Humans are not biologically adapted to surviving on Mars, and for that reason, any settlement to Mars is bound to fail in the long term.
https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/sunearth/spaceweather/ind...
I expect that designs for 'permanently underground/inside' cities would need to include some high-ceiling park-like areas with some bright UV lights, and other considerations, but that sort of thing seems pretty doable. Whether it would be enough to maintain a population's mental heath I guess would need to be seen, but generally speaking I think humans are a pretty adaptable bunch...
Definitely doable. But then there's no longer any special appeal to living on Mars, as opposed to: living in rotating space habitats among the asteroids.
If we reformulate Musk's goal as being: "Create off-site backups of human civilization", then I think asteroid mining & space habitats have a better shot at bootstrapping this process than colonizing Mars.
Once we are leveled up this way in resources and technology, building settlements on Mars can be a side-effect of this outcome. Just like the burgeoning scientific outposts on Antarctica are a side-effect of our current civilization.
But rotating space habitats might not be as good at replacing gravity as some think. Even with the really-huge 'O'Niell cylinder' scale (8 kilometers diameter), coriolis effects would be noticeable. I suspect a number of industrial processes would be affected by it.
I expect some of the major industrial processes will still need/want to be done on a big pile of rock or sand, rather than in a more fragile object that inherently wants to explode and fling apart all the time :).
Now I’m working if making a very large current loop on the ground would double up as a launch/landing system where the planet itself is the reaction mass…
(Probably not; the chances are the requirements for safety and reaction are orders of magnitude different from each other).
Technology has always been our way of expanding into spaces we're not otherwise evolved to cope with.
Mars requires more technology, but that's a matter of magnitude, not impossibility.
But you don't need to go to Siberia for Earth to be extremely difficult to survive in. Wherever you are, if you lack technology your chance of surviving is very low. Without clothing, housing, fire, tools it's very, very hard to survive anywhere on Earth.
The only reason life is so safe and pleasant right now on this planet is because we changed our environment to make it so.
If we were to survive on Mars, we would have to do the same. The advantage with Mars is that we wouldn't have to start from scratch.
Antarctica is cold year around, lacks food, lacks sun light for half a year. Almost no one wants to live permanently in Antarctica.
Mars has all of the Antarctica problems, almost zero sun light, lack of air, lack of water, radiation, toxic soil, low gravity, extreme remoteness.
It may be theoretically possible for a colony on Mars to survive, but it remains to be seen if enough people would do it in practice.
I mean, that's at least in part because you can't on a legal level. There's no private property rights and any of the Antarctic Treaty participants has the right to enter and inspect any installation on the continent. It's a set of research stations, not a colony.
Siberia has other problems similar to Mars. Water is frozen, so you have to melt it (as on Mars). Growing seasons are short (similar to the sunlight issue, which we've solved on Earth with grow lights...).
Focusing on the "Mars has more things to solve" thing continues to ignore the point.
I would like to know if solutions are feasible or even wanted.
Hypothetical Antarctic colony could simply ignore Antarctic Treaty. Did anyone seriously try?
Mars frozen water is likely not directly drinkable after melting. After all, martian soil seems to be toxic.
So there's that. Maybe we can put a big dome around the whole thing like Planet Druidia.
https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/nasa-mission-reveals-spee...
> MAVEN measurements indicate that the solar wind strips away gas at a rate of about 100 grams (equivalent to roughly 1/4 pound) every second. "Like the theft of a few coins from a cash register every day, the loss becomes significant over time," said Bruce Jakosky, MAVEN principal investigator at the University of Colorado, Boulder. "We've seen that the atmospheric erosion increases significantly during solar storms, so we think the loss rate was much higher billions of years ago when the sun was young and more active.”
Yet people now manage to survive the winter in Europe just fine using technology.
Mars and space settlement in general can be seen as yet another - more challenging - extension of this long term progress.
Also possibly in the future one could upgrade people themselves to make living in space easier.