The New Yorker Radio Hour - The Man Who Would Be King (of Mars)

Episode Date: July 18, 2017

Dr. Phil Davies, a country doctor in England, says that he owns Mars. What if he’s right? New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

Hi, it's David. Before we get started, just a quick heads-up about something on the podcast. We're trying something new. Instead of the single hour-long podcast you've been getting until now, we're giving you two episodes every week, a half hour each, give or take. It's the same content, but arranged just a little differently for what we hope is the best possible podcast listening experience. There's a new episode up every Friday and Tuesday. Here we go. You're listening to The New Yorker Radio Hour. Well, on paper, my life seemed great. I had a dream job, swanky apartment, and a loving girlfriend, but I don't know what it was. Someone felt off. So, I decided to quit my job and travel the world, bringing only my passport, a small backpack,

and my enormous, enormous trust fund. My coworkers were shocked, but I don't expect everyone to get me. I'm a free spirit, whose father owns a South American rubber empire. So, classic me. I set to work throwing out most of my possessions. Think about it. You don't need to own a lot of stuff to be happy. And also, in the backpack I was carrying, was millions of dollars.

Oh, I wish you guys could have been there. My first few months roaming the world were life-changing. I'm talking every day I updated my Instagram with photos of my favorite sites. Me taking a selfie in front of a pink wall. Me taking a selfie in front of a gray wall. me taking a selfie in front of a mirror, which is basically infinity selfies. My hand, lightly resting on a cafe table near an early edition of On the Road, with the pages creased just a little bit to make it feel like I had read it,

but I hadn't opened it yet. And I can't believe I'm sharing this with you, but I want you to feel what I felt. One time, outside the train station of a small fishing village, I met a humble man named Griebo. He sold flowers and various cheap trinkets for a living. Griebo was happy to open up to me about his life, his losses, his loves, as long as I kept buying roses. And not the cheap ones, Griebo said, because I was a man of stature. Intrigued by our easy chatter, some of his friends wandered over to join the conversation.

All of our superficial differences soon melted away. Like when you melt gold to mold into a new necklace that says your name. As I left town, I cast one final glance back at Griebo. One of his friends playfully tossed him to the ground and thumbed his eyes as the other snatched all the money I had given him. I couldn't help but smile. It felt good to make a difference in the lives of these simple, simple people. And now that I'm thinking about it,

I'm not quite certain his name was Griebo. Listen, maybe this no-reservation's lifestyle isn't for everyone. But don't worry about me. You know, whenever I start to get homesick, I just remember the old rat race and I go, all those bleary-eyed suckers packed into a, subway cart like sardines, going to their lousy jobs to afford useless things like rent and health insurance and student loan payments? See, that lifestyle isn't for me. Maybe I'm just a crazy dreamer

who also gets a monthly no strings attached 60K deposited into my checking account, but I won't be tied down so easily. His name definitely wasn't Griebo. Why I quit my job to travel the world. A true story, or not, by Joe Vikes from the New Yorker's Daily Shouts column. It was performed for us by Ben Schwartz. In June, Elon Musk of Solar City, of the Tesla battery-powered car, and now the CEO of SpaceX, outlined a plan to send a manned mission to Mars. Here's Musk speaking at a conference last year. We're establishing cargo flights to Mars that people can count on. We should be able to launch people probably in 2024 with arrival in 2025. In other words, according to the tech gurus,

there's big money to be made in space. And where there's big money, people will do whatever they can to go get it. After all, it's space. Who's going to stop them? New Yorker contributors Simon Parkin went to find out. I do quite a bit of sighting around these areas, and I have had two rather spectacular accidents on the bike.

So, yeah, just be careful driving. Country roads are treacherous. Just left here. Nice pub, her and hounds. I'm on the outskirts of Farnham, a town a little less than an hour from South London in Bucolic, suburban Surrey. This part of England is dotted with picturesque villages,

each one defined by well-manacured hedges, colourfully named pubs and local eccentrics. Sitting next to me is one such eccentric. His name is Dr Phil Davies. You go past quite a delightful little pub. Put the blue belt. At the top about here, actually. This is the Alice Holt Forest,

which stretches out across Hampshire. Dr Phil leaves me behind a pub onto a gravel pathway that snakes off into the woods. So it is on a public walkway. A little way along, we emerge into a clearing with trees on three sides,

and on the fourth, an arrestingly panoramic view of the English countryside. So the land's falling away in front of us, and so you can see right down to sort of, five degrees, really, off the horizon.

The unobstructed horizon is what brings Phil to this clearing a couple of times a week. He comes here at night, he brings a telescope on which is mounted a high-powered laser. And with some precision, he then fires that laser at the planet Mars. A pair of buzzards. Are they buzzards? You do get birds of prey hovering around here, yeah. So, yeah, we definitely don't want to be firing off lasers willy-nilly, setting light to local birds of prey.

