelle Straka-Braxton, Josephine Pearl Lee, and Ryan Destiny on an intergalactic girls night out. In a far away city reminiscent of the NYC in The Fifth Element, the gang zips around in a floating Uber, on their way to an underground, outer-space club.

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Grimes sports her signature elven ears and hot pink top knots, not needing else to blend in with the aliens surrounding her. She and a blue-tinted Doja grab drinks together at the bar, and sway on the dance floor until the radioactive juice theyre drinking kicks in. The Need To Know video is all just practice for Grimes for when she and Elon go off to Mars in a few years and start a technocrat colony.

In a 2020 interview with Business Insider, when asked whether shed rather upload her consciousness to the Cloud or go to Mars, Grimes said going to the red planet was one of her main goals.

WOW, what a question. Ummmmm.. I would very much like to do both of these things. Like, these are the main things Im trying to do Grimes said at the time. I guess Id like to upload my consciousness, and then when its technologically possible, have my consciousness live in some kind of humanoid vessel that can speak and move freely, and then that body can go to Mars and other planets with my mind inside it.

Okay Grimes, yeah sure, whatever you want to do. Planet Her from Doja Cat lands on June 25th.

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Grimes, preparing for her life on Mars with Elon probably, appears as an alien in Doja Cat's new video - Yahoo Lifestyle

Electric Gamebox, which has a single U.S. venue in the Dallas area, will have locations in major metropolitan regions around the country over the next five years.

The company announced that it raised $11 million in its latest funding round, bringing its total capital raised to date to $25 million. Electric Gamebox plans to use that funding for a bold expansion that will see more than 1,000 Electric Gamebox venues open around the world by 2026.

It expects more than 100 of those venues to land in major U.S. metro areas over the next five years, and it plans to open locations in San Antonio, Houston and Austin by the end of this year. The company also has three venues in the U.K., where its headquartered globally.

Electric Gamebox is an immersive group gaming platform where as many as six people can play as a team to overcome challenges and solve puzzles. But there are no clunky virtual reality headsets the entire game takes place in a private, white room in which the game environment is projection-mapped across the walls. Players wear small visors that track their motion and location in relation to objects in the game.

Game sessions must be booked ahead and can last 60 minutes and range from $10 to $35 per person.

The company is also searching for a corporate headquarters location in Dallas to support its growth. It expects to expand its team of 50 employees to a few hundred by the end of 2021.

Why North Texas? The region is the home of U.S. location-based entertainment, founder and CEO Will Dean said. Its home to movie theater chain Cinemark as well as other experiential entertainment companies like Dave & Busters, Main Event and Topgolf.

Dean, who co-founded the world famous Tough Mudder team obstacle race, started Electric Gamebox with the idea of creating an experience that challenged people of all ages.

My criteria for my next business after Tough Mudder was kind of twofold. It didnt have to be curing cancer, but I had to believe it was making a positive difference in the world ... and you know, I really like the idea of using technology to bring people together, Dean said.

Dean likens the mechanics and setup of Electric Gamebox to an escape room, but the company is also developing other games. It has six different game scenarios and plans to have at least 100 over the next five years. In one of the current games, tech billionaires start a colony on Mars and players have to mine Elonomium a clever play on Elon Musks name to build the largest colony possible.

Dean said the company was pleasantly surprised to learn recently that Electric Gamebox has been a hit with families that have children on the autism spectrum.

Its quite humbling when you have a family come in ... and youll have a mother say, Theres nothing that we as a family can all enjoy together; this has been quite game-changing for us as a family. And, This is something we look forward to all week.

The Electric Gamebox venue in The Colonys Grandscape has been fully booked on weekends since it opened in December, Dean said. And thats despite the pandemic.

Its very socially distant, Dean said.

The games are targeted toward all age groups and are family friendly, but theyve also been popular for corporate team-building events. Dean said he expects to see even more corporate event bookings in September as companies return to in-person work.

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Dallas Electric Gamebox is the digital escape roomlike experience youre about to see everywhere - The Dallas Morning News

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As earth continues to devolve and Mars exploration continues to evolve, humans are one step closer to living on the Red Planet. After decades of thinking otherwise, a recent study suggests that human reproduction will be possible if and when decide to build the space colony.

Experts had previously thought that the intergalactic radiation would corrupt human DNA and render breeding impossible. However, there is new hope for sex on Mars.

The study, conducted by a team of scientists at Yamanashi University in Japan, tested sperm from mice. The team collected liquid from 66 mice in 2012, decided the best ones to produce offspring and then freeze-dried the sperm.

