Philippa Kaur

By Clare Wilson

In How to Mars, the Red Planet is so boring that TV ratings have tankedgorodenkoff/Getty Images
How to Mars
David Ebenbach
Tachyon PublicationsAdvertisement

IN 2012, a Dutch group announced a novel plan for financing the literally astronomical costs of setting up a base on Mars: the firm would sell the TV rights for the selection and training of the would-be astronauts and the colonisation process too.
While there was massive public interest and more than 4000 people worldwide applied to be part of what was admitted to be a one-way mission, the company involved, Mars One Ventures, seemed out of its depth and went bankrupt in 2019. Now the idea lives on in fiction, in the form of How to Mars, the debut sci-fi novel from David Ebenbach.
The book explores with both humour and pathos the consequences of humanity leaving the challenging task of extraterrestrial colonisation to a TV company focused on ratings and sponsorship opportunities. The pitfalls are obvious from the start. During the selection process, the firm, Destination Mars!, seems less interested in finding people with the “right stuff” than in creating a telegenic melting pot.
Scandinavian Stefan, who speaks almost accentless English, is secretly told to “sound more Danish”, leaving him suspicious of the accents of his competitors. During the training programme in an Australian desert, another applicant is ejected for making the mistake of “breaking the fourth wall”, or speaking to the camera.
“The Mars settlers are in a vulnerable position: their survival depends on the goodwill of a TV company”
As the book opens, the six scientists at the colony are two years into their mission and all is not well. The crew members have become bored – of each other, the monotonous food and the never-changing scenery.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, viewers are bored too, which means the team suffers the indignity of the show being cancelled for poor ratings. The TV company has no incentive to move to Stage Two: sending out the next batch of colonists and terraforming Mars. The crew’s handlers on Earth have been suspiciously quiet about that side of things for a while.
The settlers are in a vulnerable position: their survival depends on the goodwill of a company on which they are now just a financial drain. When they disagree about something with a handler, she sets them straight: “Do you realize that you don’t even get to eat unless we send you food?”
Fortunately for the story, the colonists’ lives soon take a more interesting turn, bringing fresh challenges as well as the return of TV viewers.
The humour has shades of Douglas Adams, whose The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series excelled at satirising the frustrations of ordinary people battling faceless bureaucracy. In Ebenbach’s novel, Destination Mars! saddles the colonists with towels that aren’t absorbent because they bear enormous company logos.
But on the whole, How to Mars is a more serious read than Hitchhiker’s, exploring themes such as bereavement and mental illness. One crew member’s turmoil in particular is portrayed with convincing realism.
Indeed, a genuine fear for Earth’s real-life space agencies is that future missions to Mars may be jeopardised by the astronauts coming to hate each other. This has been investigated in mock missions, where crews are isolated for months in sealed habitats.
So far, no space agencies have turned any such projects into reality TV. If How to Mars is any guide, let’s hope they never do.

Clare also recommends…
Book series
Red Dwarf
Grant Naylor
If funny sci-fi is your thing, try the Red Dwarf series by “Grant Naylor” – actually jointly written by Rob Grant and Doug Naylor, the two scriptwriters of the TV series of the same name.
Film
Galaxy Quest
Dean Parisot
This Star Trek spoof didn’t make a big splash on its release, but now has a cult following.

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By Michael Marshall

The Plimpton 322 tabletAndrew Kelly/Rare Books and Manuscripts Library, Columbia University
The ancient Babylonians understood key concepts in geometry, including how to make precise right-angled triangles. They used this mathematical know-how to divide up farmland – more than 1000 years before the Greek philosopher Pythagoras, with whom these ideas are associated.
“They’re using a theoretical understanding of objects to do practical things,” says Daniel Mansfield at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia. “It’s very strange to see these objects almost 4000 years ago.”
Babylonia was one of several overlapping ancient societies in Mesopotamia, a region of southwest Asia that was situated between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. Babylonia existed in the period between 2500 and 500 BC, and the First Babylonian Empire controlled a large area between about 1900 and 1600 BC.Advertisement
Mansfield has been studying a broken clay tablet from this period, known as Plimpton 322. It is covered with cuneiform markings that make up a mathematical table listing “Pythagorean triples”. Each triple is the lengths of the three sides of a right-angled triangle, where each side is a whole number. The simplest example is (3, 4, 5); others include (5, 12, 13) and (8, 15, 17).
The triangles’ sides are these lengths because they obey Pythagoras’s theorem: the square of the longest side is equal to the sum of the squares of the other two sides. This classic bit of mathematics is named for the Greek philosopher Pythagoras, who lived between about 570 and 495 BC – long after the Plimpton 322 tablet was made.
“They [the early Babylonians] knew Pythagoras’ theorem,” says Mansfield. “The question is why?”

