Three big, basic facts about Mars will render it forever out of reach for permanent human settlement. Read more about them on Substack.
- Gravity is too low for humans to live without complications
- Atmospheric pressure is too low to go outside without a pressurized suit.
- No magnetosphere means dangerous radiation abounds.
I feel like all of these can be engineered around, but I guess time will tell.
That would mean:
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Rotating habitats, up to entire cities rotating, to generating additional gravity
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Pressurized buildings, so you´ll be living inside your entire life.
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Living underground.
But if you like living in an underground city, you can build one on Earth too. It would be a good proof of concept before doing the same on another planet.
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The article has the same energy as that one article about man never flying published in the 1900s.
Forever is a very long time. It’s unlikely to happen in our lifetimes though.
Would it be possible to slowly reduce the pressure around our body such that we can decompress into the Martian pressure level?
There are things you can’t just “engineer around” in any meaningful sense. Unless we make a major fundamental discovery, the issues the article brings up are unsolvable.
I always wondered how anyone could just dismiss the fact that Mars would simply loose any artificially created atmosphere like it has before. What “invention” or “technology” could prevent that?
The planet is inhospitable for reasons that humans won’t be able to change, at least not in the next millennium.
I always wondered how anyone could just dismiss the fact that Mars would simply loose any artificially created atmosphere like it has before. What “invention” or “technology” could prevent that?
Pressurized habitation structures is what I’m imagining. That would hopefully help with the radiation too. More or less the ISS but on mars rather than in orbit. I’m no engineer though so maybe I’m trivializing something that’s crazy difficult or overlooking an issue beyond “it’s hard”.
You’re agreeing with the article, the author says a small outpost is feasible but nothing comparable to a “colony” in the American frontier kind of sense : it will always be utterly dependent on earth, barely tolerable to live in, and all at a constant upkeep it won’t pay back. Like scientific bases in Antarctica but much worse.
The article is making up an argument with itself about the definition of “colony.”
Interesting that they did not mention nitrogen - I thought the extremely low abundance of which would make permanent habitation very challenging without perfect recycling and/or imports to maintain closecd off biospheres.
“Elon Musk announced plans to construct his first gigabay in Texas, a structure designed to house up to one thousand of his rockets per year and to serve in colonizing Mars.”
Why not just use the Line City Neom instead? It’s already built, so it can certainly safely house one thousand rockets.
/s
the only benifit of Mars is to make fuel there from the air and use that fuel to go to other places
Big brain idea: if dust storms on the surface are a danger, what if we just get rid of all the rest of the air? The moon doesn’t have dust storms and has no atmosphere.