Three sets of vials were sent to the International Space Station in 2013. Three were kept in nearly the same conditions on the ground in Japan. The goal was to expose the sperm on the ISS to spaces vicious radiation and see how it compared to that on earth.

The first set of vials traveled back to Japan in 2014 and confirmed that the experiment had been working. The second box returned in 2016. The third was sent back in June of 2019, five years and 10 months after its arrival. It was the longest space experiment in biological research history.

Upon their return, the scientists examined the damage to the sperm from the long-term exposure radiation. Perhaps more importantly, they determined whether any accumulated mutations could affect the next generation. It took nearly two years to complete the research and write the findings.

The results were good. After nearly six years, Yamanashis team found that the mouse sperm that was stored on the space station was still healthy.

Upon their return to earth, the team rehydrated the cells and injected them into fresh ovary cells. Those were then implanted into female mice. As Professor Sayaka Wakayama put it, many genetically normal offspring were obtained.

Eight healthy space pups were born from the sperm and did not show any differences compared to the ground control pups, the researchers explained in the papers abstract.

The research conducted by Yamanashi is crucial to understanding the impact of cosmic radiation on mammals. However, it is important to note that it cannot be extended to space travel in general. The International Space Station is within the Earths magnetic field and shields it from a good chunk of radiation. Mars is not.

There is a long way to go, but this is the first biological research that allows us to imagine reproduction for a Mars-based space colony. It also comes in parallel to important geological and atmospheric research that is being conducted by NASA.

Either way, humans are one step closer to sex on Mars.

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Study Suggests Sperm Can Survive On Mars, Reproduction Is Feasible - BroBible

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This week sees the publication of Planet-Size X-Men, the big central piece of the Hellfire Gala X-Men crossover and, we presume, home to whatever big announcement Emma Frost makes at midnight that caused massive ructions for the rest of the world. The adverts have already claimed it as making a big impact on the X-Men titles as the original Giant-Size X-Men that relaunched the series, created Storm, Colossus, Sunfire, Thunderbird, Nightcrawler, and Krakoa, introduced Wolverine to the series and began the change that would make the X-Men the most popular superhero comic book for the eighties and nineties. So what is it to be for Planet-Size X-Men? And what has it to do with Rick Remender? Time for one of these, I think, just in case.

Almost a decade ago, Rick Remender was planning to be writing the X-Men books, under editor Mike Marts, with big plans. At the time, Bleeding Cool reported that a big change would see the Inhumans increase in prominence courtesy of the Terrigen Mists traveling around the world creating new Inhumans such as Ms. Marvel, which would also see mutants terminally allergic to the mists, which would lead to the X-Men and all mutants leaving Earth to set up a colony on Europa, leaving a handful of Mist-resistant X-Men on Earth. However, Mike Marts left to set up AfterShock Comics, and Rick Remender left to create new creator-owned comic books with Image Comics. The plot was retooled the Terrigen mists were still a thing, but the mutants left instead for a pocket of the hell dimension Limbo until the Mist situation could all be sorted out.

And I couldn't help but think of this plot when the gossip came through regarding just what was being planned by Jonathan Hickman for the X-Men. Hickman has been prolific in picking aspects of X-Men history, often those ignored by others, and finding new and exciting ways for them all to fit together on the mutant island nation of Krakoa.

We have already learned that Emma Frost has expansion plans. And that whatever they are, they have major social, economic, and political impact.

With even Captain America impressed if dubious.

But unto, now, Hickman hadn't picked up any plotlines that had remained unpublished until now. As it appears, the X-Men are to expand their operations off-world, taking their teleporting Krkoan portals to Mars somewhere we knew that Krakoa had a presence since House Of X #1, and finding a way to colonise another planet. Jonathan Hickman has been here before to some degree in his Avengers World, Infinity, and Time Runs Out storylines for Marvel Comics, with the Gardeners terraforming Mars. I don't know whether they are involved in this one.

But the presence of Mars has been there since House Of X #1 when we saw Armor planting a Krakoan portal on the surface of the planet.

That there was an active portal there from Krakoa.

Powers Of X#1 revealed a future with Mister Sinister setting up breeding pits on Mars to create chimera. But also that Mars would fall along with Krakoa

and that it is all Mister Sinister's fault.

That he defected from Krakoa and was later executed, more recently, as part of X Of Swords, X-Men #14 had this prophecy from Arakko.

Arakko and Krakoa are sentient islands that were once one but became two. Hmm, there was a white light in that Avengers #1 as well.

Back together again as part of X Of Swords, Mars will split them forever. Is Krakoa moving to Mars? Or is Arakko moving to Mars? Joined by Krakoan portals?