Mansfield thinks he has found the answer. The key clue was a second clay tablet, dubbed Si.427, excavated in Iraq in 1894. Mansfield tracked it down to the Istanbul Archaeology Museums.
Si.427 was a surveyor’s tablet, used to make the calculations necessary to fairly share out a plot of land by dividing it into rectangles. “The rectangles are always a bit wonky because they’re just approximate,” says Mansfield. But Si.427 is different. “The rectangles are perfect,” he says. The surveyor achieved this by using Pythagorean triples.
“Even the shapes of these tablets tell a story,” says Mansfield. “Si.427 is a hand tablet… Someone’s picked up a piece of clay, stuck it in their hand and wrote on it while surveying a field.” In contrast, Plimpton 322 seems to be more of an academic text: a systematic investigation of Pythagorean triples, perhaps inspired by the difficulties surveyors had. “Someone’s got a huge slab of clay… [and] squashed it flat” while sitting at a desk, he says.
Journal reference: Foundations of Science, DOI: 10.1007/s10699-021-09806-0
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By Francesca Steele

Guy (Gael García Bernal) and Prisca (Vicky Krieps) in OldUniversal Pictures
Time is definitely not a healer in Old, the latest film from writer, director and producer M. Night Shyamalan, where the bodies of stranded tourists hurtle towards old age at an accelerated rate due to a local geological quirk.
This fascinating (and, typically for Shyamalan, high-concept) premise raises all sorts of thorny questions. What is important to us when time is short? What can time teach us –  and what can it steal from us? Can ageing prosthetics ever be applied convincingly?
Shyamalan, the film-maker behind supernatural thrillers including The Sixth Sense and The Village, has become as famous for the disappointing execution of excellent premises as he is for dreaming them up in the first place.Advertisement
Old, based loosely on the graphic novel Sandcastle by Pierre Oscar Lévy and Frederik Peeters, starts out as one of Shyamalan’s best efforts in years. It begins with such creepy camera angles and creepy casting that the slow pacing for which he is sometimes lambasted works perfectly.
Dread rises from the outset. Guy (Gael García Bernal) and Prisca (Vicky Krieps) have brought their children, 6-year-old Trent (Nolan River) and 11-year-old Maddox (Alexa Swinton), to an idyllic resort that Prisca pointedly reminds us she found randomly on the internet.

The dialogue is a little excessive. “You’re always thinking about the future. It makes me feel not seen!” yells Prisca. “You’re always thinking about the past. You work in a goddamn museum,” retorts Guy.
But if the script feels clunky, the production doesn’t. The family swan around their lush hotel room, as the camera spies them menacingly from outside like a predator. Trent has a habit of asking random hotel guests what they do for a living, but the way the camera pans across his subjects’ faces makes the exchange feel unsettling rather than adorable, as if we’re being introduced to an ensemble soon to be picked off.
A special day at an idyllic, private beach is arranged by the over-eager hotel manager. At the cove, hemmed in by rocks and swiftly abandoned by their shifty driver (Shyamalan himself, in the kind of cameo role beloved of Alfred Hitchcock), they find themselves stranded with a cast of characters worthy of an Agatha Christie murder mystery.
There is a doctor (Rufus Sewell, on fabulously sinister form), his trophy wife (Abbey Lee), their young daughter (Mikaya Fisher) and his mother (Kathleen Chalfant). Then there is psychologist Patricia (Nikki Amuka-Bird), who has epilepsy, her nurse-husband (Ken Leung) and a rapper (Aaron Pierre) whose partner washes up dead (and naked) the moment they arrive, heralding an onset of strange and increasingly grotesque symptoms.

Swimsuits become too tight. Patricia’s seizures disappear. A tumour balloons in minutes and must be cut out right there on the beach. A pregnancy is delivered moments after it begins.
There is no doubting Shyamalan’s talent for suspense. In the film’s first half, he labours lovingly over one shot where characters age years as the camera pans across the beach. In other scenes, it perches just behind children’s heads so we can observe their parents’ alarmed expressions without knowing precisely what is so shocking. Like a Stephen King novel, the horror here is not in the revelation but the build-up.
Sadly, Old is a stylistic triumph but a narrative dud. The second half of the film is severely hampered by too many undercooked ideas and a plot too intent on explaining itself. All those questions about what value we put on time – or ought to – are skirted over too fast. Philosophical enquiry makes way for a signature Shyamalan plot twist, which, in the end, feels perfunctory and unsurprising.
The film quickly loses its grip when it asks us to emotionally invest in characters even as it dispatches them one by one, collapsing in the process from a sinister body horror into a confused (sand)castle in the air.
Old is in UK and US cinemas now