Unless you're really hungry, and you can find where it lands. There would be space, actually. Phil is a man with a plan, and I'm here to try to understand that plan. So from the Alice Holt Forest, we head back to his flat, which doubles as his armoury. Wow, this is all the gear. It's a small room, but I do so. A lot of telescopes. Yeah.

Phil is a country doctor, a GP. He divides his time between Farnas. and his native Belfast, where his wife still lives. In his Farnham Bachelor pad, he's laid out a quiver of lasers on a low coffee table. These are not the kind of lasers teachers use to point out blackboard. They're more like the ones Ernst Blofeld users to threaten James Bond. I have got legally the strongest lasers I can get my hands on. I mean, our strongest laser here is 3,500 millawatts.

That's kind of 3,500 times stronger than the average. handheld classroom laser pointer. So what we've got here is a stubby, fat telescope that looks a bit maybe like a rocket launcher, and it's stood on a tripod that's, I guess, the size of an umpah-lumper, so about waist height, it's got a big danger sign on it. And then there's a big red button on here.

What's that for? Is that to turn it on? Yeah. I mean, we started with very trivial, lasers, but the first time I had a powerful laser, it was wow. I mean, it's a lightsaber into the night. It really is. And it looks like it's touching Mars, this little planet at the end of this long finger. When Phil shoots one of these monster lasers at Mars, he sends a beam of photons through the Earth's atmosphere, across 34 million miles of space and to the surface of the planet. A lot of those photons spin off into the darkness,

but some hit the mark. Those photons heat up the surface of Mars, ever so slightly, infinitesimally. But making Mars even a very, very tiny bit warmer, technically makes it a very, very tiny bit more hospitable for human settlement. They're just coffees. People who talk about how would you improve Mars

to make it ready for humans to go there. they talk about there being a need for an atmosphere so how would you get an atmosphere in Mars well you'll see it I mean you just go to Wikipedia and look up terraforming Mars and you will see they'll say light and heat

because the polar ice caps and actually the whole planet but mainly in the poles is full of what's called dry ice carbon dioxide in ice form and if you heat it up what it does is forms a greenhouse effect nasty thing on earth but actually what would benefit Mars greatly and it's all a bit theoretical

radical, but what is true, though, is we are adding extra heat and light to Mars. Dr. Phil may be eccentric, but he's not mad. A few years ago, Elon Musk told Stephen Colbert about the fast way to get more CO2 into the Martian atmosphere. Give me the fast way. The fast way has dropped the nuclear weapons over the pulse. You're a supervillain. That's what a super villain.

Yeah. Now, Dr Phil has a handheld laser and not a thermonuclear weapon, but the idea is essentially the same, to make Mars more pleasant for humans. And by preparing Mars for human habitation, Phil thinks that he can make a claim that he owns the planet. He's been reading up on the international law that covers how to claim ownership of a distant barren land. They were thinking Antarctica and some distant islands.

the general thought is no longer for that sort of land you actually have to go and plant a flag there you literally have to show intent to possess and also ideally show some early effort to improve the land to make it ready for human settlement and trade and so if you think about it that's kind of what I've been trying to do with Mars

so Phil filled out the appropriate forms and sent them off to the UN when did you hear back from them and what to they say? Well, yes, we did get eventually last year we got a reply from a director at UNUSA, United Nations Office for Outspace Affairs, who said, yeah, it's interesting, but we are the secretariat. So this is the difficulty when dealing with the UN. We're not the body that can decide for you. We just create the situation for the committee to come. In an effort to up the pressure on the UN

and to drum up some capital to cover his legal fees, Phil hit on a curious idea. You know how you can buy those novelty deeds to plots of land on the moon? Well, Phil sells similar plots of land on Mars. The difference being that Phil's aren't novelties. They're intended to be legal deeds. And if he's granted ownership of the planet, he'll have neighbours. Given that there are people out there charging,

guys $25 for one acre of celestial land, which is just a novelty deed, we're actually saying, hey, have a hundred thousand acres for a dollar, or a cent, even, a cent. And effectively, it's just because we're saying, join us in this campaign. And I've now got nearly 13, nearly 13,000 members. Phil thinks that when he gets the right people at the UN to look at his claim, it'll stand up. And you know what?

It's not out of the question. I talked to Dr. Philip de Mann, a scholar of space law at the University of Leuven in Belgium. It's as a more serious claim simply because of the objectives of the claim and the way that it's actually been backed up. So there is a legal document

that he has prepared to actually present some interesting approaches to the problem that maybe haven't been raised before. So, okay. But the question remains, why do this? Why spend your nights shooting a laser up into the sky? Why spend your days grappling with the bureaucracy at the UN?

What's Phil's endgame here? What's a country doctor in Farnham going to do with an entire planet anyway? To explain the purpose of all this, you need to understand three things. First off, there's something called the Outer Space Treaty. It actually has a much longer official name, but that will work for our purposes. It was adopted exactly 50 years ago in 1967, and it's the basis for most of the laws that govern what humans can and can't do in outer space. Meanwhile, the foreign minister presided at the signing of the treaty banning nuclear weapons from outer space.

