Can the humans live on the surface of planet Mars? There's a project trying to bring a human colony to live on Mars, with no returning to Earth. Many people subscribe to that project and some will be chosen to travel to the red planet to live there in 2025. This ambicious project is not funded by any government. A reality television show will document the travel. What do you think about this project? Would you like to be a pioneer in this fantastic travel?

For more information:
http://www.mars-one.com/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_One

I think it's incredible, and kind of inevitable. I hope they succeed, but there's going to be so many calculations going into it that it's really impossible to say if they will or not: they've got to figure out how to assemble an environment that can keep people alive for their natural life spans, how to pack it into a shuttle, how to get it assembled on the surface, how to keep the astronauts alive while they set up the environment, etc etc... so many things could go wrong.

One thing I am sure of is that I wouldn't sign up for love nor money.

Straight out of a science fiction novel...sounds incredible. I would never do it myself, unless maybe earth was about to explode.

My feeling is that this project is likely not to succeed. Not in a catastrophic way but that it just won't get off the ground. I think it's role might ultimately be to bring the idea forward into general discussion thus, perhaps, contributing to the viability of a later project. The reasons being that I think the expense and logistics are insurmountable and it will simply not come together - incompatible with the way the thing is being organised. I'd be more than happy to be wrong though and also, personally speaking, I'd go like a shot if asked. Hell yes. Given my medical history though, it's very very unlikely I'd ever be asked.

http://www.theguardian.com/science/...e-on-red-planet

According to the Mars One site, they're planning to extract nitrogen (which makes up about 80% of Earth's air) from Mars' atmosphere, which means that not that much of the air will be oxygen, hence not that flammable. I get that they're trying for comedy, but they could at least be accurate.

I agree - I can't imagine where they would get enough money to see this through to completion.

The comedy is in taking this badly-disguised cash-grab as serious in any way.

But if people are determined to be parted from their money, far be it for me to stop them ...

It's neither accurate nor funny as far as I can tell. The only thing that matters is the partial pressure of oxygen. In other words, if you have a certain amount of oxygen in a container of a certain size, its ability to support combustion (or to support human life) isn't affected by nitrogen or helium or argon, etc., that you might add. Any scuba diver knows this stuff. It's not rocket science.

Mars One? Yeah, not gonna happen. That one really just seems to be a headline-grabber- funding, logistics, hardware, and a long-term plan all seem pretty lacking. That being said, I'll be very surprised (and consider it a huge failing of humanity's) if there aren't people living on Mars by the time I die. What I most expect at this point is to see SpaceX get there first (or MAYBE Virgin Galactic... What makes me think SpaceX has a better shot is the fact that they're already getting practiced with LEO-missions like resupplying the ISS, launching commercial satellites, and even just using their capital (since they have enough) to develop technologies like reusable launch vehicles with heavy-lift capabilities that would be necessary for a successful Mars mission.
I'm also happy that more and more talk is given to the first Mars mission being a colonial mission, instead of an out-and-back trip like the moon landings were. For the huge investment of both time and capital that any Mars trip would take, it's worlds (pun intended) more economical to just send more stuff there, so that a self-sufficient colony can be made, rather than wast the huge amounts of fuel (if it's all sent along with the crew) or time on-site (if they produce the fuel on Mars itself) that would be required for anything like a quick turnaround. The people who first step foot on Mars should do so with the understanding that it's possible (even likely) that they WON'T step foot on Earth again (possibly ever). It might seem like that would really cut down on the pool of prospective Martians, but think about the European expansion into the New World in the 1500s- there was no shortage of people willing to leave home and hearth behind forever, embark on a life-threatening journey, and live in very difficult conditions, all for the chance of adventure and success in an unexplored (by Europeans, anyway) frontier, and there is absolutely no reason that I can see for this not to hold true for sending colonists to Mars too.
Hell, if it's an option once I'm too old to work at Grand Canyon, and can't live right by that canyon anymore, I wouldn't mind spending my OWN retirement living on the edge of the Valles Marineris! Getting to know an all new, bigger canyon sounds like fun!

