I understand the passion.
There is a lot of talk and fanciful artwork of a future colony on Mars. I'm not certain who is doing it, but there's even recruitment going on. A venture group (no kidding) is semi-seriously saying that an expedition to Mars will be leaving around 2030. I think. They've already told the people signing up that it's a way one ticket, folks. No returning to the Earth.
I understand the passion. Having read tons of science fiction as a kid, having grown up with Star Trek, Star Wars, moon shots and the Space Shuttles and the so called "International Space Station" (an orbital platform built and paid for by the taxpayers of the United States, and now given over almost wholly to Russian squatters.), I do understand the desire. Steven Hawkings is correct, we must head into space. We are destroying our home planet so quickly that I wonder if in one hundred years, there will be any civilization left.
But hard nosed reality intervenes.
The only space travel that we know is the stuff invented in our minds, i.e. "Star Trek", "Star Wars", thousands of science fiction stories/books/movies. As with anything that comes out of Hollywood, much is left to the imagination.
What none of these forms of entertainment cover is the nuts and bolts of survival. Such items (not inclusive) being oxygen, protection from temperature extremes, food, water, and the capacity for and management of biological processes such as eating, excretion, drinking, reproduction, etc. None cover such things as logistics, meaning: building materials, fuel, machinery, tools, power generation, transportation, communication. None of them address the idea that a colonist needs to take a hell of a lot of stuff with him.
It's already been proven that humans do not tolerate zero gravity very well. Our bones dissolve. Exposure to cosmic radiation (inevitable once you've left the atmosphere) is a dandy way to develop cancers. Even our eyeballs change shape in space, and STAY changed, even upon return to Earth.
Mars is a long way away. Let's say we figure out a way to really put some speed on the trip, and plan for arrival at the Red Planet when it's at it's closest to the Earth.
So let's say that takes, oh, eight months. That's still a long time to be cooped up in a space ship.
The space ship itself is going to have to be huge. It takes a lot of gear to make a colony.
Right off the bat, the ship is going to have to make a successful landing. Only 40% of the Mars missions have had successful landings. It's just asking a lot of a ship to go from over 10K mph to zero without braking and a lot of luck.
They're going to have to be able to grow food in space. They're going to have to be able to grow food on Mars. Right now, the only way they can figure out how to grow food in space is hydroponics. This is a system whereby a plant is kept under artificial light and all its nutrients are provided via nutrient saturated water bathing the roots.
How in the hell are they going to carry that much water? There is no water on Mars that isn't frozen or buried.
Let's not forget that the average daily temperature on Mars is probably -50 F. Mars year is far longer than Earth's. The sun is much farther away, and doesn't provide the same amount of sunlight needed for photosynthesis.
Plants-the types we eat, not stuff like seaweed-don't like being grown in water.. Plants like dirty toes. They can't grow in pure sand. They need organic chemicals/substances such as calcium, phosphorus, potassium. These chemicals don't recycle. We have no way of separating chemicals into their individual states from recycled (reverse osmosis) water.
They need microrhyzzae, they need humus, they need the stability that soil gives them. They also need gravity.
Mars is smaller than Earth and has a lower gravity. Plants don't like low gravity. They like to know which way is up.
By the way, you'd better understand that you are going to be vegan by necessity. Beef cattle and chickens don't do space travel. They need an entirely different sort of food. Cattle and chickens cannot survive on the space food we can. Cattle need hay. Chickens need insects (yes, chickens need protein to gain weight and lay eggs. The 'vegetarian diets' the industrialized chickens are fed are NOT normal.)
Both need room to move around. They don't do -50 degrees F at all well. Chickens (Iike the vast majority of birds) aren't grain eaters. And let's say you do carry grain for chickens. What happens when you run out? You can't grow grain crops in hydroponics.
I forgot fish. Fish live in water, true, but it needs to be good quality water. If you've ever kept an aquarium, you know how quickly a small, enclosed environment like an aquarium can turn into a cesspool. There aren't many fish that can tolerate farming. Farming fish, by the way, takes huge tanks, absolutely needing oxygenating, water circulation and clean water.
Problems arise for vegans. I don't care what they say, humans are omnivores. They need to eat some form of meat. Meat provides certain nutrients that plants just don't. Protein is only one of them. Yes, I hear you, 'beans' provide protein. But plant based protein doesn't build muscle. It doesn't provide phosphorus or calcium.
Water will need to be recycled. All of it, to include the stuff that you excrete. While you can run it past the plant's roots, still, you are going to have to purify it by running it through a reverse osmosis process. Ideally, it means you recover all the water you put in.
