Capclave 2019 - Men from Mars? Not Yet, But Just You Wait

Professor of Physics and Astronomy Inge Heyer presented a session on Mars, which included a wonderful Powerpoint of a great deal NASA’s learned over the last few decades.

Now, you may be wondering why this was the session I felt I could not miss the first night of Capclave. One of my published short stories, Nowhere to Go But Mars, whereby America’s future poor huddled masses emigrate to Mars, has been published in two anthologies over the last five years and I’ve been working on a novella version that I’m hoping to publish as a small inexpensive paperback in time for a con seven months from now. I’m ready to send it off to my editor for review, but I’ve one niggling question… about radiation exposure and the effects it will have on the colonists and how I’m handling that in my backstory, etc.

Hearing the facts I’d researched about Mars presented by Inge Heyer was great, sort of felt like I was getting a Mars Mission briefing, which was an excellent double check on my research. She also answered questions from a different vantage. For example, my imagined Martian colony is underground and placed along a canyon. Inge Heyer put up slides of that canyon, Valles Marneris, which she described as the Grand Canyon of Mars and added it stretches the length of the United States. And, stated that no one yet knows what is at the bottom of that canyon, which clearly once held water. Oh, the canyon is also 20,000 feet high. I’m liking my colonial location a lot more suddenly.

Weather on Mars is not localized is we know it on Earth. A storm on the East Coast of the United States doesn’t affect the West Coast at the same time. A dust storm on Mars with its much thinner atmosphere, often blankets the entire planet. Even with Mars being about half Earth’s size, that’s something to think about. As was Inge Heyer’s comments on Mars being on a single tectonic plate and about Marsquakes. She also spoke about the conjecture that there is a layer of permafrost under the Martian surface, basically trapped water ice. Oh, I also liked her sharing that unlike Earth, where we’re worried about the Greenhouse Effect raising temperatures, Mars has a “Runaway Icehouse Effect.” The planet is getting ever colder.

She also spent time talking about Olympus Mons which I hope to feature in a future story. She shared that that the volcano created mountain is so vast that if you were standing on its rim, you would only see the curve of it. It’s that massive, beyond being taller than any volcano on Earth.

Her presentation included a lot more, information about all the probes sent from Earth successfully or not. NASA is wonderful at promoting what it learns, so there is a wealth of knowledge available online. But for me, hearing this presentation helped my think about other aspects of stories I’ve been working on or hope to.

Oh, Inge Heyer also pointed out that if anyone hadn’t read The Martian they really should, but cautioned, which I’m paraphrasing, “That fellow was very lucky to survive. So many thing went right. So much could easily have gone wrong, but it made a great story.”

A member of the audience asked her if she’d watched the two seasons of Mars. She was not familiar with the series, so I mentioned it was from National Geographic and that Season One is currently available on Netflix. Anyone interested in humanity going to Mars, the documentary and fictional approach that Mars takes makes you understand just how much can go wrong and how challenging creating a colony on Mars will be.

I loved this session, if you didn’t get that impression… which is making me think about some changes and plot ideas for another story for my immigrants to Mars. I’m starting to worry a bit more about what my characters or going to find themselves up against… then again, the plot thickens, or perhaps I should say the plot freezes.

I also spoke privately with Inge after the session and she asked me how I planned to address the colony’s power needs, when I told her she told me it was a really good idea. I won’t share what that is at this point, but validation is always a good thing…

By the way, my book Triple Dare just came out exclusively on Kindle and as part of my promoting the release, the paperback edition of the first book in the series, Dare 2 Believe, has just come out in a second printing. The second printing of that book for Kindle as well as book two of the series, Double Dare, both came out over the summer. The Double Dare paperback second printing will be coming out in a couple of months.

As ever, Dare to Believe,

D.H.