Step into Moving to Mars, an exhibition of Mars mission and colony design at London's Design Museum, and immediately you have good reasons not to move there.
Frightening glowing wall-texts announce that Mars wasn't made for you; that there is no life and precious little water; that, dressed in a spacesuit, you will never touch, taste or smell the planet you now call "home". As Lisa Grossman wrote forNewScientista couple of years ago, "What's different about Mars is that there is nothing to do there except try not to die".
It is an odd beginning for such a celebratory exhibition, but it provides a valuable, dark background against which the rest of the show can sparkle (闪耀)—a show that is , as its chief manager Justin remarks, "not about Mars, this is an exhibition about people".
Moving along, there is a quick yet clear flash through what the science-fiction writer Robinson calls "the history of Mars in the human mind". A Babylonian clay tablet and a Greek vase speak to early ideas about the planet. A poster for the originalTotalRecallfilm reminds us of Mars's psychological threat.
The main part of the show is our current plans for the Red Planet. There are real spacesuits and models of 3D-printed Martian settlements and suitable clothing and furniture. Mission architectures and engineering sketches line the walls. Real hammers meant for the International Space Station are wall-mounted beside a low-gravity table that has yet to leave, and may indeed never leave, Earth.
This, of course, is the great strength of approaching science through design: reality and assumption can be given equal visual weight, drawing us into an informed conversation about what it is that we actually want from a future on Mars.