But not really. You lose water in more ways than just excretion. You respire it. You sweat. Your cells incorporate it and don't let it go. Slowly but surely, the amount of water available for recycling and reuse will drop. With every reverse osmosis cycle, you lose something-and gain something.
For instance, let us say you have 10 grams of potassium in the downstream water cycle from the plants. You run the water through the RO, and end up with pure water. The potassium can't be replaced, not when you're millions of miles from Earth. It can't be reconstituted into its pure form. It is intermingled with the waste water from the RO process. It accumulates. You get more and more waste and less and less pure water.
Can you farm on Mars? I doubt it. I don't think there is soil on Mars.What you see in the pictures is not "soil'. It's sand. Sand is decomposed rock, mostly quartz. There might be basalt, sandstone, in it, but it's still ROCK, and rock isn't soil. Soil is that rich, humusy stuff you grow plants in. It's mostly organic chemicals such as the aforementioned stuff like calcium and phosphorus. Soil is mostly stuff, minerals, material such as bits of rotted leaves, decomposed cellulose, mushroom spores, bits of bark, needles, animal crap, frass, and critters-worms, pillbugs, sowbugs, symphlans, all sorts of bacteria, viruses, and higher creatures that create an ecosystem.
That's not Mars. Mars may have had life, but it was a billion years ago, and there is nothing there to make the substrate suitable for growing anything.
There's very little oxygen on Mars. The atmosphere is mostly carbon dioxide, which plants use to photosynthesize. However, when it's -50 below and the sun is much further away than we're used to, not much photosynthesis is going to take place. Those photos we see of Mar's surface has been enhanced for our vision. It's not really that bright.
So let's say you still manage to make it to Mars. One thing the story and history books never mention is that, in every colonization effort on Earth, there were things immediately available (and the colonizers knew how to utilize them) in order to make a go of it. One could find trees, to cut down and build a shelter with, to provide light, to provide a fire to cook food over. There was soil in which to grow things in. There was water in some form, be it rainfall, or pools, or even ice, to provide drinking and washing water. One didn't have to worry about gravity. One didn't have to worry about sunlight and air to breathe. It was and is just THERE.
Not on Mars. There is NOTHING but sand and rock. Perhaps we can mine ores with which to create metal. But that needs a logistical base. That means needing machines to do the digging, machines to do the crushing and separation, machines to do the smelting and forming. What are you going to use for power? Oh, you need fuel for all that. Machines usually use gasoline, diesel, or electricity to work. Oh, and oxygen, for the first two. Solar power is going to be fairly weak on Mars, due to the year long winters.
The only way you're going to provide that much power is nuclear. Nuclear power plants, even small ones, take a hell of a lot of shielding and they need water to cool the fuel rods. It becomes highly radioactive and the rods are eventually consumed. How are you going to transport a nuclear power plant? How are you going to set it up and running when you need power to get it set up and running? Generators won't work without oxygen.
Shall I mention that everything, EVERYTHING-every machine, every process, every shelter/suit/ship needs to work right, the first time, every time. A shelter on Mars needs to be absolutely sealed from the outside, because it's cold. It's airless. It's lower gravity.
Every process needs to work right every time. You can't have a glitch in the computer program that forgets to keep the water pump, the reverse osmosis units, or the heat, or the electricity.
Let us also understand that re-supply is going to take a very long time. That's another thing they've not mentioned...that even though they say it's going to be a one way trip for the colonists, that doesn't mean they're not going to be independent of Earth. Far from it. Parts break. Pieces get lost. Moving parts wear out. Plants die no matter how tenderly you treat them. There's no home depot to go to when the furnace breaks down.
The environment of Mars is tough on the machines on the surface. Howling wind storms cover the planet, kicking up huge clouds of dust that last for MONTHS. You are wasting your time going out and dusting the solar panels off, because the sun isn't making it through the clouds anyway.
Don't forget, we're still humans. You won't be going outside in jeans and a T-shirt. Every single time you will need to be in a pressure suit, one that no matter how well engineered, has a finite capacity of oxygen. If it develops a leak, or you fall down and puncture it...bad news for you.
We still need a certain gravity. We still need sunshine. We still break bones, get abscessed teeth, have babies, get cancer, go insane. You're going to need one hell of a big hospital. While there aren't diseases to catch on Mars, we still carry them inside us. Do we have any idea what cosmic radiation and the differences of a Mars environment does to the bacteria we all carry?
The size of the ship is going to have to be enormous, just to carry the barest of colony gear. Do we land it on the surface? If not, the colonists will need shuttles to an orbiting 'mother ship'. We currently don't even have that here on Earth. We still boost everything we've put in space by using rockets. The technology for a space craft that go up and down like a jet power does not exist yet. Shuttles need a hell of a lot of power to escape gravity, even the lower gravity of Mars. They need to be piloted, either computerize or human, and they can break up or break down.
