Why write an opera about Mars? Because Mars isn’t just a planet. It’s a philosophy, an ideology. The way humans think about it changes over time, reflecting the unstable mix of assumptions, hopes, dreams and anxieties that define each historical moment.
In 1965, Nasa’s Mariner 4 probe flew past Mars and beamed the first closeup images of the red planet (or of any other planet) back to Earth. Prior to that flight, humans knew the planet only through telescopes, and it was thought that its surface would feature vegetation and that life may have evolved there. Mariner 4 revealed the truth: it was a rocky, cratered place seemingly devoid of life. President Lyndon B Johnson declared that “it may just be that life as we know it, with its humanity, is more unique than many have thought, and we must remember this”. The New York Times went further: “Mars, it now appears, is a desolate world.”
If like me you were not then born, try to imagine what it would have been like to be alive in that summer of 1965. In June, Ed White became the first US astronaut to perform a spacewalk. (The Soviet cosmonaut Alexei Leonov had preceded him by just under three months.) White’s experience of the spacewalk was so deeply transcendent that he described re-entering the capsule as “the saddest moment of my life”. Life magazine devoted an issue to White’s “Glorious Walk in the Cosmos”: millions pored over the images. Only a few weeks later, Mariner 4’s images of Mars were broadcast on TV, showing its desolation. We started a summer floating in White’s cosmic bliss, believing that we might not be alone in the universe, only to end it with those hopes quashed.
In another summer, 60 years later, we are still immersed in news related to space and technology. Spring was already busy enough. April saw the launch of the first all-female spaceflight, led by Lauren Sánchez – the then fiancee, now wife, of billionaire Jeff Bezos – in a rocket made by Bezos’s aerospace company Blue Origin. In May, Elon Musk, another billionaire with an aerospace company, stepped down from running Doge while wearing an “Occupy Mars” T-shirt.
In June, the billionaire venture capitalist, seasteading enthusiast and early Trump adopter Peter Thiel gave an interview to the New York Times in which he declared: “Mars is supposed to be more than a science project. It’s … a political project.” In July, scientists at the National Astronomy Meeting announced evidence of 10,000 miles of ancient riverbeds in a part of Mars not previously thought to have featured water. Then Sotheby’s sold the largest Martian meteorite in existence to a private bidder for about $5.3m (nearly £4m) – and President Trump signed an executive order aimed at “preventing woke AI in the federal government”.
Why write an opera about Mars? Because when we talk about Mars we are talking about ourselves – about our ideas of the future, and about the operations of power in the present.
So, then, how to write an opera about Mars? You begin by choosing a librettist. The writer Mark O’Connell was the obvious choice. We both share an interest in technology, AI, Silicon Valley and a bundle of ideologies that may or may not be on the average person’s radar. These range from transhumanism and futurism through to pronatalism – a movement, increasingly popular in Silicon Valley, that advocates for improving fertility and increasing birthrates to address demographic decline in western countries.
Our research was far-ranging, taking what might be termed a hard science-fiction approach. We started with mundane details. How do astronauts exercise? Eat? Shower? Poop? Is it possible for a pregnancy to be carried to term in zero gravity, or Martian gravity, which is 38% of Earth’s? The answers range from the benign (using Ared, the advanced resistive exercise device) to the not so benign (one option is to strap the woman into a subterranean centrifuge throughout the pregnancy).
The distance between Earth and Mars – approximately 140m miles – means that real-time communication is an impossibility. We wondered how human relationships would be conducted if conversations could only occur via voice note. Everything we researched led to more questions. How might our understanding of ourselves, and of the universe, be changed if we were to discover life on another planet? Would the legal framework outlined in the Outer Space Treaty of 1967 work? Would humans be doomed to repeat the horrific logic of colonisation, or is another way possible?
Our opera centres on an all-female mission. Four astronauts – Svetlana, Sally, Judith and Valentina, named after the first four women to go into space – are on their way to Mars aboard the spaceship Buckminster, with only Arabella, the onboard AI, for company. Their mission is to search for water to enable the development of the commune that has already been established there.
The journey is long, and made more difficult by the fact that they only have Shrek the Third and a few seasons of The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills. As they prepare to land, they discover their mission has been the subject of a hostile takeover and that they now work for Shadowfax Ventures, a company helmed by libertarian billionaire Axel Parchment. They must now confront isolation, sinister ideologies, the prospect of alien life and a vibeshift toward corporate authoritarianism.
As we staked out the plot, the next challenge for me was how to cover this broad territory sonically. I started by thinking about the actual sounds astronauts hear in the different environments they inhabit in space. The sonic overwhelm of a rocket launching; the whirr of fans inside the craft; the industrial clack and punch of machinery. I analysed recordings of the incredibly noisy ambient sounds of the different modules of the International Space Station (ISS), and figured out ways to orchestrate and re-create these sounds.
I listened to hours and hours of space audio – whistles, auroral choruses, interstellar audio recordings made by Voyager 1, sonifications of the light curves of different exoplanets and Chris Hadfield’s recordings of the toilet on the ISS. I haunted the Space Exploration Stack Exchange, where the community helped me with questions about how a double bass bow might behave in 38% gravity, how a trumpet or violin might degrade in a Martian habitat.
Astronauts seem to have a thing for synth music. A look through Dutch astronaut’s André Kuiper’s ISS playlist shows an interest in Vangelis, Mike Oldfield and Brian Eno. I placed synthesisers within the orchestra and also in the spaceship itself. And for our villain, a character Mark described in musical terms as “bad EDM”, I turned to AI. It seemed apt to fight like with like, and I prompted the system with genre descriptions like “bro step” and “fashwave”.
In the opera, the astronauts resist the hostile takeover of the future in their own way, no matter the risk. However dystopian the imaginings of Mark and myself, for our astronauts there is ultimately resistance and hope, defiance and even the possibility of joy – all realised through collective action. As our team worked over the summer, aware of the very real human challenges and horrors outside our rehearsal room – in a world that seems to be increasingly controlled by a small number of incredibly rich individuals imposing their will on the rest of us – I was insistently reminded of the fact that it is through coming together that we Earthlings have power and meaning.
