The Hardest Things About Living on Mars 

getting there is no problem just get there then you can worry about breathing :)

But...isn't Mars *made* of of Mars bars?

@@hermeticxhaote4723 True that

Maciej Ostrowski Whoever invented that was a GENIUS!

the universe, God(s), RNGesus whoever it was gotta love it

I am very planetriotic

no burritos

ah its just 4 hours of ping you'll be fine

Cristian Verdugo Galaz The sun is 8 light-minutes away. Mars can't be much more on it's farthest from us. Still, internet won't be the same...

www.universetoday.com/14824/distance-from-earth-to-mars/

4 hours in an exaggeration. 13 minutes.

Building a spaceship on orbit would be a nightmare.

Why aren't we funding this

No harder than building the International Space Station. If we can do that we can build a proper SPACE ship. One capable to getting to deep space quickly, and safely. First we build a base on the moon, learn to use it's materials and resources to fuel launches (yes we can do that there). Use regolith 3d printer to build the bases, and build an automated refinery for whatever we need, and robots to do the mining. Then we build the space ship.

Maybe do that for the large-scale send off. It seems like the perfect way to solidify the spending and get production of lunar resources ongoing.

*+*

Wait... is this just a normal comment and not some kind of pun or joke? I've never seen this type of behaviour from you before.

Name I know, a "normal comment" is not normal for me. ;)

yea plutonium would make a great power source! we could get the stuff from nuclear reactors and old atomic bombs on earth and ship it to mars. if only there where a safe, compact and effective way produce plutonium on mars or in space. o right there is, LFTR(liquid florid thorium reactor) not only dose it make plutonium its also a power source! ^_^ ...hum.. ..power source... .... .. .

Plutonium therefore shares much in common with the Honey Badger!!! :-)

Thorium

Right moon is closer...

That ship already sailed as we have sent many things there already. They try to sterilize them first (NASA anyway), but if we know anything about microbes it's that they are almost impossible to completely eradicate. How thorough do you think the other countries that have sent probes there have been?

I hope not thorough enough, this idea of keeping mars clean seems like pointless and unrealistic wishful thinking to me. I'd be on the boat if it had complex life but all evidence speaks against it. Though I'm not sure as to how many microbes could survive the sterilization and then the vacuum and radiation of space after that.

I was saying that, in all likelihood, we don't have to be worried about contamination of mars. There is only the smallest of chances it has not been done already.

Hello ! The moon is the moon and mars is mars. Different places, different chalenges. Exemple : the dust. On the moon, the dust is really thin. It sticks everywhere. You won't be able to make an ailock where you put on and off your space siut because after a while it's gonna be filled with dust. On mars the dust is made of iron rust. It can short circuit electronics and computer. The gravity on both places is lower than earth's gravity but is it really bad ? Your body respond to gravity. You don't need strong bones if your body weights 0grams. The lack of G is a long term problem but a person living in a 0.8G will just lost 20% of it's bone mass and muscles. Anyway everyone wants to go to Mars. I don't know why. To me it's not a really good idear. Venus looks nice too. Exept you can't land on it ^^ but you can make flying cities. All you need is a heat and acid rain protection.(Fire fighters + chemical industries = live outside in the Venus clouds) You get more sunlight there. Gravity is almost the same as here on earth. and the best part, planetary EM shielding. And you can make your city float withing an atmospheric pressure equal to earth on the ocean level. Btw, Venus is the way it is because of a big ass global warming. So if you make A LOT of floating cities, you can block (I think) enough sunlight (Solar pannels) so the global warming could reverse. But Venus doesn't interest people because it's not viable in the long terme (5B years => sun in red giant xD)

Yes they are different but similar in other ways. First off low gravity sure it´s lower on the moon than Mars but still, soloutions that work on the moon to increase the gravity in the habitat will most likely work on Mars too. The lack of an atmosphere, meaning no oxygen, what happens your co2 filters break down, how are you suppose to build new ones? Sure you can get a new shipment from earth but sending anything from that is expensive and it will take time even longer on Mars. So coming up with a more permanent solution there, maybe even finding a way to make your own filters or something else that could make sure you aren´t immediately screwed if something breaks. Radiation, neither the Moon nor Mars has any magnetic field worth speaking about, so the base will receive a shitton of radiation. Experiments on new radiation shields that can take the amount of radiation out there and reduce it to a lvl more like that of the surface of earth will be something that can be experimented on there. Which will be useful both on the moon and mars , i have heard talks of NASA experimenting with creating an artificial magnetic field which might be able to protect the spaceship from the worst of the radiation but extra radiation protection is always good. Power: Since we know there will be HUGE dust storms on Mars the moon will be a good place to experiment with other powerscoreces some that might either last a VERY long time or could be produced on Mars. Shielding: Mars has a thicker atmosphere than Earth so the risk of micrometeorites isn´t as great there, but on the trip to Mars who knows what the ship might hit, finding ways to make a shield that can take a pounding might mean we can reduce the risk to our crew on the trip. Food and Water: Sure we might be able to get some of the water we need from the poles on Mars, but again re-cykling of water and waste will be something that needs to be worked out. Same with food what´s the cheapest way of cleaning it do you just want plant food or do you want livestock on the planet too, so that you can also eat meat. The thing with the Moon is we can use it to work out alot of the solution to the similarities between the two places and at the same time test a lot of theories in practice and work out solutions for what to do when things go wrong. Same with other places in our solar system, the more problems we can find out about and solve in practice on the moon, the easier it will be to colonize other planets in our solar system. If something goes wrong on Mars it will be at least 6 to 7 months before help can arrive and here we aren´t even talking about the prep time needed to launch from Earth in the first place. Venus is alot close but it would still take close to 3 months to get there. With the moon we can make it in 3 days. So again Moon first and once we got the hang of that and can make a fully self sustaining colony work there, we can start planning for Mars, Venus and the other places in our solar system.

