For centuries Humans have considered colonizing or even terraforming Mars.
Today we will look at exactly that but instead discuss the issues and challenges with traveling
to Mars and forming a colony there.
We’ll mainly focus on the issues with creating a colony there as, in my experience, folks
tend to usually only discuss the journey to Mars.
And I think it’s also really useful to know why we would go there.
Most folks know that companies such as NASA and SpaceX aim and have plans to send Humans
to Mars in the future, but most don’t understand why we want to.
So why do we want to go to Mars?
Well, for one thing Earth is some day going to run out of resources and space to live
and when we start to realise that, we will have to come up with new ideas to make room
for new space.
Concepts such as Dyson spheres, rotating habitats, ringworlds, and so on will get discussed much
more often as they become more and more vital.
And so, beginning a colony on Mars is a fantastic solution to wanting more space and is one
reason why we would want to colonize Mars.
It’s also an essential step to improve Human survival because if all life on Earth was
wiped out by a large asteroid, like the dinosaurs were, then a self sustaining colony on Mars
would serve as a great backup for Humanity.
And we’ve been quite fortunate enough to get a planet as good as Mars; it has about
the same length of day as Earth, only an extra 40 minutes, and has ice on its surface that
we could potentially use in the future, and anyways it’s one of the best and closest
options in our solar system: Mercury and Venus are far too hot and the Moon, well the Moon
is a pretty good candidate for a colony but isn’t a good candidate for a reason that
I’m about to discuss.
Since the end of the last century and this century, we have sent many rovers to Mars
and they’ve made quite a lot of discoveries.
However, Bill Nye said in an episode of StarTalk Radio that Humanity should focus more on sending
Humans to Mars and not robots because Humans could make discoveries 10,000 times as fast
as robots do.
Mars is the next logical place to explore and discover new things, that’s another
reason to go there.
With some human work on the red planet, there is a greater chance of finding life there.
And now you can see why the Moon isn’t a good candidate for this very reason.
Although it’s very unlikely that we’ll find life elsewhere, it is a lot more likely
to find life on Mars rather than the Moon.
Not only making discoveries, but also just simply to adventure.
Another reason is to inspire future generations to go even further than the previous.
Landing Humans on the Moon inspired future astronauts, engineers and so on who were in
secondary or middle school at that time.
So now that we are familiar with a few reasons on why we want to go Mars, we shall now discuss
the issues with forming a civilization there.
So here is a list of some of the biggest issues with colonizing Mars that I could think of.
1.
The radiation Humans would have to deal with.
2.
The gravity there.
3.
The atmosphere there.
4.
Not having enough materials or money.
5.
We are inexperienced.
6.
Time lag.
7.
Some other issues Firstly, the radiation there.
We’re very lucky here on Earth.
The earth naturally protects us from radiation, due to its thick and dense atmosphere and
magnetic field.
The magnetic field deflects most of the solar wind, which would strip away the ozone layer
that protects us from harmful radiation, however some particles from the solar wind can enter,
which in turn is what the aurora is.
Most celestial bodies have magnetic fields, however most are not as good as Earth’s.
Mars is no exception, although it’s magnetic field is exceptionally weak compared to Earth’s.
This is a problem.
When astronauts land there and set up a base, they will be constantly bombarded by a lot
more radiation than Humans have ever experienced.
And not only landing on Mars, but actually making your way there, astronauts will be
fully exposed to the radiation as they have no cover, like we do here on Earth.
Of course on the route to Mars, astronauts on board the craft could also experience unpredictable
radiation bursts, exposing the astronauts to a lot more radiation.
Furthermore, to only get to Mars it takes around somewhere from 100 days to 300 days
and so the astronauts on board are spending all that time getting bombarded by all this
radiation from the sun and from the constant background radiation of the Universe, which
can have affects such as DNA ionising, cancers forming and organs damaging.
So it’ll be a pretty good idea to stop the astronauts from undergoing this radiation.
There’s two ways we can do this.
First, we could reduce the travel time, both by choosing the exact right time to leave
Earth and the quickest trajectory to get to Mars.
The ideal time to send the spacecraft with all our astronauts inside is when Mars is
the closest point to Earth, which is every two years, being at about 55 million kilometres
from Earth.
Of course you wouldn’t leave Earth as Mars is at its closest point, you’d much rather
leaving days before it is, so that your spacecraft meets Mars at its closest point.
Ideally you’d want to travel in a straight line as possible, to reduce the distance the
spacecraft is travelling and so using less fuel.
Travel time also depends on how fast the craft is travelling.
How fast the craft is travelling depends on how much fuel we’re willing to burn.
The second way to stop the astronauts from receiving as much radiation is to design the
spacecraft so that it blocks as much radiation as possible.
This just comes down to how engineers design the craft, and with most of these issues,
they are issues that are easily overcame.
The most difficult issue that I can see is not having enough money but we shall discuss
that later on.
The second issue is the gravity there.
Martian gravity is about 38% of the gravity here on Earth, since Mars has less mass than
Earth.
So if you weigh 100 pounds on Earth, you would weigh only 38 pounds on Mars.
The Moon has an even lower gravity of 16.6% of Earth’s gravity.
We’ve never had anyone stay on the Moon, or Mars for that matter, for a lengthy amount
of time that would enable us to see the effects of the low gravity there.
