Vsauce I’m Jake and…
Hey Jake.
National Geographic called and they were wondering if you, me and Kevin could each make a video
about Mars.
But Michael...Why Mars?
Throughout our lives there has been a fascination, an expectation, to physically go to Mars.
And it isn't specific to one culture or one era, it permeates through us.
This idea of visiting the Red Planet, given that name because of the iron oxide on its
surface. It has been a part of culture for a very long time.
In literature all the way back to the 1600s, in film in 1910 with the Thomas Edison produced
A Trip to Mars - one of the first Science Fiction movies ever made, and more recently
in video games like Doom, Red Faction and Destiny, and of course on television in the
series Mars on National Geographic.
In reality, we’ve been coming up with plans to go to that bright spot in the sky, that
at it’s closest is 33.9 million miles away, and at it’s farthest 249 million miles away,
for over 65 years.
The first being The Mars Project written by physicist and engineer Wernher Von Braun in
1948.
It detailed and outlined how to get a manned mission to Mars.
His hope was that it could be done by 1965, 4 years before the moon landing.
Since the publication of The Mars Project there have been over 60 other plans by government
organizations and scientists to get human beings on the surface of the planet.
During all those years we have sent landers and rovers to Mars, first the Soviet Union
sent Mars 2 and 3.
Neither were successful, with Mars 2 holding the title of being the first man made object
on the surface of Mars and simultaneously the first manmade object to crash into the
surface of Mars.
Then there was the Viking 1 lander in 1976 which was not only the first spacecraft to
actually land on Mars and complete it’s mission but also gave us this: the first photograph
ever from the surface of Mars.
Skip ahead 21 years to Sojourner, the first successful rover mission.
Then there was Spirit and Opportunity.
And quick side note on Spirit, it’s mission was for 90 Martian Solar Days, about 90 Earth
days, functioned for over 6 years thanks to cleaning events: winds blowing the martian
dust off of the rover’s solar panels.
And then Spirit got stuck, but we’ll get to that in a minute.
The most recent rover is Curiosity, which instead of being solar powered like Spirit
and Opportunity, is powered by a nuclear generator and has more twitter followers than most humans.
Now back to Opportunity.
Its been in operation for almost 13 years, about 50 times longer than originally designed,
but during that time, the rover has only travelled a distance of 26 miles.
It’s been said that what a rover could do in 6 months, a human could do in 2 hours.
What took Opportunity 13 years to accomplish in distance, a human could do in a day.
And that’s not to discredit what the rovers have been able to accomplish.
They’ve discovered some key ingredients to life on the planet, like oxygen, nitrogen,
hydrogen, carbon and sulfur.
And they’ve measured the radiation on Mars so when we do send humans, we have a better
understanding of the environment we will be entering.
But the rovers have just scratched the surface...literally.
Spirit got stuck in some soft soil during its mission.
In order to get it free, engineers from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory took an identical
rover and put it in as close to the same situation as they could, going so far as to recreate
the effects of reduced gravity.
All this in an attempt to try and solve how to get Spirit unstuck.
They weren’t able to figure out a way but this highlights an advantage of human vs machine.
A human would be able to get itself out of that situation.
Not to mention a human wouldn’t have to wait 26 minutes to get its next command.
Well, it would range between 8 minutes and 48 minutes depending on Mars’s distance
from Earth.
It takes anywhere from 4 minutes to 24 minutes to send a message to Earth and the same amount
of time back.
And that’s the thing, the Rovers move by command, they extend their arm by command,
every action is dictated by a person on Earth.
So not only is there the time delay between sending and receiving, but also the time to
decide the best course of action.
You don’t have to give a human a command to walk forward 100cm.
Humans can be much better robots than a robot.
But Jake, you still haven’t answered the question of Why Mars?
Good point, so let’s break it down, starting with why not another planet...why not Venus?
Venus is closer than Mars at 26 million miles from Earth at its closest point and 160 million
at its furthest.
It is also 80% the mass of Earth and has 90% the gravity vs Mars which is 10 times smaller
and has 38% the gravity.
Venus is often considered to be Earth’s twin.
But it also has a surface temperature of 864 degrees F, hot enough to melt lead, and the
surface pressure is 92 bar.
To put that into perspective, on Earth the average is 1 bar.
92 would be about the same pressure as going 1000ft deep into the Ocean.
It would be crushing.
Every lander or probe sent to the surface had a fairly short life, with the longest
one lasting only 2 hours before being destroyed by the environment.
Now, if you go 31 miles above the surface it isn’t as bad with similar pressure, gravity
and radiation protection which is why NASA has HAVOC, the High Altitude Venus Operational
Concept, a kind of floating city science lab.
But the general consensus is that the other planets are unhabitable do to temperature,
distance, or a lack of a surface to stand on.
So, in terms of planets in our solar system, Mars becomes the obvious destination.
Ok, we send humans to Mars to conduct experiments much more rapidly and much more impactfully
than a rover could.
A human could drill into the polar ice caps and find out what the atmosphere was like
back when Mars did have liquid water on its surface.
We could find out if there was still liquid water under the surface and in doing so, discover
life even on the smallest level.
Then this brings up the obvious next question, how do we live there?
Since Mars has much less gravity than Earth your bones would atrophy and muscles would
decay away at a significant rate.
So we terraform the planet.
Cool terraforming fact, it was generally called Planetary Engineering up until 1982 when the
term terraforming was popularized.
There are a few different proposed methods for terraforming Mars, some involve giant
orbital mirrors to warm the surface of the planet, other ideas include melting the ice
caps, directing small asteroids to impact Mars, basically we would create global warming
on Mars.
And it would take a long time.
In Senior NASA scientist Christopher McKay’s paper Planetary Ecosynthesis on Mars, he suggests
that producing an oxygen rich atmosphere would take more than 100,000 years.
Using current technology.
Other researchers have suggested only 500 to 1,000 years.
Not to mention that terraforming a planet would most likely kill anything currently
alive on it.
But as astrophysicist Matt O’Dowd told me, “Who needs to build a sky if you can build
roof.”
Vast extended covered habitats and recently NASA selected six companies to create prototypes.
Or maybe the first explorers of Mars could live underground.
Let me try and answer the question that i first asked, Why Mars?
I think it is a bit of a trick question because, yes, it is about furthering our understanding
of Life in our solar system.
Is there, has there been other life besides our own?
The significance that that would have and the other mysteries we would uncover would
be revolutionary, would be world changing.
But when asking ourselves why go to Mars, I think about what Benjamin Franklin said
on one of the first manned flights, a hot air balloon ride, when he was asked why?
He said, “What use is a newborn baby?”
It is a beginning, it is the first step that turns into something greater.
To go to Mars, it takes all of us.
From all different countries, from all different backgrounds.
It is called the International Space Station, not the American Space Station, or the Japanese
Space Station.
When we come together for a common goal, we can achieve anything, we really can.
Even if it is planting the seed of human life on Mars, no matter how seemingly small, it
will grow into something that we could have never imagined.
And those branches will extend into the rest of our solar system and into our galaxy and
so on and so forth.
Going to the Moon pumped blood and new enthusiasm for science and engineering and our own world.
Think about what stepping foot on another planet would do.
As the famous polar explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton said, “Optimism is true moral courage.
Difficulties are just things to overcome.”
And, as always, thanks for watching.