WELL SAID

Or we can be like a turtle and carrying earth with us

Fresno Bob Eventually, somebody will make a Mars Pie. Sooner or later.

They should've mentioned that as a possibility.

& that used hydroponicly, without even needing to be treated, human urine contains enough fertiliser nutrients to grow around 50-70% of a person's food needs

If there are loads of wasp on mars we are ded

redomer That's what I was wondering. It's not like there's any alien life we'd be disturbing anyway.

They are trying to find traces of life or life. Introducing a bacteria or virus could kill it off and ruin everything. When we find enough traces of life to be satisfied then we'll probably contaminate it

The idea is to first discover and learn if there is life of some kind on Mars. If we aren't careful about how we investigate and end up contaminating the planet, researchers won't be able to tell whether a new life form is genuinely Martian or if it's just a mutated earth organism. There are lots of questions to consider. It's doubtful there are any creatures larger than a cell, but there just might be microbial life forms. They might live deep in the soil or in the ice at the poles. They might be dormant and unrecognizable as living things until their living conditions change. We don't want to deliberately cause any life form to go extinct. But it works the other way, too. There is definitely the possibility that life on Mars might be harmful to us, like an infectious agent we have no immunity to. Unless people go to Mars and STAY on Mars forever (which isn't likely), they could bring back those pathogens to earth, which could kill every human, or even every form of life on earth. If we decide to terraform Mars, and if we can develop the tech to do it, there's still every possibility that doing so will either cause the extinction of Martian life, or provide dormant forms with what they need to grow and become harmful. They could BENEFIT us as well, like breaking down the perchlorates into free oxygen. It's a very complicated issue. I would imagine that we would have to wall off and completely isolate areas as "reserves" of Martian ecology, like national parks. Right now we simply don't know if Mars supports life or not. We do know that there are life forms on earth which live in extreme environments, some of them similar to what might be found on Mars, so there's always that possibility. Another possibility is that there might be Martian life that's so different from what we know that we wouldn't even recognize it as life, so Mars could appear lifeless to us but in fact have all kinds of living things. We need to study Mars further and much more deeply before drawing any conclusions. That's what good science does.

@@scibear9944 I haven't watched the video since I posted my comment but I think the issue here was presented as a sort of morality question. Hence why I talked about the long run. Of course we have research the possiblity of martian life first in a bit more detail. Not that I think further steps that could bring earthly life to mars should be held back indefinity. That would be nailing the door shut on a lot of progress. I think the possiblity of a martian pathogen just coming to earth and killing all humans to be quite slim. Not only could our organisms be quite different from those potentially on Mars but the living conditions are for sure. So some extromphiles most likely won't prosper on Earth and as a side note I find it much more likely for the diverse earthly bacteria and viruses to randomly mutate and become harmful than anything else. On terraforming Mars: I am actually not sure if that is even reasonable. I think creating living spaces will work but full blown terraforming seems like a waste of money even if technology wasn't an issue. I think it is a pipe dream.

@@redomer91 I agree with you that the possibility if Martian pathogens is very slim....but it's not zero, either. In fact, the possibility that Mars harbors life at all is quite slim, given the apparent lack of water, the cold and the radiation (that's the big sterilizer right there), but again, not zero. I also think terraforming Mars is a waste of resources. I'd much rather have those resources and tech going into preserving EARTH rather than a distant planet. Don't get me wrong: I'm a total science geek and think maybe the transformation of Mats would be cool....but I'm also practical.

