Amidst rising world nuclear tensions, SpaceX and Tesla founder Elon Musk is asking for forceful action.
He wants humans to colonize Mars—stat.
An MIT team designed the Redwood Forest, a series of forest habitats within open, public domes.
“It’s vital to urge a self-sufficient base on Mars as a result of it’s so much enough removed from Earth that [in the event of a war] it’s additional possible to survive than a
moon base,”Elon Musk aforementioned at the annual South by Southwest (SXSW) conference in Austin, Texas last Sunday.
But what’s required to successfully colonize Mars?
It may sound crazy, but “the colonization of the Americas would be a reasonable analogy,” said Jim Pawelczyk, an associate professor of physiology and kinesiology at Penn State and former astronaut who flew aboard the NASA STS-90 Space Shuttle mission. “Think of Jamestown. It was not a good place to be—it was kind of failure. But these would be plant-the-flag kinds of approaches.” Small outposts on Mars, he said, are a more realistic goal; full-scale settlements are at least another century away.
Though Jamestown was a messy failure, it was still founded in Virginia, a relatively benign environment compared to Mars. Antarctica offers another, perhaps closer, analogy. When humans first wandered the frozen terrain in the late 19th century—during what’s charmingly known as the Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration—they built modest research stations. Ever since, scientists and other brave adventurers have set up camp at those sites, but no one’s established a permanent colony. There’s no reason to, and the technology necessary to do is not yet on the horizon. The same goes for Mars—outposts, Pawelczyk said, could get the balling rolling.
“Turning associate outpost into a colony depends entirely on human biology…and this can be a locality we’ve barely begun to explore from a search perspective,” he said.
“So perhaps [outposts are] not getting to sustain the species genetically, but they’re going to sustain the human spirit.”
Of course, we’d have to get to Mars in the first place . To do so, first we need to consider the basic problem of radiation in the form of cosmic rays and solar activity. Such high-velocity particles ravage human cells , and the most violent among them can pass through the hull of a spacecraft.
We don’t apprehend nonetheless what reasonably impact such levels of radiation might wear the body—the eyes, the brain, and so on—after a few months or years.
“We’re extremely in our infancy once it involves understanding this stuff,” Pawelczyk aforementioned.
NASA has been researching the effects of the space environment on humans aboard the International Space Station (ISS), but the ISS is scheduled to be decomissioned between 2024 and 2028. George Lordos, a PhD candidate in aeronautics and astronautics at MIT, was part of a research team that won first place in the graduate division of a NASA design competition for their project , MARINA, the Managed, Reconfigurable, In-space Nodal Assembly. It’s basically a space station on steroids—a commercial entity (replete with luxury hotel rooms) that would allow different space-based companies to exchange products and services. It could also help turbo-charge a mission to Mars.
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