Colonising Mars

The concept of colonising Mars and becoming an interplanetary civilisation is one that has been talked about for decades, yet has only rather recently seen some action. This idea sounds quite achievable, for Mars has a great deal of similarities to Earth – the gravity is 0.38% of Earth’s, a Martian day is very close in duration to Earth’s (24 hours, 39 minutes and 35.244 seconds), it has a surface area 28.4% of Earth’s, which is slightly less than the amount of dry land on Earth; a similar axial tilt of 25.19° and, as a result, has seasons comparable to Earth (although they last nearly twice as long, as a Mars year is about 1.88 Earth years); and recent observations have confirmed the existence of water ice on the planet.

However, that’s where the similarities end and the problems begin. Mars is believed to once have had an atmosphere and climate similar to Earth, but, as Mars’ core cooled down and solidified, it purged Mars of its magnetic field, allowing most of its atmosphere top be blown away by solar winds. What’s left of Mars’ atmosphere now is only about 1% of the atmosphere of Earth, now composed mostly of carbon dioxide.

This draws us to our next problem, radiation. On Earth, radiation isn’t one of our primary worries (although it may  be soon, because of the depletion of the ozone layer), but it is on Mars. To retaliate this problem, the bases that humans live in would have to have rounded shapes, as edges and corners are weak points; they would have to encased in ice and on top of that, be covered with a layer of Martian soil to block radiation from getting in. These bases would be small, cramped on the inside and have minimal windows. The team of technicians who begin the colonization would live boring, repetitive lives in these bases and would have to remotely control rovers and other machines from the inside. The food they eat would be bland, although this could probably be improved. All this would lead to morale being awfully low.

The machines we send on Mars would also encounter problems as Martian dust particles, being much smaller than Earth’s, would get into the machinery and congest our gears and electronics.

Another one of the extensive issues with colonising Mars is power and oxygen. Solar energy will only be about 30% as effective as it is on Earth and wind energy would be terrible due to the incredibly thin atmosphere. Creating an oxygen rich atmosphere would be an extreme task, as we can’t simply bring any plant to Mars. However, we can use cyanobacteria, organisms which can respire anaerobically and add oxygen to the atmosphere. The reason we know this will work is because of the sudden increase of oxygen in our planets atmosphere, the aptly named ‘Oxygen Catastrophe’. This occured 2.5  billion years ago and was Earth’s first mass extinction event. Oxygen is a very reactive element, which isn’t usually a problem, but is when you’re an organism made of a few molecules. Oxygen takes away some of their atoms and/or molecules, killing them.

Colonising Mars is a project of an astronomical scale, and would take decades to finish. In this blog, I’ve just grazed the surface of what it would be like to colonise Mars. Possibly, I might even write a follow-up to this blog and discuss more about this topic. (If anyone is interested, there was a game quite recently released about colonising mars called ‘Surviving Mars’. It was released for Xbox One, PlayStation 4 and PC.)

Thank you for reading! Do consider following for more science content

Just like always, I’ll be attaching a video by Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell on the same: