• Question: Will we be able to live on mars?

    Asked by hannah77 to Lyn on 25 Jun 2013. This question was also asked by daniellaa.
    • Photo: Ee Lyn Lim

      Ee Lyn Lim answered on 25 Jun 2013:

      This is a complicated question! I would say yes – but it would be enormously, spectacularly, insanely expensive to do so 🙂

      We can’t just pack a suitcase and go live on Mars, because there’s not enough air (the atmospheric pressure is too low, because Mars has lower gravity), not enough water (actually not any water at all!) and the temperature is too cold (Mars is further away from the Sun!). So if you just plonked a human on Mars we’d be dead in seconds! Even if we had space suits to protect us from the cold, and brought along some oxygen to breathe, we wouldn’t be able to stay there for very long.

      But here’s something humans are best at doing – making things! No air? We’ll make some! No water? We’ll make some of that too! There is a new machine that physicists use, called the Large Hadron Collider (there is only ONE in the world – shows how expensive it is!) that can create any atom you like, as long as you have enough energy, from nuclear power for example. So in theory we could MAKE anything we need that Mars doesn’t have. We could even make artificial food – we already have 3D printers that can print pizza! We could also build barriers, either individual buildings or a huge dome, so that we could control the pressure and temperature inside.

      But the cost of doing all this would be absolutely astronomical (no pun intended!). Think of all the machines we’re need to send over in space ships and rockets – not just the machines we need to make and build things, but also machines to dig around Mars to find the material we need. And then the energy we would need to do all of these things – I’m not sure if all the nuclear energy we have on Earth would be enough, although we could possibly find more on Mars itself…

      I guess it depends on what you mean by ‘we’! If we only had to build a small colony, say about 50 or 100 people, that would be probably be doable (although what they’d be doing there I don’t know…). If it was a question of moving the entire world’s population to Mars, we’d have to take a hundred years to prepare for it…but if it was really the end of the world, and there was nowhere else for us to go, we’d probably figure out a way to do it!

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