No need to throttle. The ping time alone will be the killer. You certainly wouldn't be using TCP/IP, since it relies on the two-way "handshake" for each packet sent.

its called martian porn.. or each person will bring some large HD with eath porn

Aside from the sheer volume of mass data storage you'd be bringing with you (even if just selective portions), you'd be unable to update it in any meaningful fashion. It'd be more than feasible to take a huge digital "library" with you, but to expect the entire internet is too much.

i assume companies would have servers on Mars that just constantly get cached updates from Earth that way there is no latency on Mars to visit/view the sites but the data would be delayed so you would just be seeing things like 14 mins behind would work for things like Porn,youtube etc just not for any real-time interactive content but posting comments on a youtube video would be perfectly fine

Caching is a good idea, naturally, but the issue is error correction. TCP/IP has this built in, but it relies on being able to communicate both ways without much lag. "Here's a packet... Did you receive the packet?" "Yes, I received the packet... Is this what you sent?" "Yes that is what I sent... Are you ready for the next packet?" "Yes, send the next packet." or "Here's a packet... Did you receive the packet?" "Yes, I received the packet... Is this what you sent? "No. Let me send it again." ...And so on. And by using this "handshake," TCP/IP is able to transfer data quite reliably, since any data errors can be caught and corrected. Imagine downloading an entire movie at once to discover that a packet got corrupted on route, and now you need to re-download the entire thing! Even if you download the entire thing at once, it will take twice as long just to verify that you got the entire thing intact, just due to the lag. Light can only travel so fast.

Well, you can kinda do it with robots, but once you start moving people up there it gets a lot more tricky, especially long term, because you can't just sterilize all the components before you send them up.

The reason is to avoid destroying any life/ecosystems encountered. I think that risk is worth the effort.

We would not be able to determine if there is any life on Mars and instead let Earth microbes evolve there that risk having new species and strains our immune system and medicine cannot defeat, since Mars hads extreme evolutionary pressure.

did you watch the whole video? he said there are a lot more issues to solve. And this can be solved with constant exercise and heavier suits. Hell, its 1/3 of the gravity and astronauts on the ISS seem to manage fine.

Scientists know the dangers of micro gravity, but not lower gravity. No one has ever stayed in a lower gravity environment for long enough to know. It could be that .1G is fine or that .9G isn't enough. We just don't know until we try.

The real answer is that no one know the minimum gravity necessary for human health. Everyone saying that it is or isn't enough is pulling their guesses from their butts.

It's a non problem. We can easily affirm that based on the weight fluctuation that any person can have here on Earth. Obviously, 0.9G would work: If you weigh 200 pounds on earth, you'd weigh 180 pounds in a 0.9G environment. On Mars, someone weighing 200 pounds would weigh about 80. That's as light as some humans get on Earth. Considering astronauts would have plenty of work to do, I doubt they would see much muscle and bone atrophy from their time on Mars.

its manageable, especially if you dont mean to ever come back. you probably wont even need to "exercise" to keep your organs going as you would probably be occupied experimenting what kind of new third g sport you try that day

You don't need Plutonium Nasa has already built Kilo Power using low enriched Uranium constant 10 kw want more just bring more ,we will use this on the Moon,disgracefull the presenter did not know this common knowledge of our nuclear industry.Obviosly we should use new nuclear on Earth as it would clean up our world.

Not on a short term, perhaps. It's chronic exposure that you need to worry about. Taking a single puff from a cigarette won't harm you, but the tar and other carcinogens will build up in your repository tract over time, and eventually kill you one way or another.

Not over a six month trip and especially not if you took any precautions like washing your soil or doing some medicine stuff that I am not aware of.

Where did you get the idea of a six month trip from?

I'd still avoid taking a huge whiff of it. I've dealt enough with fertilizer and ferrous sulfate to know that there's stuff that you definitely don't want to be breathing in. You'd basically be vacuuming yourself off inside the airlock, then cycling the air again, or whatever other decontamination procedures you could come up with. It's a problem, but it's not unsolvable. The "6 month trip" would be whatever time you're waiting on Mars for the next ideal Holman transfer orbit, where you "intercept" Earth in it's orbit, assuming you don't just plant your flag and leave in the next week. Either you leave within a few weeks, or your stuck there waiting for the next orbit. To go without that ideal alignment means that you need a hell of a lot more fuel. jwilson.coe.uga.edu/EMAT6680Fa05/Bacon/hohmanntransfers.html

Alexios I Komnenos A 6 month visit isn't viable. The mission would cost too much to be that short.

did you watch the whole video? he said there are a lot more issues to solve. And this can be solved with constant exercise and heavier suits. Hell, its 1/3 of the gravity and astronauts on the ISS seem to manage fine.

I can't agree that worsening eyesight is a "managing fine"... + when they land after their mission, they can't walk for a while

I don't think we need Earth strength gravity to remain healthy, I'm sure we'll be ok under lower gravity. The only one problem I see with Mars strength gravity, is people born on Mars would have a hard time when visiting Earth because the gravity would be to high for then ( think the movie ' The Space Between Us ' ) unless they undergo a lot of physical therapy.

