She hopes to build better worlds on Mars and here at home
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IDAHO FALLS — One of Vera Mulyani’s most prized childhood possessions was a small plastic globe she received as a birthday present. She would spin the globe, stopping it on places she dreamed of someday visiting.
Mulyani still dreams of visiting far-flung locations, but these days she’s thinking on a more interplanetary scale. As founder and CEO of Mars City Design, she works to bring together scientists, engineers and other creative thinkers in hopes of one day establishing the first human colony on Mars.
Mulyani served as the keynote speaker of the Museum of Idaho’s National Engineers Week. This event aims to raise awareness of the contributions engineers in all disciplines of the field make to our everyday lives. Every year the museum partners with the city of Idaho Falls, Idaho National Laboratory, Fluor Idaho and Idaho Falls School District 91 for the presentations.
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The event featured an Engineering Outreach event for high students who excel in engineering-related fields, a Saturday afternoon full of hands-on engineering demonstration produced with the help of Fluor Idaho and several presentations made by Mulyani. In her Saturday morning presentation, she made a case for why now is the right time for us as a society to be looking to Mars and challenges such a mission presents to mankind.
“I think for laypeople who aren’t that into science, Mars can be a very good metaphor,” Mulyani told East Idaho News.com after her remarks. “Mars lets them look into something really alien that can make them appreciate their own daily life.”
Mulyani’s daily life has changed radically since she was a child growing up in Jakarta, Indonesia. She learned several foreign languages, and her fluency in French help her land a translator job for a journalism office when she around 14.
“From knowing these people (at her job), I was able to discover the international world that I didn’t have in my education,” she said. “I was able to understand there was a bigger world out there.”
At 16, Mulyani left home, and with the assistance of her journalism friends, found work as an au pair with a French family. This family helped prepare her to attend university, and she chose architecture school.
Along the way to finishing her Master’s Degree thesis, Mulyani discovered she had a love for filmmaking. She decided to get a second Master’s Degree, this one in Visual Arts. She soon after found her way to Los Angeles with the goal of making movies. “I learned so much about human behavior and human connections, that it really helped me when I arrived in L.A,” she said. But life had other plans.
“I met a lot of scientists and engineers who were so fascinating to me,” said Mulyani. “But they had a hard time communicating and being open to connecting to people.” Mulyani decided that the best way for her to contribute to this exciting new would be to use her skills at connecting people together to help bring scientists “creativity and art and to touch a bigger scope of people.”
It was from that seed that Mars City Designs sprouted. An innovative crowdfunded platform for designing anything humans might need to start a successful colony on Mars, Mars City Design was an idea Mulyani first had in 2014 upon hearing Elon Musk’s plan to send 1 million people to live on the Red Planet.
“I thought I know how to access very creative people,” she said. “Why can’t these two worlds connect? Why can’t the people who want to go to Mars, the people with money, the people who have creativity, and the people who know the technology unite in making this big dream a reality?”
Mulyani found a niche for herself, not only bringing these people from disparate backgrounds and disciplines together but also help with her own skills as areas like photography, 3-D printing and urban design.
Another role Mulyani plays, the role which brought her to Idaho Falls this past weekend, is the passing of knowledge to the next generation of engineers, scientists, and Mars explorers.
“The younger generation are the ones who are so genuinely eager to take this to the next level,” she said. “I’m here to nurture their skill and their knowledge so we can let them lead us to accomplish this.”
Mulyani was impressed by the minds and hearts of the young people she met in Idaho Falls. “These kids are super smart,” she said. “They’re very creative. They seem to be very open.” She also noted that local youth are living in a great area in terms of access to engineering knowledge and technology. “I’m eager to see how they graduate and create a new team that can bring us to the next frontier,” she said.
Mars is not the only world Mulyani is working toward bettering. She said the process of going to Mars will also improve our lives here at home, too. “Mars is important because we need to learn from that action of being together to design our future.” She says that that future must involve changing our behavior, managing our greed and not plundering the Earth.
“Mars is really that second hope,” Mulyani said. “But my hope is let’s not repeat the same mistakes and kill another planet. Let’s use Mars as an inspiration to heal this one.”