The Sinister Secret from Maruarders #20 says there are two ruling councils circling the sun. One on Earth, one on Mars? And the cover to Planet-Size X-Men

But we have Omega-level mutants, Magneto, Jean Grey, Storm, and Iceman, all of whom would be very useful for terraforming a planet. Recently, Rick Remender complained again bout Marvel movies taking his ideas without credit or payment. I wonder if he'll have anything to say about the X-Men titles this week? Planet-Size X-Men #1, New Mutants #19, and X-Corp #2 are all published this week as part of the Hellfire Gala. Time for a song

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SPOILERS: Does Planet-Size X-Men Have Its Roots In Rick Remender? - Bleeding Cool News

It is the Humble Store's turn to give away a game again, and this time it has brought forth a copy of Surviving Mars Deluxe Edition. The Paradox Interactive-published city-building and management title set on the Red Planet is completely free to claim over the next three days.

Originally developed by Haemimont Games, though now under Abstraction Games for future content, Surviving Mars has you building a colony on Mars. It involves utilizing drones to build habitable domes for colonists, factories, and commercial buildings while also balancing dwindling resources to ultimately become sustainable. There are also various Martian secrets to uncover during the campaign, with the title throwing things like contact with aliens, plagues, and other problems at the player to solve.

The Deluxe Edition comes with the Metropolis Building Set with chromatic skins for infrastructure, a new radio station, and three alternative housing styles. It also provides the added benefit of upgrading the base game to the Deluxe Edition if you already own a copy of Surviving Mars on Steam.

Claim the game via the Surviving Mars Deluxe Edition giveaway page on the Humble Store, where it is made available as a Steam key. Although the giveaway ends on June 14, there is a limit to the number of serial keys Humble has available for this promotion, so be sure to grab one as soon as possible. You need to subscribe to the store's newsletter to grab the freebie.

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Surviving Mars Deluxe Edition is free to claim on the Humble Store - Neowin

Ready to pack your bags and hit the cosmic highway for a new off-world home? The folks at ABIBOO Studio and SONet are putting out the welcome mat and presenting their vision for what might become the first capital city on Mars, housing up to 250,000 residents.

The city, called Nwa, was brilliantly conceived by ABIBOO and SONet, a scientific think tank headed by astrophysicist Guillem Anglada, who led the discovery of exoplanet Proxima b. It's a visionary concept for a completely scalable, sustainable Red Planet metropolis carved into the 3,000-foot (1,000 meters) cliff face of Tempe Mensa, and was selected as a finalist by The Mars Society's 2020 contest for feasible settlement designs.

ABIBOO founder and chief architect Alfredo Munoz and his team created the comprehensive design work and its stunning digital artwork, including urban parks and hydroponic gardens, that have Earthlings yearning for a one-way ticket to this large-scale Martian community.

The ABIBOO team thinks construction could begin as early as 2054 and welcome the first wave of colonists by 2100.

According to their official report, the design includes five cities, with Nwa as the capital and each city hosting 200,000 to 250,000 people. The rest of the settlements mirror the urban strategy. For example, Abalos City would be located at Mars' north pole to leverage ice access, and Marineris City would be in Valles Marineris, one of the biggest canyons in the solar system.

Space.com spoke with internationally known architect Alfredo Munoz about his involvement in the Nwa city project, his enthusiasm for its modular blueprints, why he believes it's a global construction enterprise for the ages, what the team's imaginative influences were in its conception and more.

Space.com: What's your role in this ambitious project, and what excites you most about its potential?

Alfredo Munoz: I'm the founder of ABIBOO Studio, which is an international architectural firm. But I'm also on the board of directors of SONet, a multidisciplinary group with experts in different fields in the space industry. We were interested in using the group to provide solutions for sustainable innovations in an outer space settlement. Together, we designed the Nwa city project, which we believed could be the first sustainable city on Mars.

Space.com: How did you approach the aesthetic and logistical concerns for Nwa city?

Munoz: I think it was a combination of factors. First, it was the vision and the challenge that The Mars Society contest proposed. Coming up with a permanent settlement for 1 million people was the core of the stratification for the city. Up until now, there have been other solutions for settlements on Mars, but nothing like this. The challenge for a small amount of people to live temporarily on Mars is a completely different strategy from a design point of view than coming up with a city that must improve the lives of people who are born and live and die in the city.

From a design aspect, Nwa was created by top scientists in a variety of fields. That gives the project a strong confidence that the design is valid and feasible. It's not just about beautiful images and beautiful architectural solutions. It's got experts behind it, and it was innovative in the way we solved so many of the challenges we'll face while setting up a Mars settlement. We did it in a very scalable manner, creating spaces that will be potentially exciting and beautiful. Architecture is not always about solving problems; it's about creating art.