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By Krista Charles

Artist’s impression of a pack of Eurasian hunting dogs chasing preyMauricio Antón with scientific supervision by D. Lordkipanidze and B. Martínez-Navarro
The earliest humans known to have lived outside Africa shared their environment with hunting dogs – and may even have stolen food from them.
For many years, archaeologists have been excavating at a site near Dmanisi in Georgia, where they have found evidence that ancient humans – sometimes put in the species Homo erectus – were present about 1.8 million years ago. The Dmanisi humans provide the earliest fossil evidence yet found of hominins outside Africa.
But as ancient humans moved out of Africa, it looks like they encountered prehistoric hunting dogs that were moving into Africa, because the remains of one such dog has now been unearthed at Dmanisi.Advertisement
Saverio Bartolini-Lucenti at the University of Florence, Italy, and his colleagues analysed the remains, which came from a young adult Eurasian hunting dog (Canis (Xenocyon) lycaonoides), an extinct species of hunting dog related to modern African hunting dogs (Lycaon pictus).
“Picture an African hunting dog, but stouter with long limbs like an Irish wolfhound, but not so thin,” says Bartolini-Lucenti.

This particular animal would have lived about 1.8 million years ago, making it the earliest ever found in Europe.
These wild dogs are believed to have originated in Asia, spreading into and across Europe and Africa between about 1.8 and 0.8 million years ago.
“Finding it in Dmanisi – which is an important site at the verge, the border of three continents (Asia, Africa and Europe) – is interesting because it is at a timeframe where we didn’t have any occurrences of this form,” says Bartolini-Lucenti.
Modern African hunting dogs have adapted to consume their prey very quickly before it can be stolen by larger, stronger predators, such as lions and hyenas. The Eurasian hunting dogs may have interacted with early humans in a similar way, says Bartolini-Lucenti, with the humans scaring off the dogs to steal their prey.
Working out how two ancient species interacted is difficult, “especially when the fossil record is poor”, says Marco Cherin at the University of Perugia in Italy. “But I am confident that the record from Dmanisi may offer new surprises in the future, and this paper represents a good beginning.”
Journal reference: Scientific Reports, DOI: 10.1038/s41598-021-92818-4
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By Clare Wilson

Would you share or steal?PURPLE MARBLES/Alamy
Most people play fair in lab tests where they can share or steal small sums of money – yet in real life, unfairness and cheating is common.
Now, the apparent contradiction has a new explanation. In lab experiments where people are able to take money from groups of people, they nearly always do, but the same individuals tend to be fair when dealing with just one other person.
Economists have long investigated people’s behaviour through simple tests in the lab, such as the two-person “dictator game” in which one person is given a small sum of money and they choose whether to give some of it to their playing partner, who they haven’t met before. Typically, most people give some away, although they get nothing in return, suggesting we have an intrinsic sense of fairness.Advertisement
In real life, though, unfairness is common, ranging from office workers failing to contribute their share of communal snacks through to large-scale financial fraud. We often assume that people who cheat in such ways are a minority, or even that antisocial people are drawn to careers where they can exploit others, says Carlos Alós-Ferrer at the University of Zurich in Switzerland.
To investigate, Alós-Ferrer’s team designed a new monetary test called the Big Robber game, where any unfair actions affect larger numbers of people.

The researchers asked groups of 32 people to play the dictator game and two other similar games in pairs, and the results were the same as those usually seen, in that most people acted generously.
Half the group were also asked if they would like to rob some of the earnings of the other half, which totalled €200, on average. They could take half the amount, a third, a tenth or none of it. The team repeated this process with 640 people in total.
Of the 320 individuals given the robbery option, 98 per cent took at least some of the money and 56 per cent took half. To save on costs, the researchers didn’t let everyone actually go home with their chosen amount, but one of the 16 robbers in each group was randomly selected to receive this sum.
The findings suggest that people can be fair to individuals and selfish to larger groups, says Alós-Ferrer. “Human beings are perfectly capable of displaying both kinds of behaviour.”
People may act differently in real life to how they do in lab games, but the findings suggest economists should investigate group interactions as well as two-person ones, he says.
Journal reference: Nature Human Behaviour, DOI: 10.1038/s41562-021-01170-0

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