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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.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 01 2019, @10:30PM (12 children)
Step 1 - send corpses to Mars, to start the circle of life. Get that fungi and micronutrients going.
Step 2 - send 3D "printer" and stacking robots to create AREOFOAM building panels, lets light and heat in, and instalate the interior space.
Step 3 - wait 50 to 60 years, while sneding more corpses and #D "printers" to keep increasing area under the "dome". Allows for the heat to also build up inside so the "quantum-computer" temperatures will not kill the humans and their pets and food and ....
Step 4 - send first colonist.
So 200yrs, we should be there, with a 30 to 40k population.
First, though is the dead. We need to roit so the food cycle can be started. Though shipping shit would be better, but has a higher water, so more costly to ship.
(Score: 2) by MostCynical on Thursday August 01 2019, @11:17PM
But.. I'm not dead [youtube.com]
"I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Thursday August 01 2019, @11:21PM (3 children)
Mars cannot be terraformed without building a dome over the entire planet. This doesn't mean that colonies are impossible, it means that it won't be a "wild west" kind of place. Living there will need to be tightly controlled, because a human engineered "eco-system" is a lot less robust than a natural one. So there will also need to be ways to release the stress.
It's doable, and possible (almost) now. Whether it's worth doing now is another question. A "colony" that keeps collapsing and killing everyone who lives there wouldn't be worth much, and the problems are as much political and social as technical...or perhaps more.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 02 2019, @02:55AM (2 children)
OMG no teh government rules! Mars needs to be a libraterrian youtopia.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 02 2019, @02:58AM
You need to be sent to a Martian reeducation camp.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Friday August 02 2019, @08:15AM
No worries, mate. It will be multi-planetary corporations, I hope you'll like it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by mhajicek on Friday August 02 2019, @02:16AM
Better to upload yourself into a quantum computer and enjoy the native environment.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday August 02 2019, @05:44AM (2 children)
For slightly more weight, we could send living people to Mars and have someone actively improving the location with onsite resources rather than feeding a bunch of inert matter from Earth. No need to wait 50-60 years either.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 02 2019, @05:59AM
How about some construction robots and a solar oven to bake some glass for the biodome?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 02 2019, @08:47PM
Actually, they'll be corpses by the time they get there (or not long after).
(Score: 2) by Mer on Friday August 02 2019, @10:10AM (2 children)
I think the chokepoint here is the reason there's no atmosphere to begin with. We could make our own atmosphere by pumping the air full of tetrafluoromethane but I'm not sure if it'd stay in the air (I read something about solar winds blowing the atmosphere away due to a weaker planetary magnetic field).
If it did work though, it'd take a long time but we'd eventually reach high enough pressure and temperature to introduce some earth algae to the melting ice caps.
Shut up!, he explained.
(Score: 3, Informative) by toddestan on Saturday August 03 2019, @05:46AM (1 child)
It would work good enough for us. The solar wind will slowly strip it away, but it's a really slow process, which is why Mars still has an atmosphere (though thin) even after a few billion years. Apparently if you could snap your fingers and magically give Mars an Earth-like atmosphere but did nothing to try to keep it, you'd have at least a million years before the Sun stripped enough of it away for it to start being a problem. And in human terms, a million years is a very long time.
(Score: 2) by Mer on Saturday August 03 2019, @12:28PM
If that's the case, colonists still need to put out more TFM than is getting stripped away. That makes the time frame until you can enter terraformation phase 2 very long, but not impossible I guess.
Shut up!, he explained.