The lower gravity would be the hardest thing by far for a long term, generational colony, because it's much harder to solve (we can build reactors and treat soil, we can't quadruple mars's mass) but for the kind of small scale colony that's being currently talked about, low gravity would be pretty much a non-issue. Everyone there would be a highly trained, highly fit adult professional, and we already have techniques to keep people healthy in microgravity, the only problem is that those techniques involve hours and hours of exercise a day. Low gravity would create a problem for people living on mars for their entire lives into old age, or for having children, but for a small, scientific research base filled with trained professional astronauts at peak fitness rotating every few years, it's pretty much a non issue.

Only a problem if they come back...

Justin LeFever Or you would just pack in a crematorium and wait for a more advanced ship to clean up the colony in a few centuries.

Val K , We don't know it yet, but Martian gravity would probably be sufficient. The only problem I see with Mars gravity is people born on Mars may not be able to handle Earth gravity very well.

If you waste perfectly good organic material by cremating it, you are sure to kill off your colony. People squeamish about the idea of living in a food cycle, should remain on Earth, where vast amounts are spent hiding the simple unavoidable fact that food comes from recycled waste, including dead humans.

One thing he got VERY WRONG. On the International Space Station, astronauts experience MICRO-GRAVITY. This is why things "float" on the ISS. On Mars gravity would 1/3 of Earth normal. This is many, many times more gravity than what is experienced on the ISS. A point of study for sure, but don't compare ISS microgravity with Mars gravity.

The point is that we really don't know that it is barren and dead, if we actually find out that is for sure the case then most people would be fine with terraforming but that would take a log time and a lot more tech that we don't have then just living there for a while in shelters would.

there might still be some undetected life that we haven't noticed so they want to avoid contaminating mars just incase

that's exactly how I feel but I think its to not alarm scientist that there are bacteria or things that should only be from earth in mars and then learn that it was only from earth an yeah...

It’s basic good practice not to infect a extraterrestrial environment. We want to keep planets such as Mars as we found them so that if life is detected we can be sure it is Martian. We also don’t want to risk infecting any potential Martian organisms, wiping out what little life could exist on the planet. I thought we had all learned from the spread of small pox in the America’s that when entering a new environment, be careful not to spread viruses and bacteria.

Besides, ecosystems are complicated and we still don't really understand them. So if we set up a small ecosystem on a new planet, it may spiral out of control in a way that could be hamrful to us. For example, what if the martian environment is perfectly fit for a parasite lethal to us ? Or a toxic bad weed ? Putting life in a place where there's none is something we've never done. Anything can happen.

The low gravity will probably kill them all eventually anyway not much point worrying about the rads long term

weights

I’d rather see someone like Elon Musk give it a shot before NASA.

The main issue with that general idea is that the moon and Mars are so different that it doesn't matter. The main issues they share are also shared with space travel in general. Not saying you don't have the right idea, just that it's more complicated than most of is realize. I hope I have been informative.

Didn't America and China just agree to just that?

Thats exactly why we should do a moon base, precisely because it is so complicated. After thousands of years, humans STILL build roofs that collapse. And yet, we think that building a structure with a roof is a walk in a park on another planet/moon where EVERYTHING we once assumed (like gravity and wind) are completely different now? These are just basic important things that people like Musk and his supporters are so blind to....

Tamal Paul Food can't be grown on the Moon's surface. This would make food more scarce and/ or expensive.

4th

Raymond Mclendon I have had this very question...I have also wondered if such a field could be produced, could we oscillate it in such a way to repel the ionized dust storms.

Sounds like a good scishow episode

It could! I know NASA and the Japanese Space Agency(?) have been looking at that. I can't find it now, but I read a scientific study about it and it wouldn't even take that much energy. ~10 nuclear power plants would be enough to protect the planet and let the atmosphere start to build back up! I'll see if I can find the original paper.

Update/Corrections: Looks like the paper I originally saw was only for a magnetic field 10% of earth's (so it would roughly double mars' current one. And it would take ~12GW of power. And it is land based. The paper is here: www.nifs.ac.jp/report/NIFS-886.pdf We could also use a single dipole at mars' L1 point, but I can't find anything about power consumption and I don't know enough about magnetism to make an estimate myself: trendintech.com/2017/03/12/could-a-magnetic-shield-be-the-answer-to-creating-a-suitable-atmosphere-on-mars/

+24680kong 12 Jigawatts? Great Scott! That's more than the entire power output of earth right now. I don't think it's going to happen on Mars anytime soon. However, we don't need to because protecting the entire planet would be inefficient in the first place. We need to protect only the colony and I reckon that wouldn't take much power.

Less energy on a joule basis than an ant farting. It's that the energy does horrible damage with such little energy.

