Mars. A landscape where everything wants to kill you. A place where life once was, but not even that could survive its harsh conditions. With NASA’s new rover, Perseverance , now settling into their new home it poses the question of how far off are we colonising the planet?
For any manned trip to the red planet, humanity would need to bring everything they needed to survive with them. These resources would have to be used and consumed, and then used again and again, taking the meaning of sustainability to a whole new level.
A colony on Mars has gone from the far fetches of science fiction to a major talking point in the space exploration debate in recent years, with private companies now starting to take over from governments in regard to feeding our need for exploration, most notably Elon Musk’s SpaceX.
Why Mars? Why bother? Musk’s motivations are driven by the growing fear that a future global catastrophic event that could damage or end human life on our planet. With a Martian colony of around a million people, the estimated number required for it to be completely self-sustaining and independent of Earth, this colony would be able to carry the banner for mankind. Our thirst for knowledge is another motive, the wealth of information sent back from the Spirit, Opportunity, Curiosity and now Perseverance rovers already on the Martian surface would be dwarfed by a manned mission that would be able to perform experiments in real time.
Mars is a whole other ball game compared to low Earth orbit (where the International Space Station or ISS is based) or the Moon. The dangers of being exposed to high levels of solar radiation for months on end, and the psychological effects of being confined in small spaces are two of the main worries for the trip there.
Things don’t get any easier after touchdown, the obvious danger is the thin CO2 atmosphere with no oxygen to speak of, along with freezing temperatures outside of any habitation we manage to set up. Along with this, Martian dust will cause problems similar to that of Lunar dust, which corroded equipment and caused the Apollo astronauts to suffer from ‘lunar asthma’.
The list could go on and on, but one more risk to consider is that of living in micro gravity for extended periods of time. Scientists don’t really know what the effects of this are, but they hypothesize that astronauts could arrive on Mars, weak, brittle-boned and possibly blind, not to mention that they may not be able to return to Earth and its much stronger pull of gravity if a solution cannot be found.
As you probably know, there’s not a lot on Mars. Scientists have found a high enough amount of ice that we could mine it and use the water, but other than that, we’re going to need to bring everything we might potentially need with us. Not just for a three day mission to the moon, or a six month mission on the ISS, but for at least a minimum of a generation down on the surface of Mars.
