Estimations for when humanity can colonize Mars vary from 2050, according to Elon Musk, to 2117, according to the United Arab Emirates. Space travel is notoriously dangerous, and any entity seeking to expand it should ensure astronaut safety over enterprise and innovation.
One of the main challenges of colonizing Mars is figuring out how to send humans to the planet in the first place.
Mark Fischer, a professor in the Department of Earth, Atmosphere and Environment, outlined some difficulties.
“Getting to Mars takes a long time, and we don’t really have experiments on humans in space that go for that long. And any human that spent a significant amount of time in space, they’re close enough to the Earth so that we can resupply like, for example, the International Space Station, right? We can send up supplies to the ISS, and it’s not at risk of running out of water or running out of food or whatever,” Fischer said. “But if you send someone to Mars, you’re not going to be able to resupply them very effectively, so they have to have everything they need to survive on the way there and the way back has to be all within that ship. And that’s a lot of material.”
Fischer also pointed out that the astronaut’s mental health is a concern.
“It’s going to be a small crew, and that means they’re going to be very isolated and potentially lonely, and that can lead to a lot of mental health challenges that we don’t really have ways of counteracting right now. I’m not sure that we even understand real well, you know, how people would respond to that,” Fischer said. “We’ve done tests where people get isolated on Earth for a long time, but those would be, those are much shorter than what you were asking when going to Mars.”
The surface of Mars is not much more welcoming than the confines of a spaceship millions of miles away from Earth. There is little oxygen on Mars and the temperature is generally much lower than on Earth, according to NASA, which would force any human on the surface to always wear a protective suit.
The atmosphere is also too thin to prevent meteorite impacts, unlike Earth, so this would be a constant hazard for colonists.
There is also no infrastructure on Mars. This means that when astronauts arrive on Mars, there will be no way to grow food, find accessible and drinkable water, extract resources or construct shelter.
Additionally, Mars experiences tornadoes and dust storms. While Earth has a good system of warning for these types of meteorological occurrences, a system this sophisticated would not be on Mars.
“Those same approaches (warning systems) would work on Mars, but remember that a lot those warnings are built upon, nowadays, they’re built upon people studying Doppler radar in real time and noticing things on that Doppler radar that suggest there’s a tornado.We also have storm chasers and spotters on the ground that see the tornadoes and tell us where they are, and so the alerts get triggered by those things,” Fischer said. “So, there’s no Doppler radar on Mars. So we would, that is not something that, you know, we could implement that in any kind of reasonable way in a short time frame.”
Building this infrastructure will also require materials and tools to be sent from Earth because there are no established mines or factories on Mars, and those facilities will also need to be built using Earth’s resources.
With all these factors in mind, a Martian colonist’s life will be hard, and the chances of a catastrophic failure are high. Whoever leads such an expedition, whenever that happens, must be certain every health risk has been accounted for.
People will almost certainly die while colonizing Mars, but our leaders should still do what they can to keep colonists as safe as possible.
There is no future for the dead, after all.