1) "Less energy on a joule basis than an ant farting" Can't build huge ass panels in the desert, store as electricity in huge ass capacitors? (also, maths for dat figure?); 2) "horrible damage with such little energy" Like fission bombs, r8? Can't imagine how I could hijack a nuclear chain reaction to get lotsa energy, tho...

It would take way too much space (too many panels) to power anything. Here's a rough calculation: 12 square kilometers for 60W. There's just so much more photons from the sun than cosmic rays from space. helios.gsfc.nasa.gov/qa_cr.html#energykeep

It makes no difference if most of it gets screened by dust... if I was NASA, I wouldn't be so quick in fancing myself chooser rather than beggar. Really, what you're saying is basically the same as saying we shouldn't use solar panels because their efficiency is stupid low Plus, you didn't read your own source closely - that estimate is for the cosmic shower _on Earth_ , and it doesn't factor in the actual mechs for energy production; let's say, a panel roughly a silicon wafer with radioactive spots every now and then - why is it unfeasable?

The thing is, you could do it, it would produce energy, but it wouldn't be viable, too much panels for too little energy Cosmic rays can mess your DNA because it's extremely sensitive information packed in the cell nucleus, just some particles can mess a lot of things, it's enough to give cancer to someone but not enough to power anything Most of the little energy you could get from it would be lost in the wiring due to resistance, and again, it's not viable, why would you launch giant amounts of panels to mars when you can just send a small reactor, and the reactor would perform infinitely better than it The question isn't if it's possible, but if it's affordable and cheap enough to be done

Unfortunately that is not the issue. We know that bringing along certain microbes would be helpful for us and the kind of ecosystem we live in. The worry is that by contaminating Mars we could prevent, or make it very difficult, to find out if there is or was ever life on the planet.

At some point you have to shrug and carry on or you'd never go anywhere. The point I made above dose relate to the "is there life on mars" but contamination is a given. But if we do not go or at least try to, then we may not get any further as the same would apply everywhere. If there was life on Mars it may very well be fossilised. If there is any hiding there currently then we'd need a far more robust presence to find it. But if we go it will be contaminate, that as I said is a given. But if humans are banned then we might as well say human space exploration is over, then after about 50 years organisation like NASA will be struggling to get funding. It'll all be about low earth Orbit and satellite. So trying for Mars as a goal is a must, that will help us get back to the Moon and then we can build up the technology and research needed to survive there and that in turn will develop technology that can be used back here on Earth. You only have to look at Musk's aim to go to Mars spurring on a tech surge with the success of the Falcon ( so see that is true. The Space shuttle being decommissioned, as the reusable white elephant it was, was inevitable. And there was nothing to replace it. Space tech was sliding backwards steadily as far as capability was concern. The scrapping of Apollo program alone saw the loss of the plans for the rocket and shortly afterwards the companies the program had been supporting, who n were trying for industrial expansion into space, went bust. So a few years later they could not have build an Apollo rocket to save their lives, Reusability was deemed impossible and research into was not supported, that is until SpaceX, after almost going bust, finally launched Falcon 1 which saved the company and let them develop the Falcon 9 which still has everyone in awe of that fact, yes this rocket is reusable and can land the first stage on land after launch. We needed a new goal and Mars is that goal. A lot of technology is needed to get there and a lot of challenges are there to be over come. Light Lag is a big problem in the exploration of Mars, so getting people there even if only in orbit, saying we can protect the people there 24/7, would give a huge boost to not only human ego but the search itself. No develops or keeps things were do not use, that is how the technology of Aqueducts was lost, not through deliberation but through not being used. We need to go to such place to encourage other to develop tech to support than and to find ways to make it safer easier and more efficient. It also encourages budgets to keep flowing when it means deaths for those you decide to cut off and leave to wither on the vine as it were. So, that means we'd try to make Mars as safer place to live or at least visit. And that in turn means we end up contaminating it. The trick at that point is to have the people "on the ground" controlling the local data flow and try to speed up the search before the contamination becomes too far reaching. If we do find life there and cannot tell it if is from Earth contamination or from Mars, that itself would say interesting things. Keeping things scientifically clean is all well and good, but there comes a time when you have to say "Enough!" and get on the the job. Scientific standards is one reason why anti-matter costs thousands of times more than it has to, as they want a very specific type and only want that type for study, and it is also the reason why anti-matter fuel is said to be so expensive to produce, all due to a scientific standard being required. Shove that aside where it is not required and some jobs become a lot less arduous to get done,. I'd say the clock is ticking on Mars maintaining that demand scientific standard. But important things can still be learnt when we try to transplant there that cannot be studied or learnt in any other way.

Solanumtinkr Attempting to colonise mars is pretty useless at this point... I think we should at least send up some surface drills and run some other manned tests first before permanently ramming humans onto it.