I think it is realistic to colonize Mars sometime in the future. Technology moves forward, and with the population growth in recent years we'll soon need someplace else. But by 2025? And through a reality show thingy? I'm doubtful. Perhaps it will happen during my lifetime, but not in just ten years. They haven't even sent people to the moon to live there, and that's a far more realistic project - mainly because it's closer, and people can actually go home to Earth when they've had enough. Sure, you'd need to build some kind of shelter thingy for them to live in, so they don't get radiated to death by the sun, but still more realistc. Besides, who are crazy enough to go a one-way trip to Mars if they don't end up on a reality program?

The only thing that's easier about the moon is the fuel cost to get there, and the round-trip time for data signals (~3 seconds for the moon, ~40 minutes for Mars). Even Buzz Aldrin, 2nd man to walk on the lunar surface, and someone you'd expect to be all for a permanent human presence on our own moon, has said many times "Forget the Moon! Let's head to Mars!" and even makes a case for a permanent mission by saying (one of my favorite quotes) "[Mars]warrants more than a brief sojourn, so those who are on board should think of themselves as pioneers. Like the Pilgrims who came to the New World or the families who headed to the Wild West, they should not plan on coming back home."

The moon has NO atmosphere whatsoever, whereas Mars's may be thin and poisonous to humans, but it's there, making pressurization a bit easier, and with just some slight genetic modification (or none at all, depending on how research on some Earth-based extremophiles goes), could be perfect for a variety of algae, lichen, and hardy plants, to start converting some of that deadly CO2 into nice, breathable Oxygen. See Terraforming of Mars

The mineral composition of Mars has orders of magnitude more potential for being able to create different resources in situ, whereas the moon is pretty uninteresting from a manufacturing standpoint- you'd have to ship way too many of the raw materials up with the astronauts, which becomes exponentially more expensive the more you have to ship.

Aside from a few craters near the poles, there's little to no evidence of water on the moon, which means that it's yet another life-sustaining resource that would have to be sent up with the colonists, again dramatically increasing the payload weight, and by extension, the fuel needed to get there. In contrast, virtually the entire surface of Mars contains frozen water reserves that are pretty easy (when you consider that you're getting extraterrestrial drinking water here) to extract, and there are likely to be vast frozen aquifers, much like the liquid aquifers found here on Earth, which would be again, reasonably straightforward to tap into. Good info with the Wikipedia page for the Colonization of Mars

Gravity is another big one. While both Mars and the Moon have much less gravity than the Earth does (meaning that adjusting to a new gravity will be an issue either place), the moon's gravity is barely 16% that of Earths, while Mars has a much closer value of almost 40%.

Even smaller things like the different horizons colonists would have to mentally adjust to dealing with have Mars as the clear winner- Mars has a sky that changes from day to night- the moon would have a constant stark black starfield. Mars has a wider horizon, meaning that you can see further there than on the moon (though still less than you can on Earth- it's a smaller planet!). Even the fact that the Martian landscape has been shaped by water at some point in the past means that colonists on the Red Planet would be faced with river valleys, mountain ranges, and floodplains (at least in the northern hemisphere), while the moon is more or less constant, with craters overlapping craters as far as the eye can see.

The idea of people going home actually makes the trip far more difficult, since an Earth-return vehicle is almost invariably the most complex part of any proposal. Another quote from Buzz Aldrin here- "Did the Pilgrims on the Mayflower sit around Plymouth Rock waiting for a return trip? They came here to settle. And that’s what we should be doing on Mars. When you go to Mars, you need to have made the decision that you’re there permanently. The more people we have there, the more it can become a sustaining environment. Except for very rare exceptions, the people who go to Mars shouldn’t be coming back. Once you get on the surface, you’re there." What with the hundreds of thousands of people (maybe millions, I haven't seen exact figures) who are already willing to sign up for a one-way trip, the complexity of trying to make a round-trip visit feasible just doesn't make it worth the effort. Besides, if the idea is to establish humanity as a two-planet species (and it damn well should be! ), having people there with the idea that they're making a permanent home for themselves would be much more likely to result in a successful mission, and a successful settlement. (Also, for people who have been scared of extraterrestrial diseases by films like the Andromeda Strain, a no-return-trip mission, at least for the first few decades, helps prevent any possibility of backwards contamination- i.e., bringing some theoretical Martian pathogen back to Earth) More and more often, the idea of the first mission being some variation on the Mars To Stay makes by far the most sense (and in case you're somehow not getting it after I've made such a long-winded presentation on it, is the one I most want to see! )



Me.

