The Best Australian Science Writing 2015 Read Free Page B

this really about?”’
    The question hangs in the air a moment, unanswered.
    * * * * *
    After lunch Josh takes me to the beach. When we get there his dog, Diesel, shoots off across the grass. The beach is miles long in both directions. The coast overlooks the Indian Ocean. Out there are trenches more than 10 000 metres deep, in one of which is thought to lie the wreckage of Flight MH370.
    Josh has a book with a hundred-item bucket list, and he’s already ticked off 60 or so. Some of the things are kind of dumb ( Take part in a line-up; Get backstage with a rock star ); some are impressive ( Catch a fish with your bare hands; Save someone’s life ); some are practically impossible ( Write a bestseller; Capture the moment in an award-winning photograph ). There’s one other thing Josh would love to do before he left Earth forever. ‘I’m dying to scuba dive with leopard seals in Antarctica,’ he says, watching Diesel. ‘That would be amazing.’
    I can’t doubt his commitment to the program, but I also can’t help thinking of all the things Josh has tried on for size and found wanting. Many items on that list are pursuits he’s thrown himself into and then abandoned.
    Josh earned a degree in applied physics and joined the army, training as an explosives engineer and then as a diver. But after a time, this work came to bore him. The largest mineral-rich deposits on the continent are in Western Australia, so he went to work in the mines as a blast specialist. After a year, 22-yearold Josh had a not-immodest nest egg. Yet he hated the work so much he’d thought seriously about killing himself. ‘Me blowing big chunks out of the ground, I’m not making the world a better place,’ he says. So in 2009 Josh joined the Royal Marine Commandos: a hardened elite force, known for breaking men and rebuilding them as efficient killers. Josh lasted 11 months. He contracted Lyme disease; but he really knew he had to leave when an officer asked a recruit of around 18 if he would shoot a suspected terrorist in the head point-blank: ‘I closed the door, sat down and said, “Who the fuck are these people?”’
    Some months later Josh found himself working for British conceptual artist Damien Hirst, who needed an explosives expert for a U2 video he was making. Josh’s next job with Hirst was an art installation piece. ‘In & Out of Love’ is a white room filled with butterflies that alight on blank canvases, fruit, bowlsof sugar water, and visitors as they walk around. Josh was tasked with rearing the butterflies. He figured out, through making small adjustments in humidity, temperature, and light, how to raise these tiny celebrities from their cocoons to robust fourweek lives. It was a strange but immensely satisfying thing to discover: he was unusually good at the gentle art of butterfly husbandry.
    The turnover of staff in Hirst’s operation was high, and in 2012 Josh was let go. He was ready to dedicate time to his emerging passion of comedy. Yet soon enough he’d given that up, too, for Mars.
    Going one-way into space isn’t something you can bail on. But maybe for Josh that’s the point: having the options taken away could be the answer he’s been looking for all these years.
    * * * * *
    David Willson is one of the few people inside NASA who cautiously thinks what Mars One is doing is ‘kind of cool’. He’s Australian, too; an unabashed nerd who proudly points his webcam around his office to show me his Star Trek posters.
    Willson’s currently at work on the Icebreaker Life Mars lander mission, seeking funding to send an unmanned craft to explore the planet’s northern pole, where it will drill into the ice in search of proof of life. ‘It’s a chicken-or-egg proposition. What Mars One is trying to do is to be the egg that attracts chickens,’ he tells me. ‘If they create a market for the