The way I see it, sure going right this minute is impossible. We do not have the tech to do it and we are currently developing it. The Moon is where most of it will be tested anyway. And Industrialising space and the Moon is a important first step. A step that has been delayed for over 50 years due to budget cuts and then the loss of capability that came with the winged lemon. Sure the shuttle as a nice craft but the reason for its size was a demand by the DoD who was said to have been going to pick up the tab for the complications and drastic cost increase making it bigger would entail. It was supposed to be a taxi mounted on top of a rocket. But no one picked up the tab and the design compromise was a stupid decision by armchair comity without the understanding of just how hard building a truly reusable vehicle would be. We need to start planning and designing with a deadline and sufficient drive to keep industry interested and funded enough to not only bring down the cost of getting into space but finding ways for humans to live and work their safely. For that we need a goal that inspires people and Mars is one such inspiration. At the very least we need to use this to boost strap expansion onto the Moon with it being far enough advanced to make that an economically encouraging ecosystem. If it allows for cheaper, easier and more well supplied missions into the further reaches of the solar system that extra capability could be used to final get businesses interested in doing things like asteroid prospecting. Mars is an inspiring goal. It gets people interested and fires the imagination. Sure it's hard to do, but saying. "lets go live on the Moon" just does not have the same spark. But a lot of the tech will be compatible for both. One inspiring goal will and has generated competition to make sure they are not left out, this means money being spent of research and design where none was before. But to get your drills and large AI vehicles safely to Mars surface, a lot of the same technology is required anyway and being able to send ans support a group pf people there could do wonders for data collection. Maybe we will get to Mars on time or maybe Moon expansion will consume most of our efforts for a further 20 years. But if we get one and work on further capabilities the other should be achievable. And learning how to protect a colony on Mars should give us the ability to do it elsewhere. Maybe the tech will not translate, but a lot of things will not be known unless we try and learning how to deal with the Mars environment could help us understand how to deal with some of the problems we have here as well. The main problem being we need an inspiring goal and a colony that requires support or travel connection has the possibility of doing wonders for driving the need to improve space travel, which will have benefits far beyond just getting people places.

You can't just grow a plant from water, plants need minerals to function, and sending minerals to Mars will be to expensive. Cleaning the existing soil would be the best solution.

Dylan Barkhuizen you can't just send nutrients to Mars? You're kidding right? Umm do you really think that removing 2 million parts per billion of very harmful particles is easier than packing freeze dried chemical nutrients? Also with composting there on Mars, after a while you wouldn't even need to send more nutrients as a whole. Just ever so often.

Our chemical nutrient technology is a lot further along than you think Dylan Barkhuizen. It's not a sack of cow crap they are sending up. Eesh...

_Heck...The sack of cow crap will work too_

we cannot wait to perfect fusion, that'll have to be done while we go to mars now. I dont know if you noticed but we are kind of on a time limit.

Really? Then what do you do about the neutrons, neutrinos and pions? Plus, I think you'd learn that using a remote non-stops dries off the batteries _rather_ quickly... ;)

Are we on a time limit? What is the countdown? You sound like those people who say that Jesus is returning "any minute". They've been saying that for 2000 years and we have no idea when the next extinction event will occur. I agree that we should become an interplanetary species as soon as possible but jumping to Mars is premature. Creating an infrastructure on the moon that can sustain itself and use in-situ resource utilization and perfect the technologies that we need while still having the lifeline​ to the Earth is the smart way to go.

TheJimtanker the next extinction event has started 2 hundred years ago more or less with the advent of the industrial age. We killed nearly half of the species on Earth during it, and there is no sign of it stopping.

earth Chan is tsundere

I wonder what personality Mars-Chan has

Earth chan is my girlfriend c;

0.0002kb/h

I believe the registration date has passed.

Iosif Vissarionovici Stalin Yes papa

In Soviet Union, Mars is standing on you.

X-death Nope. The atmosphere is virtually nonexistent. The "air" wouldn't have enough mass to turn a turbine with enough force to be viable.

X-death good idea but atmospheric pressure is too low to be of use. So if it could be done, it wouldn't be as easy as just putting up a windmill.

Have anyone mentioned the density of the atmosphere yet?

Simon good point, the density of the atmosphere would be an issue ;-)

Ya, that's the one thing that The Martian got wrong.

Angela Gonzalez the shielding required weighs as much as the whole ship

There is a very delicate ratio between how much fuel you need, and the overall weight. If we added another entire ship weight onto the current ship, you’re stuck with adding more fuel which adds more weight and so on. It’ll be difficult for the balance to add anything onto ships.

yeah, lead is such a good insulator because it's very dense (= heavy) so so either you have such a thin foil that it doesn't do anything or it's so thick that the spacecraft will be too heavy to take off

Aren't those storm windy ? It's too bad we never invented something that can produce electricity using wind power :) Problem is that due to the low density of the atmosphere those "storms" are not that powerfull as some movies can show. You won't get power generation if the wind is too weak to make something turn on the axis due to mecanical friction.

