Game of Life: Dead or Alive
If you take the blue pill, the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. If you take the red pill, you stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes. Remember...
Existence started with the passion of curiosity, and after humans instinctively try to keep existence forever. Adaptation, evolution, and learning from failure have become the biggest strengths of humans. Now they try different ways of survival using the power of learning and adaptation to continue to exist in different places even interplanetary. One day some of us from different places will win a one-way ticket to Mars. It will be a game of life to complete the mission of human survival in the most isolated space. There are questions and uncertainty behind this settlement. Why does anybody want to live in this kind of abnormal environment? What was the idea behind the passion for the future mission of a permanent settlement in the middle of nowhere called Mars? How will humans survive? What about radiation? How will they get around? What will happen to the others on the Earth? What if it is suicide? And more. It is hard to get answers to these questions. To know if there is life on Mars, could Earth help to find it? Maybe it can be found on Earth, it could be in one of the most remote, empty places on Earth, Devon Island.
Devon Island
About 23 million years ago, an island was hit by an asteroid or a comet, and scientists named it, Haughton Crater. This monumental impact likely wiped out all life on the surface of the Earth and the impact left a crater. This was Devon Island that was unpopular but nowadays the island has the attention of scientists because of its similarity to Mars and was nicknamed Mars on Earth. It is in Baffin Bay, Qikiqtaaluk Region, Nunavut, Canada. Much of the land is covered in snow and ice, and it is very cold and very windy. Therefore, this harshly welcoming island became the temporary home for scientists who were to use the Mars-like environment to simulate living and working on, and the Haughton crater is now considered one of the world's best Mars analog sites. There is a NASA and other organizations crew on the site every summer period to test the skills and the machines like drones, drills, and astronaut suits in the harsh climate and they practice daily life on this island and even try to crop and plant there. It would be perfect to simulate Martian communal living in similar environmental conditions to Mars, like Devon Island. Before going to Mars permanently to understand the psychology of humans and their behavior and to prepare them with technical skills for future missions where mistakes and errors can be made and more forgiving than Mars.
Dome
With a polar desert climate and barren, rocky terrain, this land is hardly welcoming. Devon Island in the Arctic is the largest uninhabited island on Earth for good reasons. Therefore, controlling the climate will be the biggest challenge for this project. For climate control, a dome-like fake atmospheric control as Buckminster suggested for Manhattan, over some part of the island could help to settle in Devon for both winter and summer periods. Therefore a dome-like structure was proposed above the barren island that was next to NASA’s research center to get benefits from the already-built infrastructure. It should be also considered that snow load and strong winds were the biggest structural challenges that affected the choice of material for the dome steel. It was also important to create a buffer zone and microclimate to live in this cold environment. In the form-finding process, Frei Otto’s Artic City, and soap bubbles idea; Buckminster’s works inspired to creation of an organically shaped dome in the form of a grid shell structure. Sunlight and climate have a huge effect on human psychology, we are all sure that, conversely, some architectural firms proposed underground living and mostly closed and protected areas for the settlement for good reasons like radiation, etc. The challenge became how one could create a place for communal living considering well-being.
There will be space for planting and a greenhouse, courtyards for air ventilation and communal gatherings, not in a human-scaled dome not to create the feeling of jail or stuck under the dome, there will be habitation or homes for Martian that were designed with inflatable material, a statue that remains the Inuit’s symbol, and the height difference of topography-like space.
Conway's Game of Life: Cellular Automata
Game of Life: Dead or Alive name comes from Conway's Game of Life. One interacts with the Game of Life by creating an initial configuration and observing how it evolves into a life-like system. The best tool to create a living organism, communal living, is in the middle of nowhere to give the possibility to extend and expand later. Conway’s Game of Life as cellular automata command, has three rules any live cell with two or three live neighbors survives; any dead cell with three live neighbors becomes a live cell; all other live cells die in the next generation. Similarly, all other dead cells stay dead. The project idea is to create a communal living on an isolated island and make it livable again same as in the game. The 3D generation of these live volumes created another generation on top of it, but it was enough to create one generation for this period of Martian simulation that homed a hundred fifty Martians. If you wonder why hundred fifty people not more, according to Dunbar’s Social Group as Number Theory, a person could have a meaningful relation in life with only a hundred fifty. This theory was taken into consideration for creating first generation Martian community. These live cells or lands will be habitation areas for Martian simulation for this project and each live cell has a neighbor not to isolate in this remote space. The initial pattern is the first generation.
Womb
The first generation of Martians will inhabit inside inflatable structures for easy transportation, designed to resemble a mother's womb. Drawing inspiration from Archigram's works, a 3D-printed skeleton is used to encase the spaces. To meet the minimum requirements for human habitation within the smallest feasible square footage, the 'Zero Wasted Space' project conducted at Delft University was inspired to focus on preserving both energy and heat. Habitat housing’s bathrooms, kitchens, sleeping, and working areas are designed to be constructed within a 9m² space. The modular framework of the skeleton of the habitat employs inflatable structures. Given the near-impossibility of transporting conventional furniture, it was meticulously designed inflatable mechanisms that conform to ergonomic sitting and sleeping positions, and create furniture through inflatable structures.
This fictional project was a utopia, a game of life based on the idea of simulating the communal life of Martians on Earth, Devon Island living under an organically shaped dome, inside womb-like inflatable habitats.