The problem is this. Any restoration ecologist, such as myself, will tell you that you don't restore an environment, you don't restore a blasted piece of real estate, by planting redwood trees.
You have to start with grass. You have to start with small plants that don't need a lot of help in surviving. You don't use something that takes fifteen years to begin reproducing. You need plants that can be planted in May and be producing by August, that don't need pollination by wind (too cold out there) or animals (bees or butterflies). Let's not forget that the plants need to be edible. Scotch broom might just be able to survive Mars...it certainly can survive anything WE do to it...but it's completely inedible.
Even our own planet, this lovely cradle, was a hostile, poisonous one for billions of years. It took cyanobacteria billions of years to replace the original atmosphere with the one that we breathe now.
We aren't cyanobacteria. Even that colonizer can't survive on Mars-it needs water. More precisely, plants-and humans, need rain. They need water circulating in an atmosphere.
Mars has neither.
Mars, also, has no magnetic field. The magnetic field that surrounds our planet protects it from cosmic radiation. A compass won't work on Mars.
We are proposing to put humans up there and making a going concern of it, making it a permanent habitation for humans.
But that's crazy. We take twenty years to reproduce. Beneficial mutations are few and far between. We need so many things that Mars just cannot provide. We're going into this eyes tightly shut and with our hands tied behind our back. I honestly think the reason the understanding that you're not going to be able to come back to Earth is not just because the changes to the human body will be irreversible. I think it's because the colonists are going to die, in many different gruesome and painful ways. The 'you're not coming back' is probably as much a liability disclaimer as it is a pragmatic, blunt statement.
After spending months in weightlessness, the colonists will be weak as kittens. Despite the fact that the gravity will be less on Mars, still, they're going to have to hit the ground running, and that's not going to be easy.
I am not even going to go into the capacity we have for killing each other. I've seen what war does to our thin veneer of civilization. It strips it away. People go mad in situations not unlike the colonization. People kill each other after months of putting up with the shithead actions of another. People kill each other when the last mouthful of food isn't enough for two or more.People even eat people when there is absolutely nothing else to eat.
The problem, though, is: even though we are upright, bipedal, incredibly advance creatures, we are still, really, fish out of water. 70% of our body is water. Like our plants, we need water in many different forms. We, along with every other living thing on earth, evolved with the need for water in some shape. Even desert creatures and plants need water.
Mars doesn't have it, in any form that we can use. Mars is a cold, low gravity, no atmospheric, cosmic ray bathed rock.
Back in early 1990, an experiment called "Biosphere ll" was attempted. A giant glass greenhouse set in the Arizona desert, it was supposed to be a closed ecosystem, depending on plants to exchange CO2 for 02 and grown in soil brought in for the purpose. Several mini biomes: an 'ocean' with a coral reef, a rain forest, a savannah, etc. Birds and insect pollinators were included, as well as animals such as goats, chicken and I believe, pigs. It was staffed by (I think) 8 'colonists' who knew they would not be allowed to leave for the two years of the study.
It was a disaster. The first year the 'colonists' were perpetually hungry. Condensation turned the rain forest into a swamp and the savannah into a marsh. Water that was supposed to be circulating amongst the biomes become so heavily clogged with algae it stopped filtration systems. Most of the birds and beneficial insects brought in died, leaving: ants and cockroaches.
Most alarmingly, no matter how they managed it, the oxygen levels dropped steadily and relentlessly. Something odd happened: oxygen levels dropped, and so did CO2 (carbon dioxide). This isn't how its supposed to work. It was found much later, that the CO2 was interacting with the cement blocks making up the base of the building and sequestering both oxygen and carbon dioxide in the form of calcium carbonate.
When oxygen levels dropped to 14% (as opposed to normal levels of 21% in the air we breathe), one of the colonists took drastic and "illegal' (and yet life saving) action: They opened the doors to the building to allow fresh air into the biosphere. This alleviated the oxygen depletion problem, but it was still cheating.
The end came when the colonists were told to leave because the sponsors of the venture got tired or started fighting, I'm not sure which. However, the colonists themselves were fighting, too.
On Mars, there won't be an atmosphere outside just there for the breathing. Or just about anything else that humans need to live.
I understand the drive, the
passion. I understand that we are where we are today because of the
seemingly unquenchable drive we have to see what's over the horizon, to
"boldly go where no man has gone before".
I just don't think we can do it, though. I don't think we can do it.