What I meant was that perhaps they should use the moon as a practice run before heading to Mars. If I remember correctly, no one has even been on the moon since the 1970s, and despite lots of differences between the moon and Mars, it's the closest they get to an actual practice base in space. Sure, there's no water there, but it's a bit easier to head home if they've forgotten something (so to speak). If the Mars plans don't work, we're essentially sending a bunch of people off to there to die (whether it's quick or slow). I know they can practice on Earth, and also do so, but it's not quite the same. Anyway, while I find space travel interesting, it's not one of my expert areas.

As for Mars pathogens, I keep thinking of a certain episode of DW. Sure, it's sci-fi/fantasy, and the rovers and probes and whatnots we've sent up there haven't found much in the way of living creatures, but still...

There are always people (crazy enough? I don't know) who want to do stuff like this. If you don't mind going through lots and lots of spacetravel training, then living in a very tight space with the same bunch of people in a tiny living space on a rocket for 6-8 months, for then to realize that these people might be the only people you'll ever see again for the rest of your life, never even see your family or friends (if you have any) again, on an empty planet that makes the craziest, most hellish environments from back on Earth seem like a Sunday stroll, and be without nearly all the creature comforts you now have around you, living on canned and dried food for at least a year or two until you manage to perhaps grow some veggies (maybe never again fresh meat?)... Sure, go ahead and sign up. As for me, I'm not going to do so, as I prefer Earth.

Don't get me wrong, I'd love to see colonies on the moon too, but in every way that counts, the moon is much harder to live on than Mars is. What's more, there are a LOT more similarities between Earth and Mars than between the moon and Mars. Depending on what needs to be tested, the dry valleys of Antarctica and the high Arctic or the dry hot deserts like the Atacama in northern Chile are remarkably similar to conditions found on Mars (so much so that NASA uses the Atacama for testing many of the instruments used on Mars rovers and probes), and for atmospheric testing, a sealed laboratory that allows for controlled conditions like those on Mars is a lot more useful (and practical) than the moon is. You're certainly right- practicing on Earth is not the same as practicing on the moon- it's better!

Extraterrestrial disease vectors are only a concern in science fiction. Think about how few other animals besides humans are capable of carrying diseases that can infect us- and then consider that those are species that have only had a few tens of millions of years separation on the evolutionary tree, since stemming from a common ancestor of some sort. When it's that hard to transmit a pathogen between two branches of the SAME tree, imagine the degree of impossibility you'd be faced with if you wanted to move something (whose very existence is very much in doubt) into another tree altogether (and even if you are convinced that life on Earth or Mars could have been seeded by an asteroid or cometary impact [which is plausible], you're then looking at nearly 4 BILLION years of divergent evolution). You're more likely to get Dutch Elm Disease than you are to get infected by anything on Mars.

As to the issues of never seeing family or friends again, I'll again reference the European expansion into the Americas- it was fairly common for entire families to make that crossing together (I'm descended from dozens of families that did!), and there's no reason to think that this wouldn't/shouldn't/couldn't be the case with Mars too. You already have people who know how to work together in a confined space that way, and it gives you a preexisting sense of community that can function as an on-site social safety net, instead of a bunch of people who don't know each other until 18 months before liftoff.

As for questions of lifestyle (canned food and the like), one of the ideas I've seen proposed is to send over much of the living quarters and whatnot before the astronauts (by about 6 or 8 months) so that a.) there's time to make sure all the life support essentials (and creature comforts) are functioning properly before they're actually supporting human life, and b.) so that there's time for things like air processing, fuel production, and yes, greenhouses to grow fresh fruits and vegetables, and small animal farms even, potentially. This also means that if there's a problem with the vehicle carrying the colonists to Mars, they have a safe haven of sorts on Mars already, so if they're already most of the way there, they're not confronted with the daunting, Apollo-13-esque challenge of returning all the way to Earth in a dying spacecraft.

Mars is the practice run.



Yeah, it's probably best to just never leave the comforts of Europe. What's out there that can possibly be worth sitting in a carrack for two weeks and then having the shits in some podunk colony town without even decent ale to go with your cholera?



