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posted by Fnord666 on Thursday August 01 2019, @09:35PM   Printer-friendly
from the never-say-never dept.

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

Humans Will Never Colonize Mars

The suggestion that humans will soon set up bustling, long-lasting colonies on Mars is something many of us take for granted. What this lofty vision fails to appreciate, however, are the monumental—if not intractable—challenges awaiting colonists who want to permanently live on Mars. Unless we radically adapt our brains and bodies to the harsh Martian environment, the Red Planet will forever remain off limits to humans.

Mars is the closest thing we have to Earth in the entire solar system, and that's not saying much.

The Red Planet is a cold, dead place, with an atmosphere about 100 times thinner than Earth's. The paltry amount of air that does exist on Mars is primarily composed of noxious carbon dioxide, which does little to protect the surface from the Sun's harmful rays. Air pressure on Mars is very low; at 600 Pascals, it's only about 0.6 percent that of Earth. You might as well be exposed to the vacuum of space, resulting in a severe form of the bends—including ruptured lungs, dangerously swollen skin and body tissue, and ultimately death. The thin atmosphere also means that heat cannot be retained at the surface. The average temperature on Mars is -81 degrees Fahrenheit (-63 degrees Celsius), with temperatures dropping as low as -195 degrees F (-126 degrees C). By contrast, the coldest temperature ever recorded on Earth was at Vostok Station in Antarctica, at -128 degrees F (-89 degrees C) on June 23, 1982. Once temperatures get below the -40 degrees F/C mark, people who aren't properly dressed for the occasion can expect hypothermia to set in within about five to seven minutes.


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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by Osamabobama on Thursday August 01 2019, @10:06PM (19 children)

    by Osamabobama (5842) on Thursday August 01 2019, @10:06PM (#874288)

    Once temperatures get below the -40 degrees F/C mark, people who aren't properly dressed for the occasion can expect hypothermia to set in within about five to seven minutes.

    That's an interesting factoid, I guess, but I'm sure it represents an arbitrary point (with error bars) on a curve. Temperature vs. time to hypothermia for an improperly dressed person... Did they choose that point because they wanted "five to seven minutes" or were they more interested in the point where Fahrenheit and Celsius scales cross?

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  • (Score: 1, Troll) by takyon on Thursday August 01 2019, @10:10PM (6 children)

    by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Thursday August 01 2019, @10:10PM (#874292) Journal

    When on Mars, live indoors. Like basement dwelling incels already do on Earth all the time.

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    • (Score: 2, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 02 2019, @12:01AM (5 children)

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 02 2019, @12:01AM (#874369)

      You keep bringing them up, almost like it is an issue dear to your heart.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 01 2019, @10:11PM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 01 2019, @10:11PM (#874295)

    Temperature scale intersections? I thought they were going unitless....

    • (Score: 2) by Rupert Pupnick on Thursday August 01 2019, @10:24PM (1 child)

      by Rupert Pupnick (7277) on Thursday August 01 2019, @10:24PM (#874310) Journal

      My favorite hypothermia rule of thumb from a life jacket company: The Stearns Rule of 50 says you have a 50% chance of surviving 50 minutes in 50 deg F water.

      • (Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 02 2019, @02:57AM

        by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 02 2019, @02:57AM (#874447)

        Ditto for 50 C.

  • (Score: 3, Informative) by Runaway1956 on Thursday August 01 2019, @11:42PM (4 children)

    by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Thursday August 01 2019, @11:42PM (#874361) Journal

    Here's a factoid, as drilled into us by the Navy. 30-30-30, or, at 30 degrees F, in a 30 mph wind, it only takes 30 minutes for exposed flesh to freeze. So, yeah, as temps drop below zero, you're going to have a lot less time to act before the cold starts killing you.

    I'm pretty sure that somewhere, they have these things plotted on charts. I've often read that a person falling into 30 degree water only has about four minutes to save himself. Water leaches heat from your body much faster than moving air.

