Crops of lettuce, kale, cucumber, peppers, herbs, tomatoes, cantaloupes and edible flowers comprise many of the plants grown in the climate-controlled chamber. Because the importation of soil is restricted by the Antarctic Treaty , dirt is not used to grow the plants. In fact, the closest local dirt is nearly two miles beneath the ice on which the station sits. The plants are grown in a hydroponic nutrient solution instead — no dirt needed.

For that matter, no sunlight is needed either. The growth chamber, which was built in the winter of 2004, makes its own light via 13 water-cooled, high-pressure sodium lamps. In this bright environment, it is not uncommon to find people, like the plants, dwelling happily under the intense light produced in the chamber during the dark polar winter.

Carl and I put a lot of thought into extraterrestrial agriculture while writing In the Shadow of Ares, not least because the primary setting for the book is a very large agricultural settlement. Interestingly (or perhaps not surprisingly), we came to some of the same conclusions as these researchers. Of particular note, the morale benefit to settlers in an inescapably indoor environment of having an open green space (or Greenspace, if you’ve read the book).

Margolis led them down a set of steps to floor level, then to another large bulkhead door.  Inside the door was the chamber of an  airlock, one large enough to drive a small rover through.

As they entered the airlock into Bubble 1, Margolis muttered something into the small object strapped like a watch to her wrist.  Amber only caught a quick glimpse, but was sure Margolis’ MA was a new Holst Informatics Onyx 3.  She could only hope her new job paid enough for her to buy one of those.

The door behind them swung shut, and the one in front of them immediately opened — it was pressurized on both sides, so there was no need to pump down or suit up here, but the small difference in pressure made her ears pop.  Like the emergency bulkhead at the entrance to Main Street, the airlock was a safety feature against catastrophic depressurization of the bubble above.

Walking up the long ramp into the bubble, Amber thought she knew what to expect.  After all, they had had a greenhouse at home…arguably the prototype for this one.  This one was bigger, of course, but how much different could it be?

She looked up at the narrow slot of sky visible between the walls lining the ramp.  The tint of the translucent membrane overhead gave the sky an alien hue, a pale red-blue, not quite Martian or terrestrial, but somewhere in between.  It was far enough above that she didn’t notice at first that anything was there at all — it just appeared to be a strange-colored sky.

But it wasn’t the size or the color of the dome that made Amber look around, slack-jawed.  As she reached “ground” level, she stepped into a world she had only imagined before, based on pictures, vids, and her parents’ descriptions.  She stopped, astonished.  Is this what Earth is like?

The openness made her stomach knot.  She had no problem with open spaces while out on the surface, suited, but this was very different.  Here she stood unprotected at the edge of a grassy field a hundred meters on a side — larger than any open place she had ever been without a suit.  Worse, there was much, much more volume beyond the end of the ramp, where instead of grass there were long ranks of trees and assorted crops stretching into the distance.

She gulped and squeezed her eyes shut.  The nausea and unease gradually passed.

Looking up again, she could see the sky for what it was:  a multilayered translucent membrane some thirty meters above her, curving down to the waist-high anchorage wall.  Just inside the anchorage was a deep recess where the windows of the residential area below were located.  Construction details  — crisscrossed tension-stay wires, broad light panels, small clusters of sensors here and there — brought the bubble into a manageable but still unsettling scale.

Towards the near end of the bubble, the grassy field was bounded by a concrete trough filled with assorted bushes and flowering plants, sunflowers mostly, carefully arranged and meticulously manicured.  Amber looked at the dark green carpet stretched out in front of her.  “Is it real?”

Margolis giggled. “The grass?  Of course.  Try it out.”

She hesitated.  “I’m not going to hurt it, am I?”

“No,” her mother laughed, giving her a playful nudge forward.

Amber took a few cautious steps. Even through her slippers, the ground felt strange, spongy.  The floor is actually alive! She pulled her slippers off and ran her toes through the soft, slightly moist blades.  Imagine a whole planet like this…so full of life you can’t go anywhere without seeing it, touching it…or stepping on it. She closed her eyes as she walked gingerly into the field, imagining she was on that lush planet, instead of a world carved with great effort from a cold, dead wasteland.  Opening her eyes again, she felt a fleeting twinge of disappointment.  True, the Green was a little spot of paradise in the middle of the barren Martian desert, but no matter how real it looked, it was still only a simulation of the real Earth.  The thought tempered her delight…but only slightly.

In this short excerpt, Amber and her parents are camping out in their beat-up rover, as they travel from their home (one of the old tuna-can habs left behind by the early exploratory missions) to the main settlement, Port Lowell. Amber, having just turned 14 a few days earlier, is finding herself increasingly bored with life on the frontier:

Amber awoke with a start, feeling dangerously exposed under the transparent curve of the rover’s front window.  She had lived all her life surrounded by walls or a suit, seeing the surface only through a small viewport or a helmet visor.  This broad, clear view of the sky always made her feel vulnerable.

She wondered what time it was — just above the horizon was one of the morning stars, which the daily astronomy report said would rise about an hour before the sun.  Dawn was near.

She reached out both hands towards the faintly blue star, touching her wrists together and forming a cup as if to cradle a precious jewel.  “Earth”, she whispered.

Aaron, lying on his reclined seat with his back to Amber, stirred.

“Dad?”

“Unh?”

“You awake?”

“I am now.”

Amber paused and collected her thoughts, feeling about her throat for the Earth pendant and remembering that she’d left her necklace behind at the hab.  “Why are we here?”