That's great. You might have noticed though, that your fellow humans are really busy shitting all over Earth? Cockroaches, rats, and people - that's all that's going to be left after a while. You've got a real nice couch, but at some point it might be worth getting off your ass since the house is burning down.

A bunch of people who wouldn't have been killed and/or sold into slavery if people stayed their side of the hemisphere? Considering the genocide Europe caused, it might have been a good idea to wait until, you know, they know how not to deliberately wipe out cultures just for existing.
Which doesn't apply to Mars, since as far as we know, the only life is microscopic at best, but still. Humans do not have a good track record with the places they explore. Though we're slightly more enlightened now, so I expect the chances of not killing anything alien just for existing is up to about 60%.



And you think that what happens here won't apply to anywhere else we go? Mistermook, I never thought you'd be so optimistic.
If humanity is causing problems, then humanity is the problem. Going to another planet just spreads it to another planet. You might as well stay here, since the only way to stop the problems we're causing is to improve so we don't screw things up. You don't need to leave the planet to do that, unless you're expecting to find the Grand Pope of Environmentalism on Europa and receive the Holy Pollution Grenade.


In other news, did you know that Venus might be inhabitable? Not on the surface, obviously, but up in the atmosphere, there's a nice layer where oxygen floats. It's about 80 Fahrenheit, too (24 C?). It would obviously take more tech than inhabiting Mars, since we'd need flying cities, but it would give us another option in the solar system.

When we discover any cultures to deliberately wipe out on Mars I might take this strawman under consideration further.



So your point is that we should turn our backs on the stars and consign ourselves to a slow, lingering death as we kill the biosphere and run out of finite resources, based on imagined Martian bacteria and the potential for aliens anywhere in the...galaxy? universe? It's a big place, how much room are you proposing we allow your invisible aliens else we offend them, while we slowly wither and kill ourselves?



The only way to fix personal issues is to give yourself enough time and room to fix your issues. Trying to fix things is always better than giving up, is always better than suggesting "things won't ever get better." You are always the problem. You are always the solution. The solution to humanity isn't less humanity, it's more humanity.

You mean, like how I said there weren't any and that I was replying to your assessment of humanity's destructive tendencies? I mean, you can surely realize that when you're talking about how humanity is destroying the planet, a comment about how we destroy anything else we explore is kind of warranted, no?



You know, I did say that we should try to become less likely to wipe out anything we come across in lieu of never going out and exploring. Hence why the Europeans should have stopped thinking that genocide was a good idea before heading out instead of staying in their little corners forever. Are you replying to a post I made in another reality, or did you just not read mine?
Also, do you really think I would have commented on the viability of Venus if I thought we should stick to our own planet?



Yes. Just like I said. We need to improve so we can figure out how not to screw things up. But going to another planet isn't magically going to change things. We might as well stay here and work on our general tendencies, since Mars or any other planet isn't going to be ready for the general public in any of our lifetimes.
Heck, forcing everyone off the planet - as you implied when you were sniping at simmer 22 - won't help. What drive will people have to fix the problems on Earth if you just move everyone away to where it's not an issue? That sounds far more like giving up to me.
And I believe your metaphor was "get out of the burning house". You don't just leave a house to burn while you move merrily on to a new one, you put out the fire first and see what you can salvage. And maybe get another house instead of staying in a hotel while that's happening, but things are less likely to feel important when they're out of sight (and the environment is far more important than a single house).

Sure, we should colonize other planets. But we're going to screw them up, too, if we don't get better as a species. We've made steps, but we still can't manage things as simple as "don't pollute the environment" or "don't support the terrorists". Since we won't be able to leave for years, in the interim, we should work on getting better.

And if some people choose to stay, that's hardly a death sentence. I mean, we're probably never going to be able to magically teleport every single person off of Earth at the same time (unless we consume stars for the energy) so there's going to be limited travel. Why force everyone to leave when the situation is still recoverable, and when it would cost far more resources to make everyone leave than to just fix the planet? Yelling at someone because they'd rather stay is just stupid.

"I totally screwed up baking these cookies. They clearly had nuts in them. How can I ever be trusted to make a sandwich?"

No, I think your way sucks.

