• Question: Will Mars in your opinion be a sutible place for humans to live?

    Asked by to Aimee, Chris, Dave, Greig, Laurence on 19 Jun 2014. This question was also asked by .
    • Photo: Greig Cowan

      Greig Cowan answered on 19 Jun 2014:

      Hi! In it’s current form, Mars is not a suitable place to live. We will need to build up a lot of buildings and infrastructure before people can live there. We still need to answer questions like how can we grow and harvest food reliably on Mars and where can we get fresh water from? These are tough problems, but I think they will be solved at some point, making the chance of living on Mars even higher.

      Maybe at some point we will be able to change the environment on Mars to make it more like Earth (terraforming). This could perhaps allow us to breath the air on Mars (it’s currently just carbon dioxide) and maybe grow plants on the land. However, this is a really difficult issue and will be a long way off, so it is better to invest time researching ways of establishing a small colony on Mars and then trying to grow that up into something larger.

    • Photo: Aimee Hopper

      Aimee Hopper answered on 19 Jun 2014:

      not as soon as we get there, but if we were able to get resources over to the planet. There is a mission (Mars1) which aims to start colonising mars in the next couple of decades, so maybe we’ll see Mars actually become habitable 🙂

    • Photo: Dave Jones

      Dave Jones answered on 20 Jun 2014:

      Right now, now. But, it does have a few of the important things that we need to look for in another planet. We have a few basic needs in a planet which are:

      -It needs to be about the same size as the Earth. Mars fits the bill here, and that is important because a planet that was too big would have too strong a gravity, squishing us, while a small planet wouldn’t have enough gravity and we might float off into space (or our bones and muscles might degenerate).

      -It needs to have water, because we need to drink! Mars might have water, but we aren’t completely sure. It definitely used to, but now any water it does have must be well below the surface.

      -It needs to be about the right distance from the Sun (or if it is a planet around another star, it needs to be about the right distance from that star). Too close and we’d burn. Too far away and all the water would be frozen, which wouldn’t be any use to us. Again, mars is about right here.

      -It needs to have an atmosphere that is similar to that of the Earth, with enough oxygen for us to breathe and nothing toxic. That’s where mars fails. Mars has a very, very thin atmosphere that is mostly made of carbon dioxide, so we definitely wouldn’t be able to breathe there.

      So, in order for us to live there, we’d need to fix that last part. That would mean either building a big bubble around wherever we live to keep our own private atmosphere, or a much bigger job which would be trying to fix the planet as a whole. Perhaps it would be easier to find a habitable planet around another star and make the long journey there than it would be to try and solve the problems of living on mars? Who knows?

    • Photo: Laurence Perreault Levasseur

      Laurence Perreault Levasseur answered on 20 Jun 2014:

      Aimee, I wanted to answer the same thing, but you beat me to it! In any case, here is the website of the Mars One missions:
      http://www.mars-one.com
      They have all the details about how they will deal with the problems Dave mentions 🙂

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