Humans are not adapted to live in space either. But because of a couple brave people, we now know a little about how to counteract zero gravity's degradation on the body (Bone and muscle loss -> stricter workout regiment). Bound to fail in the long term is quite the statement to make given our ability to build tools based on data that could increase our chance of survival.
Low gravity is one thing. But the radiation outside the Earth's magnetic field is quite another. People colonizing Mars will need to shield themselves from several types of harmful radiation. Wich means in practice: living underground.
Agreed. You could cover your above-ground pressurized habitat with blocks of ice. Or with a thick layer of dirt. But the subjective experience remains about the same as living underground.
There are a lot of people who live indoors almost 100% of the time in the winter in northern climates. A lot of the larger northern cities have underground walkways between buildings with subway access etc. No one wants to even walk across the street when it's 40 below. :)
I expect that designs for 'permanently underground/inside' cities would need to include some high-ceiling park-like areas with some bright UV lights, and other considerations, but that sort of thing seems pretty doable. Whether it would be enough to maintain a population's mental heath I guess would need to be seen, but generally speaking I think humans are a pretty adaptable bunch...
> I expect that designs for 'permanently underground/inside' cities would need to include some high-ceiling park-like areas with some bright UV lights, and other considerations, but that sort of thing seems pretty doable.
Definitely doable. But then there's no longer any special appeal to living on Mars, as opposed to: living in rotating space habitats among the asteroids.
If we reformulate Musk's goal as being: "Create off-site backups of human civilization", then I think asteroid mining & space habitats have a better shot at bootstrapping this process than colonizing Mars.
Once we are leveled up this way in resources and technology, building settlements on Mars can be a side-effect of this outcome. Just like the burgeoning scientific outposts on Antarctica are a side-effect of our current civilization.
I like the idea - why waste all that energy going up and down, and missing out on swimming in zero g? :)
But rotating space habitats might not be as good at replacing gravity as some think. Even with the really-huge 'O'Niell cylinder' scale (8 kilometers diameter), coriolis effects would be noticeable. I suspect a number of industrial processes would be affected by it.
I expect some of the major industrial processes will still need/want to be done on a big pile of rock or sand, rather than in a more fragile object that inherently wants to explode and fling apart all the time :).
The magnetic field is, by far, the easiest problem. There are many other unsolved problems, but that isn’t one of them.
Now I’m working if making a very large current loop on the ground would double up as a launch/landing system where the planet itself is the reaction mass…
(Probably not; the chances are the requirements for safety and reaction are orders of magnitude different from each other).
We're not biologically adapted for surviving in Siberia, but we manage it. Hell, you'll get hypothermia on the French Riviera in winter without clothes.
Technology has always been our way of expanding into spaces we're not otherwise evolved to cope with.
> Almost no one wants to live permanently in Antarctica.
I mean, that's at least in part because you can't on a legal level. There's no private property rights and any of the Antarctic Treaty participants has the right to enter and inspect any installation on the continent. It's a set of research stations, not a colony.
Siberia has other problems similar to Mars. Water is frozen, so you have to melt it (as on Mars). Growing seasons are short (similar to the sunlight issue, which we've solved on Earth with grow lights...).
Focusing on the "Mars has more things to solve" thing continues to ignore the point.
But you don't need to go to Siberia for Earth to be extremely difficult to survive in.
Wherever you are, if you lack technology your chance of surviving is very low. Without clothing, housing, fire, tools it's very, very hard to survive anywhere on Earth.
The only reason life is so safe and pleasant right now on this planet is because we changed our environment to make it so.
If we were to survive on Mars, we would have to do the same. The advantage with Mars is that we wouldn't have to start from scratch.
The alternative is we either go extinct on earth or find another earth-like planet to go to, which won't have humans on in and may not be able to support us any better than mars
Unfortunately, due to Mars' lower gravity and lack of a magnetically active core, not only can it not hold a substantial atmosphere to begin with, any such atmosphere would inevitably be blown away by solar winds.
So there's that. Maybe we can put a big dome around the whole thing like Planet Druidia.
The timeline for that process is millennia, so if we come up with a continual process for replenishment that works on shorter timeframes, it's maintainable.
> MAVEN measurements indicate that the solar wind strips away gas at a rate of about 100 grams (equivalent to roughly 1/4 pound) every second. "Like the theft of a few coins from a cash register every day, the loss becomes significant over time," said Bruce Jakosky, MAVEN principal investigator at the University of Colorado, Boulder. "We've seen that the atmospheric erosion increases significantly during solar storms, so we think the loss rate was much higher billions of years ago when the sun was young and more active.”
The entire solar system is an inherently unstable construct. Luckily for us the instability is on a scale of billions of years. Terraforming mars would be similar. It would be a herculean effort that would take several lifetimes to complete, but the result could be stable on the scale of millions of years without further input. With a bit of maintenance it could well be stable for the life of the solar system.
Genuinely curious, is it possible to make atmosphere in Mars just like in Earth? Isn't this because of Earth's unique gravity that we have an atmosphere? I'm not a physicist so please excuse my ignorance.