David Foster Yes. They need to come up with a different name for that type of radiation. It's just fast moving subatomic particles. You stop them from moving and they're perfectly safe. It's the energy they have from their speed that makes them able to damage your DNA.

They do have names for it. Ionizing radiation, high-energy photons) won't contaminate your drinking water. Beta, or gamma radiation from an active source (decay products), like uranium or plutonium will contaminate your water supply, because the decay products actually stay in the water and then enter your body. That's my understanding of it anyways. I could always lookup what Wikipedia has to say, but I'm too lazy right now.

There are 4 types of radiation: Gamma (basically high energy light), Alpha (ionized helium, released from heavy elements), Beta (free, high-energy electrons), and Neutron (which are... neutrons). Alpha, Beta, and Gamma radiation will not affect the water in any meaningful way. Neutron radiation -could- turn a few atoms of water into "Heavy water" which is slightly radioactive, but not enough to worry about (especially given the environment we're talking about here). When people talk about "radioactive contamination" what they are actually saying is that there is radioactive material that has physically gotten into whatever it is you are talking about. So if some radioactive dust got IN the water, then yeah... don't drink that. EDIT: ALL of the type I listed are "ionizing radiation." That term just means that the particle has sufficient energy to rip apart molecules if it collides/interacts with them.

Yes. Well, it seems like both of us ought to have consulted The Google before sharing our wisdom, don't you think?

JOE BLOE me too, but the money that it would cost to build infrastructure to support human life probably costs far more than a helicopter and some supplies, and not many can see past that. Just my guess

JOE BLOE Good point. But, we could send them to Mars too.

Daniel Farrell It would be an expensive logistical endeavor. But under 10 people up there isn't too much stuff.

why not both?(apart from the $$$ that it would need obviusly)

You need to reread wherever you go that from. If you're talking about his interplanetary bus system then that won't work either. You would have to have an incredible amount of deltaV to rendezvous with the bus at the Earth and then enough to slow down at Mars. Still not a workable system, kind of like the Hyperloop hyper dream.

1. its 3 months 2 the interplanetary transport system can and will work (though i believe a little later than 2024 but hey, Elon has a pretty good track record of doing what seems impossible) 3. hyper loop is being developed across the world, not just by Elon. It will also inevitably happen.

it will happen for the LOLz, and then abandoned because it is economically a waste fo money

I don't think you understand the "pressure" that project is buckling from.

Most of the issues still apply to computers. Radiation fries a CPU a lot faster than it can do anything to a human, chemicals still erode the casing, the power is probably the one issue you thought of, finding materials to build more computers might be even harder than growing food, etc.

Windrake101 True, if a space agencies had infinite funds, and the right guy leading them, we would be a type-3 Civ in no time!

gurubej K HAHAHAHAHAA

gurubej K They already sent a Blur CD, isn’t that enough?

Nillie What's that?

Kiba Whitefang The Beagle 2 lander carried/carries a Blur CD.

Oooh.. a Bieber joke. Edgy.

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Burning perchlorates release oxygen too. So wash the soil and burn the byproduct seems obvious to me

Sure; to get drinking water from the sea, all it takes is distillating it - that's why nobody on Earth thirsts nowadays Also, would be interesting to see a verifiable quote for that last one

Water ionises salts. This would probably be a burn-based purification process.

The amount of water you'd need for that is completely impractical on Mars. Solving problems in extraterrestrial environments requires stepping outside the common-sense of solving problems on Earth. Having a planet entirely covered in high concentrations of the equivalent of industrial waste isn't a problem you can solve by just washing it (especially with very little available water).

Not in the sense that you're washing the dirt then throwing the water away, that is extremely impractical. But if you soak the dirt in water, thereby dissolving the perchlorate (which is just a type of salt), then boil the water-perchlorate solution to reclaim the water, it is a much more impractical and it is a relatively simple process already used in space stations with astronauts' urine.

Israel Gray No, but there have been plans to make cloud cities using balloons in the upper atmosphere!

Even though said clouds are laced with pure sulfuric acid?

I really don't know why you'd bother with cloud cities. It' not that it couldn't be done, jut that for all the effort you put into it, there' nothing to do. Mars is interesting to study, because of the prospect of finding life, or at least past life. Venus, on the other hand, has nothing on the surface that you could actually do with a human. Not just due to the acidic rainfall (which actually evaporates before it hits the surface), but due to the pressure. Mars' atmospheric pressure is about 1/100th of Earth. Earth's atmospheric pressure is about 1/100th of Venus! To top that off, the surface temperature will liquefy lead! Every probe man has ever sent to the surface has only lasted a few minutes before the cooling failed and the electronics fried! Pressure we can deal with, but not with extreme heat at the same time - not if you want humans or electronics to survive, anyways. There's no natural resources to exploit on Venus (not that would be cost effective, anyways), and no science to be done that you wouldn't require a probe to do anyways (unlike Mars, where it's estimated that a human could do the science that the probes do 10-100 times faster). The only purpose would be colonization, but if that's the case, why not just build Earth orbiting habitats instead? Like Mars, Venus doesn't have much of a magnetic field to speak of.