That combination is what myself and the team on this project were able to bring. The marriage between strong technical and scientific solutions, along with innovative architectural ideas, as well as The Mars Society's vision, has created the amount of new interest in society saying that this is really possible. Why not be optimistic with a permanent city on Mars?

With urban planning projects, we often face issues where we need to create identity. How can we create environments that are attractive for people so it creates a sense of identity and belonging? It goes beyond beauty. It's about the emotional well-being of the people that are going to enjoy and live in that space. That was critical for us and something we wanted to do from the very beginning.

Space.com: What does the chosen name "Nwa" mean?

Munoz: Nwa comes from Chinese mythology. There was a goddess that created the universe and protected humans from all the bad things that happen, and her name was Nwa. So when we were talking to SONet about potential names, we thought it was a fantastic representation not only of what the name means, but also how we envision Nwa as a multicultural location.

Most of the team is from Europe and the United States, but we thought to bring in Asian culture and Asian background that compensated for that lack of Asian aspects on the team. Again, we envision Nwa city as a completely inclusive city with people coming from all backgrounds, and we thought this was a beautiful opportunity on both fronts. We really want this to be global.

Space.com: What were some of your influences in creating this Mars megacity?

Munoz: It's funny; we really didn't look at science fiction when we were trying to solve the problems we have on Mars. Consciously, there's always some influence from things like "Blade Runner," and that movie had a very big impact on architects in my generation.

In my case, it was more of my experience with Toyo Ito. He's one of the most influential architects alive. He was granted the prestigious Pritzker [Architecture] Prize in 2013, which is the equivalent of the Nobel Prize, and he's the architect I worked with years ago in Japan. He gives a lot of importance to systems that can be replicated in a very conceptually easy manner.

So when I approached this with the rest of the team, it was very important to come up with something that was simple, scalable and able to generate an identity. We never really went back to science fiction. We were trying to do engineering and architecture. Sometimes, when you look at references that are visually too appealing, you can let go of that anchor of science.

Space.com: Besides the challenges of creating enough breathable air and tunneling technologies, what are other obstacles that need to evolve for Nwa to be born?

Munoz: Yes, there are some critical parts that we've identified that exist ahead, and until those parts are resolved, we won't be able to properly implement construction on a scale like Nwa. The first one is the fact that we'll be relying on steel. Based on the scientists, it will be relatively easy to obtain steel from water and CO2, which can create carbon. We're basically building the entire city with local resources. We're barely bringing things from Earth, which is critical for that scalability and sustainability. We'll still need to test and develop that technology before going ahead.

Another challenge is that we will need on-the-ground confirmation from a geological point of view that the location conditions are appropriate, and that requires actual astronauts the same way that here on Earth, we're not going to perforate the mountain without doing the proper site analysis. A lot can be done with robotics, but some astronauts will need to be there.

The use of artificial intelligence and robotics will also be critical. The way the robotics industry is going, in more than 20 years, we'll be more than ready to have the know-how to start construction. But even if the city is ready to be built, we still need to bring the population to actually live there.

One of the biggest hurdles we found is that, due to the two-year window of opportunity, [planetary alignment for most efficient transit time to Mars] the amount of rockets required to send 250,000 people from Earth to Mars will be huge. Even if [SpaceX CEO] Elon Musk is doing great work and will be able to send humans to Mars very soon, the volume needed is completely mind-blowing. Our engineers are working on ideas of how we can scale that component up. We are hopeful that in the next 30 years, we'll get to the point where those critical parts are resolved so we can start implementing a construction like Nwa on Mars.

Space.com: It's difficult to put a price tag on such a monumental endeavor, but what would you speculate as the costs for Nwa?

Munoz: We were basically comparing it to what the Panama Canal cost back in time. We're talking about a large infrastructure that takes decades to build and requires a lot of commitment. The impact it can have concerning well-being and commerce can be staggering.

We still have no detailed analysis of cost. It's a primary process, and we're working on trying to build prototypes and getting the right partners and financing to continue moving forward. We have a journey of many years ahead, and part of that journey will be doing a detailed breakdown of costs. If we solve some of these obstacles in the next 10 years, we'll have a much better idea.

If we compare it with 60 years ago, when Yuri Gagarin went into space, the amount of complexities involved for trying to send someone into orbit were staggering. In 60 years, which will be 2081, if we compare back in time how much humans have been able to develop technology, we could be in a position where we could speed up our timeline beyond what we're currently targeting. Sixty years is nothing.

