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--- Full Text - Profile ---
FULL TEXT: Welcome to AMEC2003, the 3rd annual Australian Mars
Exploration conference. I am going to briefly tell you a little about what
the Mars Society is and what it aspires to do, and then I will introduce you to
the Lord Mayor of Perth, Dr Peter Nattrass, who is going to be opening today’s
conference.
Some day in the future, a space
suited figure will fling open a hatch door, slowly climb down a ladder and
take the first ever human steps on the surface of Mars. They will wander out onto a dusty, wind
swept plain, moving uneasily under an unnaturally weak gravity. They will
look up and see a pinkish orange sky.
They will stare searchingly across an earthen, greenless
landscape wondering what there might be beyond and beneath the horizon
waiting for them to find. It will be an unforgiving, dangerous and hostile environment,
but strangely pristine and beautiful. Turning
back, these first explorers will see the series of habitats and other structures
that will be their only sanctuary for tens of millions of kilometres over the
coming months. They’ll commence a
search that will exhilarate the scientific community back on earth and enthral
billions and they will be following an ancient tradition of exploration and discovery,
which over recent centuries has moved Europeans to explore and settle the Americas and Australia. When it happens, it
will be an electric moment, the culmination of decades of research across many
disciplines, and it will represent as new peak of human creative and intellectual
achievement.
The Mars Society Australia was founded in 1998 to help bring
that day closer, and to help make Australia part of that huge human
enterprise. It is a national organisation with branches in each of the Australian
state and it draws its membership from the interested public as well as researchers
in the scientific community. It undertakes
as program of research of its own which contributes in a small, modest but very
useful way to the body of knowledge that will be needed by a future human Mars
mission. It also undertakes outreach activities
that seek to instil in the public with wonder and excitement about Mars exploration,
and hopefully influence Australian government opinion to support Australian
participation in planetary exploration.
This conference AMEC is our single
most important outreach event. It is
the annual national gathering for the Mars Society Australia, for its widely
dispersed members. It is an important
opportunity for people in Australia who are undertaking Mars related research
to get together and share ideas, and is also a chance for the general public
to come in and hear about some of the latest discoveries that are going on in
Australia and overseas, and to talk directly with people who are involved in
that research.
If it seems improbable that humans
will one day eventually live and work on the surface of Mars, just cast your
mind back several centuries. When early
European explorers first sailed past the coast of Western Australia, usually by accident, they
looked towards the shore and saw what looked like a very hostile, barren
landscape. Typically, unless they were
ship wrecked, they sailed on because there seemed to be nothing useful there.
It seemed too hard to take that extra
step to establish a settlement, but time has passed, and here we are several
centuries later, we are here standing in a beautiful, modern, prosperous city
whose citizens enjoy one of the highest living standards in the world. Who
would have thought in the 18th century sailing past that this would one day happen?
Just as Australia was once over the edge
of the known world, a strange hostile, barren place in the 17th and
18th centuries, so Mars is today, and the edge of the know world
is again moving, and in out time that boundary is moving towards Mars.
At this point rather than talk
about the various projects you are going to hear about today I d like to hand
you over to the Lord Mayor of Perth,
Dr Peter Nattrass who we are very privileged to have here to open the
conference
PROFILE: Guy Murphy
has a Bachelor of Arts (economic history) and a Graduate Diploma
(architectural history & conservation) from the University of Melbourne.
He works as a heritage consultant in Melbourne,
researching and documenting historic buildings. A founding member in 1998 and
the current president of the Mars Society Australia,
Guy is also a member of the Mars Society's International Steering Committee
and last year attended the US
Mars Society Convention at Stanford
University. He
participated in Project Jarntimarra in 2001
assisting the search for Mars analogue sites in the outback regions of Central Australia. He also was a crew member on
Expedition 1 in Utah
in February-March of this year.
Particular interests include space architecture, crew psychology and
parallels between Australian history and contemporary space exploration. He
is keen to see the MSA further develop its research program. Guy is the
author of a forthcoming architectural monograph.
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