    The lesser known fact about all these survival factoids is that Nazi Germany actually researched a lot of it, using Jewish victims to verify the results.

    • (Score: 2) by driverless on Friday August 02 2019, @02:46AM (3 children)

      by driverless (4770) on Friday August 02 2019, @02:46AM (#874437)

      The lesser known fact about all these survival factoids is that Nazi Germany actually researched a lot of it, using Jewish victims to verify the results.

      Yeah, that's always been an interesting bit of hypocrisy, let's prosecute the researchers as war criminals, and we'll be keeping all that useful research, thanks. Even worse was Unit 731, where the guys who carried out the human experiments were not only not prosecuted but allowed to keep working because the results of their (utterly unethical) bioweapons research was in demand in the US.

      • (Score: 3, Informative) by Acabatag on Friday August 02 2019, @03:39AM

        by Acabatag (2885) on Friday August 02 2019, @03:39AM (#874469)

        I was going to bring up Unit 731, which was Japanese. But what they did was in some ways far worse than the Nazis. They used US Prisoners of War, not just Chinese civilians, for their experiments. Which included a lot of vivisection. But they also did things like air-drop biological warfare vectors on regular Chinese villages.

        We wanted the tech they had developed, and the alternative was the scientists going to the Russians, so those bastard scientists got amnesty. The head of Unit 731 in fact became a prestigious professor at a US institution.

      • (Score: 3, Informative) by Runaway1956 on Friday August 02 2019, @02:21PM (1 child)

        by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Friday August 02 2019, @02:21PM (#874627) Journal

        So, uhhhhhhmmmm, what would you have done? Bulldoze all that research into the mass graves with the dead Jews? Wouldn't that have been spiteful of the Jews, themselves? Their lives were considered wothless, and thrown away, some of them in the name of research. Then the "liberators" come along, and trash the data gained from the research. That would seem to be less respectful of the dead, than those who murdered the Jews to get the data.

        Tough call, isn't it? There's no way to "make things right", but I think preserving the data is more right than destroying the data.

        • (Score: 3, Interesting) by driverless on Saturday August 03 2019, @02:55AM

          by driverless (4770) on Saturday August 03 2019, @02:55AM (#874948)

          A lot of the experiments were carried out on Russian prisoners, particularly the ones the Allies wanted the data from, e.g. exposure to freezing conditions. Others were on German citizens, e.g. a number of experimental programs used Dachau as their source of subjects. I guess in 1945 the Allies were less concerned about data gathered from Russians and Germans...

  • (Score: 1) by khallow on Friday August 02 2019, @06:15AM

    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Friday August 02 2019, @06:15AM (#874497) Journal
    The general argument is dumb. Earth for the most part is less lethal than Mars (though there's bits of Earth that will kill you faster than generic areas on Mars can), but almost everywhere is lethal to the "improperly dressed". The solution, of course, is to properly dress when exposed to Mars's (and Earth's) raw environment and live in shirt-sleeve environments in habitats otherwise. It's already a solved problem.

    Mars just happens to be harder, that is all. Last I checked, impossible didn't merely mean hard.
  • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday August 02 2019, @11:58AM (2 children)

    by JoeMerchant (3937) on Friday August 02 2019, @11:58AM (#874570)

    Hypothemia has more to do with the thermal conductivity of the fluid you are in than even the clothing you are wearing. Churning cold ocean water will take you out hundreds of times faster than dry still cold high mountain air at the same temperature.

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    • (Score: 2) by Osamabobama on Friday August 02 2019, @07:38PM (1 child)

      by Osamabobama (5842) on Friday August 02 2019, @07:38PM (#874803)

      Do you suppose they adjusted their hypothermia charts for the reduced convection of the Martian atmosphere? I'm guessing no...

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      • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday August 02 2019, @07:44PM

        by JoeMerchant (3937) on Friday August 02 2019, @07:44PM (#874807)

        At Martian atmospheric pressure, I think you also get cooling from the liquid in the surface of your skin boiling away...

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