Final Muse

*Chimes* Space, the Final Frontier. These are the voyages of the Starship Enterprise. Although we are just a not even close to becoming a full-fledged interplanetary species, unlike the United Federation of Planets, we may soon become one. This weeks' muse is Mars.

On Monday I watched the first installment of MARS on National Geographic. For anyone interested in "space-stuff," this show is pretty cool. They mix a fictional future of the first humans arriving and living on Mars with a documentary of the current state of space affairs. This is just the latest in my Mars craze. In late September I watched Elon Musk's momentous announcement for plans for a trip to Mars. And for a while I've been interested in the possibility of terraforming Mars.

We can thank capitalism and the private sector for jump-starting our venture to Mars, and this blog. Anything run by the government is incredibly wasteful, I like to rag on the government, including NASA. That's what's good about the beginnings of the private space industry with companies like Spacex, Blue Origin, and Virgin Galactic. Capitalism makes the space industry cheaper and progress quicker than the in public sector. The increasing privatization of the space industry may in fact bring the first crew to Mars and by the 2030s compared to the 2050s with NASA.

But what's the draw to Mars? We want to start a human colony on Mars, sure. But why?
1. Curiosity (To boldly go where no man has gone before.)
2. To preserve humanity

So, curiosity. Didn't curiosity kill the cat. Yeah it did. It will kill some humans too ... eventually. We want to know if there was ever life on Mars (life may have started on Mars). And we want to know if we can survive in such an inhospitable place.

It's pretty frickin' inhospitable. For starters, there's negligible oxygen (compared to Earth). We have to produce our own oxygen, we have the technology. There is no water, we have to condense it into liquid from the humid martian atmosphere, we have the technology. As for food, it would be MRE's from Earth and crops grown through hydroponics. You wouldn't be able to grow anything directly from the soil of Mars unless the perchlorates from the soil could be extracted. Because there is no magnetic field on Mars, there is no protection from dangerous solar radiation, another thing we need to figure out. We might be able to create a martian magnetic field to hold in the atmosphere and protect us from radiation. The other topic that's often forgotten about is the lack of gravity on Mars. This significantly weakens bone and muscle strength, significantly, and makes eye-sight get progressively worse. A blind astronaut is not a good astronaut.

We also want to start a colony on Mars to preserve humanity in the advent of a catastrophic event like an asteroid colliding with earth. Or in case we destroy the earth with our unsustainable environmental practices.

via GIPHY

So let's say we somehow manage to start a self-sustaining colony on Mars. We now have the opportunity to start re-engineering the planet. We first need to make Mars warmer, it generally ranges from 100 below zero to 70 degrees Fahrenheit. We're pretty good at destroying planets with global warming. One theory to warm the planet involves using satellite mirrors on Mars and the sun's hot rays. If we concentrate the heat on the poles we could start melting the polar ice caps on Mars. This would eventually release water vapor into the carbon-dioxide rich atmosphere. And we would be able to keep this water vapor with a strong enough magnetic field. Both of these greenhouse gasses would help hold this heat. And in 100,000 years Mars would eventually reach Earth temperatures. Once we start to get liquid water we could then introduce microbes capable of surviving in a Martian environment, reproducing and putting oxygen into the atmosphere, yet another greenhouse gas. And eventually we would have precipitation on Mars. This is all speculation and nearly all science fiction.

Courtesy of Daein Ballard

So there are some high hurdles human-kind must jump before a Mars colony is a remote possibility. Lots of people are going to die. But it will be interesting to see if we can do it. But, it definitely won't be as easy as its made to look in the movies and on television. It's not as simple as let's go. 3...2...1 lift-off. Because science ... is not that advanced yet. If Mars doesn't become the next Roanoke, it will be amazing to see what else we humanity can do.

Anyway thank you for letting me collect my thoughts on Mars. I hope that wasn't too awfully boring, I commend you for reading it to the end.

I guess this is good-bye.


via GIPHY