The longest anyone has been on the Moon was the final mission of NASA’s Apollo program
in 1972, where they were on the Moon for a little over 3 days, while the entire mission
took over 12 days.
With that being said we do have fairly good guesses on what would happen, based on the
effects that astronauts on the International Space Station experience.
Ever since the first astronauts went up to the Space Station NASA discovered that, due
to the low gravity, the body works a lot less, causing muscle deterioration and loss of bone
density.
To solve this, astronauts need to regularly exercise and on average they do this two hours
a day.
However, to tackle this we could create artificial gravity.
This way it would be just like on Earth and the astronauts wouldn’t need to do exercise,
which gives them a lot more time.
At the moment we know of two ways to create gravity, either somehow grab a ton of mass
and use its natural gravity or using spin to create fake gravity.
This could be accomplished by rotating a large structure in a shape such as a cylinder, ring
or torus.
It’s the same thing you feel in rides like rollercoasters, where you are pushed to one
side.
Now this solution is great for getting to Mars, but on the surface it would be a lot
more difficult to have a rotating structure.
So it’s whether it’s worth spending that extra money for the astronaut’s benefit
or not.
This type of artificial gravity is seen in a lot of science fiction books, such as one
of my favourite books “2001: A Space Odyssey” by Arthur C. Clarke and also “The Martian”.
The third issue is the atmosphere there.
Mars’ thin atmosphere makes landing on Mars very difficult, which is why Mars rovers have
strange landing methods.
The air composition is completely useless as it’s made up of 95% carbon dioxide and
small percentages of oxygen, argon and other gases.
The thin air on Mars also does a poor job of capturing heat.
A good idea would be to terraform Mars, although it’s very difficult and would take a long
time.
One of the key steps in doing so would be to make the atmosphere more like Earth’s.
We’d have to make it thicker and and alter its composition.
One way to do this would be to trigger a global warming effect, introducing more greenhouse
gases, such as carbon dioxide, methane or ammonia.
We could get methane from mining rocks on Mars, or if we’re feeling ambitious then
we could hit Mars with some asteroids to release ammonia.
This would be done by somehow capturing an asteroid from either the edge of the solar
system, so the Oort cloud, or even the asteroid belt.
The fourth issue is not having enough materials or money.
It seems to me that this would be the most likely issue for Humans.
A manned mission to Mars would be exceptionally expensive.
A few years back, NASA estimated that it would cost them at least $100 billion over the course
of 30 to 40 years, and that number might even be too low.
After all, the ISS was once thought to cost $10 billion over the course of 10 years, but
turned out to cost 10 times that.
$100 billion is a very large figure in comparison to previous Mars rovers such as Curiosity
that cost only $2.5 billion.
With that being said, I undoubtably want NASA, or SpaceX for that matter, to send a manned
mission to Mars.
If they can’t meet the money needed, NASA have instead suggested that they may do another
mission to the Moon, possibly even to form a colony there.
Seen as SpaceX are pretty confident with future manned missions to Mars, NASA forming a colony
on the Moon would give SpaceX a bit more beforehand knowledge before they colonize Mars.
SpaceX plans to send its first cargo mission to Mars in 2022.
What’s even more exciting though is its second mission, including both cargo and a
crew, which will be preparation for future crew flights and the spacecraft will be the
beginning of our first Mars base, which we can build from to create a thriving city and
eventually a self sustaining civilization on Mars.
The fifth issue is that Humans are inexperienced.
The aforementioned colony on the Moon would give SpaceX some helpful insight and advice
for the more ambitious job of colonizing Mars.
It’s possible that SpaceX’s first manned Mars mission encounters an unknown problem,
resulting in all of the crew dying.
Having said that the best way to learn is from our mistakes.
This issue always has some degree in every space exploration mission, but we always end
up just learning from mistakes, making future missions better executed.
The sixth issue is time lag.
This is probably the least affecting and the least thought about issue on my list.
This includes messages and signals taking a long time to get from Earth to Mars, or
vice versa.
Radio signals can take anywhere from 4 minutes to 24 minutes to get to Mars, depending on
where Mars is in it’s orbit.
This means that there couldn’t be phone calls between the two planets so messages
or voice recordings would have to be used.
Friends and family connections are likely to get very distant as it’s too time consuming
and troublesome to have a conversation or text each other.
That could drive someone mad, not having any loved ones to talk to or any real friends,
just colleagues.
That’s why it’s pretty important that a crew, going to colonize a planet and be
pretty much on their own for at least more than a year, has to be good friends and close
to make it at least bearable for them, in that manner.
And now some other issues that I’ll briefly talk about.
There is the contamination problem.
As soon as we step foot on Mars we have brought microbes, or life if you like, to Mars, despite
how many checks the spacecraft and crew go through beforehand.
This means that if we find life on Mars we might not be able to tell whether it originated
on Mars or if we brought it over from Earth.
There is also the problem of perchlorates in the soil.
Perchlorates are salt compounds, often used in rocket propellants and they’re exceptionally
harmful for Humans.
They can cause aplastic anaemia, when your bone marrow can’t make any new red blood
cells.
And can also cause agranulocytosis, which makes your body create less or no white blood
cells.
So if we’re going to grow our own food on Mars then we’ll either need to use our own
soil or remove the perchlorates from the soil.
Comment down below your thoughts on these issues.
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