For someone vying for a one-way trip off the planet, Chris Patil seems remarkably dialed into Earth's simple pleasures. From pepperoni pizza to his panoply of friends, the joys of terrestrial life defy enumeration, he says.
And yet if all goes perfectly to plan, Patil, '93, would say goodbye to all that to spend the rest of his days eking out an existence growing vegetables and studying soil samples on a frigid orb millions of miles away. Patil is one of 100 finalists, selected from more than 4,200 applicants, short-listed for a privately led effort to send the first humans to Mars.
The endeavor—the vision of a Dutch nonprofit called Mars One—has no shortage of critics, some scornful, of everything from the viability of its funding to its ability to sustain life on a barren, radiation-blasted planet. Patil himself still has major questions. As a trained research scientist, with a doctorate in biochemistry and cell biology, he trades in facts and data.
But Patil, now a freelance scientific editor, maintains a skeptical optimism that Mars One can overcome the challenges. If it does, and if he's selected, Patil says he would get on a cramped rocket for a seven-month journey with no return.It's no slight to the home planet, he says—he'd miss it terribly, friends and family most of all. But Patil believes the chance to push scientific understanding of fundamental questions, like whether life existed on Mars, and to prepare the way for a permanent human presence there are worth that sacrifice.
"Literally with every turn there would be something completely novel that we had never seen before," he says.
He claims his loved ones—mother and two brothers included—aren't too worried. Mars One doesn't plan to send the first four-person crew until 2026, a date he acknowledges is likely to be pushed back, if it comes at all.
Indeed, the biggest psychological challenge Patil foresees isn't so much going to Mars as dedicating himself to the cause for years and then not going, either because he's not selected or the mission doesn't happen. Mars One plans to train 24 finalists for a decade before choosing four for the initial trip.
"What would happen to someone if they prepared for nine years to leave Earth permanently and they didn't leave Earth?" he says. "That person would be in a very strange position."
Photo: Stanford News ServiceNo matter the outcome, he's delighted to bring new scrutiny to interplanetary travel, an idea that has enthralled him since he watched Carl Sagan's Cosmos on PBS as a 9-year-old. Perhaps the conversations about Mars One will do the same for today's children, a generation he predicts will settle parts of the solar system.
One of Patil's roommates from Stanford, Steven McCarroll, '93, says Mars is the latest chapter in Patil's long history of drawing others to science. It was Patil's passion their senior year that steered McCarroll away from his major, economics, and onto the path that led to his professorship in genetics at Harvard Medical School.
"Chris is the college roommate who changed the entire course of my work," he says. "I can only imagine how many kids he will get excited about science from the Mars One platform."
Sam Scott is a senior writer at Stanford.
