Even since the 1960s, humans have wanted to go to Mars. Now more than ever this is becoming a reality, but why stop there? Why not make Mars … a colony.
Why Colonize Mars
Mars can teach us so much about how planets grow and change, it can also potentially serve as another Earth in the future.
“Exploring and colonizing mars can bring us new scientific understanding of climate change, of how planet-wide processes can make a warm and wet world into a barren landscape. By exploring and understanding Mars, we may gain key insights into the past and future of our own world.”
— Buzz Aldrin
At an average distance of 140 million miles, Mars is one of Earth’s closest habitable neighbors.
Mars is about half as far from the Sun as Earth is, so it also has decent sunlight. With an atmosphere primarily made of CO2 with some nitrogen and argon and a few other trace elements.
We can grow plants on Mars using the atmosphere. Gravity on Mars is about 38% of that of Earth, though this can cause side effects, humans and machines can lift much heavier things. Lastly, the day is remarkably close to that of Earth at around 24 hours and 37 minutes.
Do We Need a Martian Base
The short answer is no, well… not right now. But we cannot do this in the near future, we need to do this keeping in mind the hundreds or thousands of generations that will come after us. Our Earth, frankly, isn’t going to be enough.
If we have the resources, technology and people up for the task, why not start now?
If in the future, we can establish a Martian presence and permanently live there, many prevalent problems in today’s society would be completely eliminated.
Things like:
- Overpopulation,
- Lack of resources,
- Warming in certain regions
would all be irrelevant issues… just a moment in history.
Traveling to Mars
Getting to Mars doesn’t seem like a big challenge, Right? Well Mars is 54.6 million kilometers away from Earth at its closest point! That means that it takes light around 3 minutes to travel from Earth to Mars. Thus nearly instant communication wouldn’t be possible and this means that any support from the control center or any inputs wouldn’t be feasible. This is evident as only 8 out of 12 of the missions to Mars successfully landed(that is only a 66% success rate).
A trip to Mars would take around 7 months! For a combined total of around 300 miles!
This is a huge challenge and there will undoubtedly be very large sacrifices of astronauts and equipment. Just as air travel has gotten many, many times safer over the past few decades, space travel, being in its infancy, needs time to develop and perfect.
Rockets
Our technology with rockets has seen so much progression over the past few years. Now there are companies like SpaceX and Blue Origin leading the world in space tech and pushing the boundaries of our technology.
In order to establish a permanent presence on Mars we need a lot of resources and people there, and that means… rockets.
Traditionally, rockets have always been crazy expensive as well as very dangerous! But now, with new technology being constantly developed, space travel is becoming more, and more feasible.
Astronauts
The conditions of the first few years on Mars will be very rough, distant from all other life and many of the luxuries that we have here on Earth. Only things that are necessary will be brought at first with the most basic necessities.
The heavily overworked astronauts will need to endure through these rough conditions for at least 2 years before the next window to go back to Earth opens up. As Mars’s gravity is on around one third of that of Earth, astronauts will have to constantly exercise to maintain bone integrity and muscle mass.
All of this will possibly be the most challenging circumstances that any explorer will have to endure. Thus, astronauts need to have a strong will and physiological integrity. They would also need to be very good at problem solving and survival. Lastly they need to have a very wide range of skill sets.
Energy
Energy will be rather difficult to generate on Mars. Many of the methods we use on Earth wouldn’t be possible on Mars. Wind turbines would not be efficient in Mars’s thin atmosphere, there is no water for dams, and even solar energy would be constantly blocked by the dust and would be inefficient due to the distance from the sun. Due to this we would need to only really be left with one feasible option: Nuclear.
This technology has already been implemented in the perseverance rover, and will probably be used to power our settlement on Mars. Nuclear technology is both, very powerful and also very efficient, making it the best option for sustaining our temporary Martian base, and a building block for our future settlement.
Problems on Mars
One of the biggest challenges we have to face is the rough conditions of the Martian planet. Radiation will greatly deteriorate the bodies of our astronauts. The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission has set 0.05 Sieverts/year as the dose limit for workers who are exposed to radiation at their jobs. A roundtrip to Mars alone will be several Sieverts! And that’s not including at least two years that they will live on the planet!
Another problem will be the Mars Dust. On Earth, 71 percent of the surface is water, and when dust touches water, it sticks to it and eventually gets deposited on the ocean floor. Mars is devoid of any water, so all the dust that’s blowing around just keeps getting blown around, sometimes even resulting in planet-wide dust storms.
This dust is really fine and electrostatically charged and will stick to everything. Every inch of our equipment will need to be dust proof as a result and spacesuits may even need to be attached to the outside of our bases.
These are all problems that we haven’t solved yet and some we probably won’t in the near future. But we are good at doing hard tasks and this is just yet another one of those.
With new innovations to come, we will be able to turn our focus away from these problems and establish a permanent presence on the Red Planet! A Mars base will be hard! But if we are able to(we most likely are) get past the first stage of this proccess everything else will be much easier.
A Martian Future
In the future we can even terraform Mars into a second Earth. This will be a huge undertaking. Initial stages of terraforming Mars could take several decades or centuries. Terraforming the entire planet into an Earth-like habitat would have to be done over several millennia.
Some proposals include the use of greenhouse gas emitting factories to raise the temperature of the planet and trap solar radiation. This would have many benifits. If we can lower the cost of travel(Space Tethers) between Mars and Earth, many things could be manufactured on Mars without having to worry about global warming.
Others say to use large orbital mirrors to heat up the surface of the planet. These mirrors would be huge, hundreds of thousands of tons and hundreds of kilometers in area.
Whatever the solution may be, it’s going to be hard. But hey… we have to start somewhere, and we humans, are good at hard problems! If we can get past the initial stage, anything else is possible! We can start to expand our settlement and possibly make it permanent, make underground cities and create a space hub.
What The Future Holds
Getting to Mars is difficult, perhaps one of the hardest things that we will witness to be done by humans in our lifetime. The many challenges, trails and sacrifices we have to endure will not be easy. But we are pioneers, we are explorers… it’s what we do! Our history has been harsh and full of these things, the rough seas, the new terrain and the skies. But we endured through them, the challenges and sacrifices of those who came before to create the world we now know today.
“Mars tugs at the human imagination like no other planet. With a force mightier than gravity, it attracts the eye to the shimmering red presence in the clear night sky.”
– John Noble Wilford,
Mars Beckons
Colonizing Mars will not be easy, but it’s the way we can create a better future for those who will come after us, just like those who came before us did for us.
A terraformed planet, a second Earth, a hub for planetary connections, missions and interplanetary travel, the next step to becoming a truly interplanetary species now lies within our reach…
Explore Further:
Kurzgesagt — In a Nutshell (youtube video)
BBC article
Applications of Aerogel on Mars(NASA Website)
HowStuffWorks website (How to Terraform Mars)
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