Space.com: How do you hope your conceptual Martian city will stir the imaginations of future generations?

Munoz: I'm really passionate about education, and I've been involved in academia and teaching in the past. I think the role that education can have is huge. And architecture has a critical role in having either a positive or negative impact for future generations. To be able to create a plan and be part of the team that came up with a highly scalable solution that could be a road map for a permanent settlement on Mars, to come up with such a landmark in what being a human is and what society can become, is so enriching as a professional. It's fascinating.

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Introducing Nwa, the sustainable Mars megacity of the future: Exclusive interview - Space.com

I had an idea of where my sympathies lay in terms of that geopolitical situation which is more of a history of settler colonial theft and subjugation than it is a conflict, because the two sides are so asymmetrical but for a long time felt it wasnt really my battle. When I was invited to Palestine, I was focused on things much closer to home, here in California prison, poverty and I was writing a contemporary novel about California and its struggles.

But after going there, I could absolutely see how it becomes an obsession for people, because what you witness is so intolerable. The refugee camp I went to, Shuafat, has Gazans living in it, and it has Gaza-like attributes, in the sense that its both incredibly densely populated and also, if somebody ends up there with neither paperwork that allows them to travel in the West Bank nor paperwork that allows them to enter Israel, they are essentially stuck in a one-square-kilometer refugee camp for the foreseeable future.

The logic of the military occupation, shutting down freedom of movement, and the stated military objective of making every Palestinian feel they are being hunted and chased, was totally overwhelming. Its a lot to absorb, as a witness, which is nothing compared to living under it, or trying to.

I mean, watching Palestinian construction workers line up at 4:00 a.m. at a checkpoint to go through what are essentially cattle chutes to get to their jobs in Jerusalem, and to see that their very survival depends upon learning to consent to conditions of subhuman treatment it was just totally awful and unbelievable. Older people will be stuck in this line who are incontinent, or who have diabetes and cannot stand on their feet for six hours. If you have a health emergency in the line, theres chain overhead and chain walls on both sides, and there are hundreds of people lined up in front and behind you. Theres no way to get out. Thousands of Palestinian men endure this every day to get to work.

Thats just one example of the many outrageous things I saw there of the military occupation. Going there had a real effect on me. Our government not only supports this the United States more or less underwrites the whole thing. I am convinced that anyone who saw what I saw would not be able to continue to believe in Israel as the ethnostate that it is. Its tragic for everyone, including the Jews, that after a war in which literally two-thirds of European Jews were erased thats so staggering, I mean, Im stunned by that over and over that after a genocide of that engulfing scale, the reparation was to become a settler colony with nukes pointed at all their neighbors. Its agony.

Anyhow, as you mention, the essay in my new book, The Hard Crowd, is specifically about this refugee camp, called Shuafat, that is technically inside of Israel. I was interested in the idea of going to a refugee camp because a lot of them have become permanent homes for people, for better or worse. There is high-rise housing in Shuafat. The idea refugee camp suggests transience, but many of these refugee camps have now been there for fifty years. I wanted to know how that feels, what it looks like, how it works for those who live there.

Shuafat is a place where 85,000 people live in one square kilometer without any infrastructure or services. It is surrounded by twenty-five-foot concrete walls. Israeli authorities never enter except to storm the camp to make an arrest or arbitrarily bulldoze somebodys house then they fine the person whose house was bulldozed, for the cost of doing so.

Theres no garbage service in Shuafat. Theres no water system. Theres no electrical grid. Almost no schools. No fire trucks nor ambulances. Theres no land registration, no safety or building codes. There are roads, but they arent paved nor named, they arent zoned, they dont have addresses, and they dont have sidewalks. There are no parks. Theres no place for kids to play.

There are reasons to live in Shuafat. If you do, you can hold on to your Israeli residency, which is precious for people who need to get inside of Israel in order to work. But also, people dont want to leave Jerusalem, because thats where they are from, where their parents are from, even as they are stripped of citizenship, as Palestinians, and only have a provisional version of it, in the form of a Jerusalem residency status that can be revoked at any time.

My guide there and my host, I stayed with him and his family, was community organizer Baha Nababta an amazing person I write about in the book. He was assassinated in the street fourteen days after I left.

I didnt exactly sign up to be exposed to that kind of violence. When it happened, I was immersed in writing my novel The Mars Room, and in doing activism work with people serving life sentences. I was going to prisons all the time, and talking to people and thinking about different kinds of violence, and then Baha was killed, and I felt like I was sandwiched between worlds that were just really tough, really brutal, if in different ways.

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