Aaron rolled onto his back.  “We’re going to Port Lowell.  You know…”

“No, not here here.  Mars.  Why are we on Mars?  Earth has everything.  Mars has nothing.  Why would anyone want to come here?”

He stretched, crossed his arms behind his head, and stared silently out the window for a time.  “Because we’re explorers.  That’s who we are.  That’s what we do.  From the time we are babies, able to crawl, we—”

“Right, right, okay, I know all that,” she interrupted.  “I’ve heard that speech a hundred times.  I’ve given that speech a hundred times, in my class videos.  I mean us:  you and me and Mom.  Why do we have to stay on Mars?  The planet’s being explored, and permanently settled — that’s what you wanted, why you stayed behind.  Right?”  She let the question hang for an instant, but her father didn’t take the bait.  “So why stay?  Don’t you want to go back to Earth now?”

“No,” he said simply.  “I used to think we’d go back some day, but now?  No.  There’s nothing back there for us — our lives are on Mars now.”  He sighed.  “Look, sweetheart…I know life on Mars isn’t everything we would like it to be.  But this world is growing and things will change for you.  Maybe sooner than you think.  You just need to tough it out for a while longer — Mars is bound to get a whole lot more interesting in the near future.”

“Yeah.  Sure, Dad.”

“Goodnight, sweetheart.”

“Goodnight.”

She drifted off to sleep, but Aaron sat awake, mulling over what to tell her, and when.  He knew Lindsay would be upset if he told Amber about the offer — there was no point bringing it up yet, when there might be no need.

It’ll all work out, he thought.  He checked the hab’s status on his MA before nodding off again, as the sky began to lighten in the east.

Excerpted from “Labyrinth of Night”, © Thomas L. James and Carl C. Carlsson

So, a few weeks back, I bought a Kindle 3G to test out the platform.

So far, I like it. It takes a little while to get used to it, but it grows on you fairly quickly. I had seen previous versions owned by friends, so I had an idea of what to expect, but I was still pretty impressed with it. The first thing that wowed me when I took it out of the box was the thinness of the thing — I was almost afraid to handle it, for fear of slicing my fingers off. The second thing was my mistaking the default display image for a printed shipping overlay — I had to look very closely at it, from several different angles, to convince myself that what I was seeing was really on the screen, such is the visual novelty of “electric paper” displays.

Turned it on, set it up in short order (added my home wifi info, which is actually optional with the 3G version), and it was ready to go. The only other setup I had to perform had to do with uploading of documents, and involved simply adding my personal email address to a list on my Amazon account so that the conversion server would accept documents sent to it from that address. With only one false try (using PDF format, which produced unsurprisingly dodgy results in formatting) I was able to upload the manuscript to my Kindle flawlessly. I had expected it to require a lot of online fussing and fixing to make it look right, but it digested the native .docx file with nary a burp.

One thing I have not yet done is paid to download any new books (for lack of time). I did download a few freebie classics I was familiar with (Machiavelli’s The Prince and Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations…not kidding about the “classics” part), and have been poking around in them as time permits since their short, self-contained chapters make them more amenable than novels to reading in small increments. The feature whereby passages highlighted by other readers are highlighted on your own screen is a nice touch — it’s like a social-media version of buying a used book at the college bookstore, with the importance of a passage indicated not merely by the electronic equivalent of underlining or a highlight pen, but also by the number of other people who thought it significant>

One thing I didn’t like about it is the way the screen flickers when you “turn the page”, but this is where that “getting used to it” thing comes in — after a few minutes, you don’t notice it.

Time permitting tomorrow, I may be able to start posting sample chapters as an appetizer for the full novel, which we expect to have available via Kindle in the next two weeks or so.

These volcanic cones were formed by hot lava running over water or ice. The heat from the lava boiled the water underneath, and the water burst upwards in an exploding bubble of lava. The explosion threw chunks of molten and solid lava into the air to gather into the cones. These cones are similar in size and shape to cones found in Iceland.

Probably because last month I saw some of the craters in Iceland referred to in the Wired article:

It’s a little hard to appreciate them from this angle – short of renting a plane or climbing the Gibraltar-like pinnacle in the middle of the lake, there wasn’t a good vantage point from which to capture on film the features you could see with your eyes (well, okay, there sorta was, but I didn’t have my long zoom lens on the trip).

As I recall, the Mars Society was at one time considering establishing one of their analogue stations in Iceland. One could certainly choose far less Mars-similar locations…

[via Instapundit]

A slightly-marsified version of one of my Iceland pics, from the wastelands near Emstrur.

It was easy to see why NASA sent Apollo astronauts to train here.

As I upload the pictures, I’m also adding any especially un-Earth-like shots to a separate set which I will publish here later. The set will include some shots I got of various geothermal installations, which (like the landscapes) look an awful lot like what I would expect some of the industrial parts of a Mars settlement to look like.

Finally back in Reykjavik after a week’s trek through the hinterlands north of Eyjafjallajokull and two weeks of camping throughout the rest of the country. I’ll have more Mars-related material over the next couple of weeks, as I sort through about 24GB of photographs and 48GB or more of HD video.

I don’t know that he didn’t, or didn’t offer to do so (the article doesn’t say), but it seems like the obvious thing to do for a guy with a passion and a couple billion dollars in the bank. Indeed, a sponsorship arrangement with NASA would have been a coup for both. Trade Cameron the rights to market the resulting imagery in exchange for underwriting the camera, let him produce a theatrical 3D documentary using it, and both win: Cameron cleans up at the box office, and NASA gets a great PR and education/information outreach opportunity.