I’m glad I didn’t go to Mars

I'm glad I didn't go to Mars

The first Sputnik was launched fifty years ago this week, so that day I joined The
British Interplanetary Society. Seeing that science fiction had become science fact.

Not clever enough for rocket science I studied life-support-systems, and with my
continuously travelling the world film-making, soon realised that we did not have a
support-system for our own home planet.

Mars. In view of the logistic limitations to space travel, I suggested to NASA to be
a 'one-man one-way' mission as the most likely way to have a man on Mars.

My outline was that:

At my age I could live there for the rest of my life if there were no further
missions to bring me back.
I understood how to grow all my own organic food by mineral recycling, including the
micro-algae phase.
I was a Fellow of the British Interplanetary Society.
From time to time, I was familiar with living on my own, and of working alone as a
film cameraman, relying upon myself around our world.
I was at home with living in small spaces with my own 30ft live-in van.
As a macrobiotic I knew how to live healthily and indefinitely on a minimal and
perfectly balanced diet - which I could grow continuously.
I was familiar with travelling and with operating mechanical, technical, electronic
equipment and vehicles.
And was quite healthy.

NASA were interested, and we got on well.
Then they realised that I was not a US citizen. And that was it, over.

Maybe the Chinese will be the first to do a one-man one-way mission with their
lifestyles and skills.

Seeing the reality of our world over the last fifty years it became increasingly
obvious that we did not have a working support-system on Planet Earth. Yet with just
the understanding of the immense resources available, once recognised, it could
quite easily be achieved. Plenty for all for millennia to come.

About forty years ago I shot the documentary One Man's Hunger, directed by Bill
Morton, working with those dying from starvation in northern India. The first film
of its kind, with many painful and excruciating incidents.

Coming from my garden flat in Hampstead, I could not believe that I belonged to a
society that let this happen to others in our human family. It gave me a deep sense
of guilt about our self-centred society, and a pressing need to do something about
it. Much later my good friend Bill took his own life. Even now I know how he felt.

Along with other world documentary film makers and academics we formed the Green
Desert Group and, curiously enough, quite quickly identified the solutions:

Our world has the water, the plantlife, the minerals, the sunlight, photosynthesis,
natural energy technology and massive barren wastelands waiting to be refertilised.

Our planet offers everything we need for more than adequate life-support-systems,
readily available, sufficient for more than one hundred times our present global
population (yet about one in five are currently starving).



The answers were so simple, once understood, we expected that a world recovery would
take off within a few years.

Then along came the climate change hazard of global warming.

Well, this can quite simply be resolved by the same processes: Basically Carbon
Cycling with micro-algae for fertilisers, taken from the unbelievably vast mineral
supplies that exist in the oceans and the air -including the carbon (re the Carbon
Cycle). To give total full span nutrition cyclically and provisioning for all -
almost without limit.

Thirty years later and it still hasn't happened. Human life is in serious jeopardy
because the excess carbon is in the air instead of its being in organic life on the
land.

So what are we doing about it? Officialdom and population alike are not interested.

I wonder if it could have been easier, on Mars on my own, on television, by showing
our world the way to do it?

harry