Israel Gray It is not the clouds that prevent you from landing on Venus. It is: Acid, pressure and infernal heat.

FutureChaosTV But if you get rid of the clouds you don't have to worry about those things.

Would take FAR more work for much less return. The best part of mars is that were on the ground, with plenty of materials right there, no need for extra steps.

Liberty Prime we would have to make a sky city (hard) or terraform the whole planet (hard and takes centuries)

Liberty Prime Maybe you should read the Wikipedia article about Venus. en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venus

Liberty Prime Becouse it's as hot as hell, there are acidic rains and other nasty stuff.

Becouse, more like Beach House am I right guys

even when the first man were send to the moon they were left on decontamination chambers when they'd return, so it would be standard procedure i would asume

Where else will you get your soil from? Cart it from Earth? That's expensive. Fortunately, we know how to leech the peroxides out.

hydroponics is much more effective and uses small amounts of water and that would be very sustainable to use while you were cleaning the soil.. I think you don't understand hydroponics .. it uses no soil....

I agree! Every cannabis farmer out thier knows for a fact that hydro/aqua pontics is way better than conventional farming!

Thomas R. Jackson That's actually a really good point! But we didn't really reach the MOON for a reason, I believe the president said 'we're not doing it because it's easy, we're doing it because it's hard" A semi-permanent mars mission is kinda useless, but a temporary proof-of-concept landing like the Apollo lander I can understand. But hey, we ain't landing a guy on Venus any time soon, so why not?

Thomas R. Jackson , I know you're against space colonization but colonizing the cosmos will be good for us and provide new social opportunities

Thomas R. Jackson , Better yet we can build spacesteads ( space stations that spin to fake gravity and that have cities and towns inside them where ordinary people could live, work and play ) Building these would be a worthwhile goal. Imagine the possibilities!

he's not saying he's against space colonization, just that he'd prefer doing something more practical and useful first. i agree with prioritizing moon colonization first. it'll help A LOT with future manned missions to anywhere else. not to mention you can mine the moon easily for rocket fuel or fuel for fusion reactors (when that becomes a reality) and it'll be easier to build probes, and such, from the moon and launch them from there (same also goes for space elevators). i honestly see no reason to not colonize mars, especially if we do it primarily underground, but delaying it until it's safer, cheaper, and more practical is something worth talking about.

We don’t really know the health effects of low, as opposed to no, gravity. Humans have never spent a prolonged time in low gravity. Their are fixes for low gravity in any case, fixes which a martian colony might need to employ as well. I am not sure why anyone would think I am against space colonization, especially in response to a post where I promoted a colony in space. Anyway, I am all for it. But if we are talking about a colony, not just an excursion, it needs to be both self sustaining and economically viable. That is unless we are talking about some sort of Elysium populated only with billionaires and there servants, oops, I meant support staff. Space steads are a great idea! All for that. In a lot of ways better than a lunar colony. But we need materials to build them, and most of the mass of those materials needs to come from space. Lots of stuff the moon that is easy to get, particularly shielding, but also water, and ores. So Moon first! A Venus cloud colony has been proposed, but folks are not fired up about it, and there wasn’t a Percival Lowell to tell us tails of a bustling alien civilization as with Mars. We mainly want to go to mars because of sci fi and fantasies of crank astronomers, not because it would be a good place for a colony.

why not just halve the US military budget & use that money? Full budget would cover colonisation of mars & the moon & a new space station & return trips within 10 years

soooo dry

João Dalvi the lessened gravity would be manageable. The lack of a magnetosphere, and it’s radiation protection, really is the biggest handicap for long-term human survival. You would die a lot faster from radiation poisoning than bone density loss.

that's not the true problem for now. You could counter the effects of lack of gravity on your body,just like they do on ISS. But by the time we will get to mars we will probably have already some kind of better tech that helps with it.

That people never question if gravity has an effect on reproduction. Hint, it does. And that make a surviving Mars colony a pipe dream

Spinning building? Okey.. You know you can't add to the Martian gravity in the first place right? So all you will have to do is spin it even faster to counteract the gravity produced by the planet compared to just doing it in space. And have you given a thought to the diameter you would need for this? And still have the ring sized building supporting itself in 0.4G. Not feasible. And it isn't a gene problem, so Cripr won't help. It is a design problem. All mammals need strong gravity for their conception and fetal development. On Venus you need no extreme solutions. Not even a pressurized suit if you place the floating city on the correct height. Why run before you even can walk?

What?