So hugbug993, it looks like the crux of your argument is that we shouldn't travel to other planets because we're not good enough at a variety of things yet, yes? But don't you think there's some truth to the notion that striving for big goals like that does a lot to MAKE us better? I'm not denying the fact that there were mistakes made in the Space Race of the 1960s, since it was really born out of the Cold War as just another thing that two superpowers could fight over, but it gave rise to a huge number of the aerospace, communications, electronic, and technological marvels we have today, not to mention being a massive boost to the physical sciences in other regards. We didn't wait around to be perfect before we set out on ventures like this before, and we weren't perfect after they were done either (not by a long shot), but I'd challenge anyone who'd claim that we weren't better for the trying! And especially when you're looking at a "New World" that really is NEW (in the sense that there aren't already indigenous cultures who would be displaced), what's to say that the society we'd build there would fall prey to the same vices and issues that plague many societies we have today? Why couldn't Mars be a fresh start of sorts?

No, the crux of my argument is that Mistermook is being a hypocrite. He's telling us that we need to leave the planet because we've screwed it up, and he seems to think that we won't do the same on another planet.

Of course we need to have a goal. That's the point. We have a goal that's going to take decades to reach, and we know that there are going to be problems. Therefore, we need to improve so that we don't screw it up. We don't need to be perfect, we just need to not permanently ruin a planet. Which we know we'll do if we go over as is, because we've already done so.

And for the "fresh start", what's to say it wouldn't? We know what human nature is. We've seen it in action for 10,000 years. People didn't change when they immigrated to the Americas, or when they left Africa. We are not rational beings, we are rationalizing beings, and if we want to do something, we'll bend our minds into moebius strips to justify it. Changing planets will not change that, unless you're going to suggest something ridiculously complex, like "the planet is altering our collective unconscious".
Do you have a single example of a group of people going somewhere new and starting a utopia?

For that matter, we also need to heal the damage we've already done. And if Mistermook chases us all off the planet with his cane, shouting "FIRE", then that's less likely to happen. Out of sight, out of mind.

One thing about Mars being a fresh start is the fact that it doesn't have an atmosphere like Earth which is what humans are accustomed to - breathing air and all that. So I think that's a big problem - not only the breathing part, but also the protection from radiation that our atmosphere affords us. And have you seen pictures of that place? Grim.
Maybe the money would be better invested in the planet we already have.
Which is not saying that we shouldn't explore space - Mars could be a base for that, but I can't see it as a habitation for tons of human beings.

I'm still not convinced that the fact that we've screwed up this planet means that we shouldn't travel to and colonize other planets though. If you wait for anything large-scale (like, say, planetary-scale?) to be perfect before you do it, you'll never actually do it! Imperfection is found in virtually every aspect of human existence, and I can't imagine that ever not being the case. I don't think that means we can't still be moving forward though.

As far as improvement goes, the first analogy that comes to mind is that of an architect who tries to design a building site-unseen, versus one who's actually walked over the landscape they'll be building on. Which one has a better feel for the nuances of the site, a better idea of what subtle changes might be needed to ensure that the eventual building built there is a success? We absolutely do need to improve so that we don't screw it up, but that's not a reason not to start- I can't think of a single long-term project that wasn't changed and fixed and at times held together with nothing more than spit and baling wire before being completed, and again, it seems to me that expecting a plan to be set in flawlessly-chiseled stone before actually starting the project is a sure-fire way to make sure that the project is never actually started.

Do I have an example of people travelling somewhere and starting a utopian society? Of course not, and I very much doubt that history will ever provide us with such an example. That being said, history is FILLED with examples of people going somewhere new and setting up a new society that was BETTER in some way than the one they'd left behind, and oftentimes, the more challenging it was to make that new society function, the more successful and enduring its ideas turned out to be. This is really what I'm getting at when I say that Mars could allow for a clean slate to build a new form of society on- not that it would be perfect, but that it would (by its very nature) be different from anything we've tried thus far, and would almost certainly give us new, better ways of doing some things. Who's to say what those things are?

