Water ice buried at Mars' equator is over 2 miles thick
space.com
space.com
Discovering water in large amounts means establishing a colony is increasingly possible and viable.
People underestimate how nasty Mars is to live on. We'd be better off building colonies on the moon then trying to colonize Mars.
Imagine a nuclear holocaust on Earth, but far worse. That's Mars. The radiation is crazy. It's the equivalent radiation to being about 1 mile away from the center of the bomb dropped on a Hiroshima, every year. The air will make you pass out in seconds. The soil can't grow anything, not because of the UV radiation that sterilizes everything but because of perchlorates in the soil. You would need to live in a clean room on Mars because they build up in your system and slowly kill you. Never mind the low gravity.
And that's just scratching the surface. Mars isn't some nice place where we can set up a colony. It's a disaster zone of unimagined scale that no amount of money can do anything about.
Radiation on the surface of mars is only ~2.5x the radiation in the ISS. There’s no air there, either. Perchlorates suck for humans but are great as rocket fuel - there’s a double incentive to strip them out of the soil, and there are known mechanisms for doing so. The low gravity may or may not be an issue, but people have survived a year on the ISS in 0G so it’s probably surmountable.
Yes, living on Mars is much, much harder than living on Earth. No, it isn’t impossible.
Didn't we think Chernobyl would be a dead zone yet things are growing there? Not that I expected to be able to grow stuff on Mars' soil without processing the ground.
> You would need to live in a clean room on Mars because they build up in your system and slowly kill you
Aren't we getting slowly killed by _everything_ here on earth? Why wouldn't we be able to build planet wide sealed structures, starting with a small region, and growing to surround the entire "liveable" surface? Of cource it's not a trivial task, but the planet already provides relative shelter from space, has at least _some_ gravity and provides some of the resources needed for survival (water it seems, metals that we can easily access, metals, some minerals, and so on).
Tourism is at least conceivable, but the number of people who could plausibly afford a ticket is tiny; and the journey time would be hard to justify. The market for low earth tourism is already tiny; and exists only because everything needed was already built to support the science mission.
For asteroid mining; just go to asteroids. It seems bonkers to set up your base at the bottom of a gravity well for no particular reason.
For trade; there is nothing of particular value on Mars. If you are already there, then on site production makes sense. Otherwise, skip the trip and gravity well and find an asteroid to mine.
Blah blah blah, this is kindergarten level perception of reality and it's really sad that a large swathe of adults cannot conceptualize beyond cheap fantasy.
Main problem with Mars is that is has no magnetic field. Without that any attempt at terraforming it is pointless and wasteful. Say one would devise some scheme to warm the planet and melt the water. Result would be the water would evaporate and the water would be lost in space. Pointless.
There is water there, like oil reserves on Earth. Once burned, it's gone forever.
So first, one must invent some way of generating planetary-scale magnetic field which would envelop the planet and shield it from the solar wind which blows any gas particles away. That doesn't require going to Mars, if it will ever happen it will happen here.
I don't see how but hey ... that's what science is for.
So, even if maybe the terraforming and colony project has a life span of a few million years…that’s still longer that’s humanity has existed.
An interesting projection.