Can Mars Be the New Earth?

As technology thrives from all different spectrums around the world, the race to find other habitable planets is on. The planet most likely to sustain human life is Mars. This can be exciting considering it is pushing limits of what we know as our everyday life. What it would it be like to live on a different planet? What if Earth became seen as we view Mars now: uninhabitable and out of reach?

National Aeronautics and Space Administration, or NASA, has a mission that is much bigger than just visiting Mars. It includes building a city of millions, a plan better known as SpaceX. NASA wants to send the first crew to the red planet in the 2030s, but it will be a short visit to test the limits of human capabilities while on Mars.

The plan is bring their own place to inhabit for two to three years. If the goal is to have a colony, there will need to be on-the-ground construction, and a way to harvest resources from the planet itself, creating a 100% perfect recycling system.

It’s easy to understand why Mars is the next destination due to all of the materials that can be found, from ice to clay, as long as we can access these through technology.

This raises some important questions if we, as a species, want to inhabit Mars. If the Earth envelops us with a protective magnetic field that shields us from carcinogenic cosmic and solar radiation, how can we disregard that? The question may be answered with a nuclear power plant that can strike big depending on how we can utilize it on our mission to Mars. Even though this can be durable for the short term, it will increase in difficulty for long-term colonists.

There are more problems than radiation and resource recycling to consider, including Mars’s weak gravity. Mars’s gravity is about ⅓ as strong as Earth’s. This may not seem like a drastic change, but our bodies are accustomed to Earth’s gravity effects, down to the microscopic level. Try as we might, we’ll never fully reshape the Martian environment to resemble Earth’s, due to mass and gravity.

There is still hope if we can start a colony and continue to build it. Some speculations assert that children born on Mars can adapt to Martian gravity. These children would have weaker bones and muscles than babies born on Earth. Even though this doesn’t seem like a huge deal, no native Martians would ever be able to visit Earth, much less make it their home.

Some astronauts think that starting in settlements in Low Earth Orbit would be smarter for a worst case scenario situation occurring and a need to return to Earth. This is referred to as incremental development, and the chances of success and logistics are much, much higher.

Even though there are many complications to living on Mars, it is possible, and we are trying. The fact alone that we are living in a time where a colony can form on a different planet is more than a miracle. It shows progression of the human race, and that is something we can’t turn a blind eye to.