I'm a lefty-tree-hugging-environmentalist-granola-and-trail-mix type (virtually unavoidable if you grow up in a National Park! ), so I'm fully in agreement with you that we need to do a hell of a lot more to fix what damage we've done to Earth, and many of the things we've done over the years are, quite frankly, shameful. But again, I don't see this as an argument against colonizing other worlds. There's the development of new ideas, which I've already touched on, that could give us all sorts of new potential solutions to the problems confronting Earth today, but there's also a whole host of other (often longer-term) benefits too. For instance, many of the pollutants and greenhouse gases that are leading causes of negative global climate change here on Earth would be invaluable additions to the Martian atmosphere if we ever hope to be able to live there. Putting the manufacturing processes that we could move there on a planet where their byproducts are HELPful rather than HARMful is a win-win situation. As far as raw materials, the gravity well of Mars is much smaller than that of Earth (meaning it's much cheaper to launch a rocket from Mars than it is from the Earth), and it's closer to the resource-rich asteroid belt, so many of the minerals and precious metals whose mining here on Earth again causes so much of the environmental trouble we face could actually be mined in an environment where none of these impacts would ever be felt, but we'd still get the benefits of their use.

I'd never want to see going to Mars used as an excuse to give up on our home planet, and if I thought that it would be, I'd be first in line to argue against expansion to other worlds, but I don't see it going that way. Rather, I think that colonizing another world could actually give society the boost it needs to address many of these problems, in ways we might not even have thought of today!

EDIT: Since RoseCity sniped my response, I'll address her points here briefly too.

We're not going to find an atmosphere that's breathable for human beings anywhere in our solar system, so that's a problem that'll have to be dealt with one way or another anyways. With that being the case, Mars still is the obvious candidate- it's big enough to actually MAINTAIN an atmosphere, and much of its former atmosphere is still there (unlike Mercury or the moon), just frozen away in the Martian surface. Thawing the planet by even a couple degrees C would be enough to start releasing much of it, so that even if it wouldn't immediately be breathable, it wouldn't take long before you wouldn't need spacesuits to go outside anymore- just an oxygen mask.
Radiation protection gets resolved much the same way, plus since any early settlers would be spending all their time either inside habitats or encased in spacesuits anyways, protecting against radiation is a much smaller problem than just the raw data on the Martian surface would suggest. As far as making the habitats radiation-safe, it wouldn't even be expensive- just a couple feet of rock and dirt and dust heaped on top of the habitat would make it safe against all but the most powerful cosmic rays, and we're not safe from those here on Earth already anyways!
Finally, "Grim?" Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, I guess... I think the Martian surface is one of the most spectacular extraterrestrial landscapes I've ever seen, fact or fiction!

No, the crux of your argument is the strawman you've set up for me. We've screwed this planet up. If we're really lucky we'll screw up a lot more - because it's better to try and be a walking disaster across the cosmos than to be a dusty tombstone because you've stuck your thumb up your ass when the time comes to do something based on how shitty your fingers smell. We create our own problems, but we're also our own solutions.



No Hugbug, we don't even need to "not permanently ruin planets" if we've properly established a choice of them. You want us to be monogamous with our planet because the relationship's gone sour and we're terrible partners. I'm saying divorce Gaia. Leave her. Be the bad person, it's okay to not be a good planetary partner as long as you're playing the field. Sow your oats widely enough, and fuck the Earth, fuck Mars. We could the worst planetary stewards ever, and still get by... and that's okay. It's okay to be a shitty person if you've got enough time in front of you left to maybe one day not be a shitty person. But you're asking humanity to just stay in the abusive relationship. It's bad for both of us, even though right now we're terribly dependent. There's no point in pretending we're good for one another, no point in staying around other than the house is in both of our names. The sooner we hit the road, the better. Maybe, after we've been around the block a few times, expanded our horizons, learned a little more about ourselves, maybe we can be friends again in the future. But we don't need couples therapy just because it's the only relationship we've ever known.



Do you have a single example of people staying somewhere and starting a utopia? No? Is there something precluding this wonderful enlightenment you're seeking once you've gotten off planet? Are you suggesting leaving the planet somehow makes you a worse person than you'd be by staying inside the terran gravity well?

I guess it is a matter of opinion - the Martian landscape looks creepy to me, but I've spent most of my life in New England. I remember one year some boys from Kansas were working here for the summer. They couldn't wait to leave - they said there were "too many trees" I'm the opposite - I have agoraphobia and don't think I could stand the huge scale of the Martian landscape nor the dull coloration.