He pledged Britain's wholehearted support. Without such a treaty, life on earth would be under continual threat, a nightmare existence. The outer space treaty was principally concerned with two things, keeping nukes out of space and making sure that of whoever made it to the moon first, the Soviets or the Americans, neither would be able to claim the moon as their own. On all other counts, the treaty is pretty vague. It's actually only three pages long. And today, all kinds of stuff is happening in space that nobody seriously anticipated in 1967,

orbital construction platforms, space tourism, asteroid mining. Deep Space Industries Deep Space is a new kind of company with a new kind of plan. We don't build rockets. Astronomy, we are explorers and harvesters, makers and suppliers. So the second thing you need to know is that some of these new space companies are looking for ways to exploit the vagueness of the outer space treaty. And nations with space businesses are inclined to interpret space law to favor those businesses.

This is the chairman of the Senate Subcommittee on Space Science and Competitiveness, Senator Ted Cruz. Therefore, it's incumbent on Congress to use this 50-year anniversary of the Outer Space Treaty to properly determine our actual international obligations. Here's Philip de Man, the Belgian space law expert again. To adopt the national law that says that their industry cannot go to outer space and cannot mind the natural resources. What we're going to end up with is a race to the bottom where everybody just wants to adopt legislation

that is going to spur their own national industry. there's not really going to be much left with the general spirit of the outer space treaty, which is very much one of international cooperation, of peaceful exploration of outer space. Let's say they rip into the space treaty. And if you've only got one thing that stops nuclear weapons going into space and you've got nations that are credible, like the US, ripping into that treaty, then what's to stop a less credible nation, or maybe a more malevolent nation deciding to send up nuclear components into space

and say, well, OK, you're saying we broke the space treaty. Well, we're not the first. Look. So that's the last thing you need to understand, and the reason for Phil's projects for the lasering, the theoretical terraforming, the petitions to the UN. Phil doesn't intend to take over Mars.

Phil's ambition, which is a hairless quixotic, if no less grand, is to protect space and maybe save the Earth as well by forcing the UN to rewrite the outer space treaty for the 21st century. If I run a campaign to get the Space Treaty updated, where is that going to get me? We know what the UN's like. But if I could develop a claim that actually did have some legal merit and then say, right, look, the Space Treaty has too many holes to even stop a claim like that. Now, come on, that'll embarrass them and that'll make them update it.

If the UN receives a petition that legally they can't ignore, they'd have to do something about it. it. Because if a country doctor from Farnham can lay claim to Mars, then what could a multi-million dollar spacefaring company accomplish? We are deep space. The frontier is coming and our time is now. Just putting in a battery. Back in Farnham, I asked Dr. Phil to show me his lasers in action. It's the middle of the day, so we need to fire them inside if I'm going to see them. That's for you. Phil sets up a cardboard box on the other side of the room and aims his equipment. His claim to changing the environment at Mars by terraforming is built around a laser that can be defeated by a piece of cardboard. Make sure your glasses are on?

They're on. Oh, there it is. Now, so again... Very bright. And you can't actually see it coursing. In my glasses, it's showing up as kind of magnesium or brilliant purple. What we need is some dry ice in here, and then we'd have the world's most localised disco. Start to see smoke and the black and blackening.

Actually, there is a mark. It's already got some charred, a charred pinpoint on the... After just ten seconds, yeah. So there you are. There's a reason for safety. Dr Phil will never rule a Martian colony. He will never be crowned king of Mars. And he knows this.

But I think he would have been a benevolent king, this mild-mannered country doctor. And it feels right if his plans work and the space treaty is rewritten, we might all benefit from his benevolence. Is this Mars here? Yes, it is. We've got, I guess it's the size of a large snow globe, and it looks like Mars, and it's rotating.

Is it on a motor, or is it? It's a globe suspended and fluid, and light will induce a rotation. So you're holding it in your hand now. You look kind of like a megalomaniac. This is the planet that I own. That is not the intention. And now that you've pointed that out,

I can see how that could be misconstrued. That would be a gift for somebody quite soon. Simon Parkin in Farnham, England, with Dr. Phil Davies. If you want to buy one of Davies' plots of land on Mars, you go ahead and look them up online. I'm not in the real estate business. I'm David Remnick, and that's the New Yorker Radio Hour for today. Thanks so much for listening. See you next time.

The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbus of Tuneiards with additional music by Alexis Quadrado. This episode was produced by Alex Barron, Emily Boutin, Ave Cario, Riannon, Corsby, Jill Duboff, Karen Frillman, David Krasnow, Sarah Nix, Michael Rayfield, Mithelie, and Stephen Valentino with help from Susan Morrison, Emma Allen, and Jessica Henderson. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund.