Humans Will Never Live on Mars Permanently

Humans Will Never Live on Mars Permanently

Direct link to original post:https://verysmallocean.org/blog.html#never-live-on-mars

In a recent video, Taylor Lorenz’ YouTube show Power User breaks down why it is essentially impossible to colonize Mars with physicist Adam Becker, author of the new book More Everything Forever: AI Overlords, Space Empires and Silicon Valley’s Crusade to Control the Future of Humanity. They get into the actual meat of the Mars question starting about the 12 minute mark, but I’ll summarize some of the main issues for you here. As much as they try to make it sound like space could be a consumer product for the masses, it will not happen. Ever. Before I dive in here’s the video link (also embedded below): A Physicist Destroys Elon Musk’s Mars Fantasy.

Some of the most hostile features of a journey to or stay on Mars (They concede that you could probably build a research base on Mars but it would be a sad, cramped, underground experience) “You don’t see people lining up to live isolated on the Antarctic ice, but the worst day in Antarctica is far more human-friendly than the best day on Mars”:

1. Muscle atrophy & bone density loss: even with intense exercise astronauts who have spent months in microgravity/zero gravity have difficulty walking when they return and have to rehabilitate. To leap ahead towards the end, this also makes it likely babies could not survive birth after gestating in Mars’ low gravity (about 38% of Earth gravity).
2. Radiation en route: The International Space Station still gets about half the radiation shielding from Earth’s magnetic field plus some from the thermosphere, which the ISS it’s still inside, and the exosphere, which it’s still below. On the journey to Mars, probably on a ship much smaller than the ISS, you have none of that
3. Radiation on Mars: Mars does not have any significant magnetosphere (magnetic field) like Earth does, and the atmosphere at the surface has about 1% of Earth’s surface atmosphere denisty. Consequently the radiation problem is nearly as bad as outer space unless you spend all your time underground (which is kind of infeasible)
4. Rockets and Space are Insanely Expensive: “One challenge is the extreme cost of transporting building materials to the Martian surface, which by the 2010s was estimated to be about US$2 million per brick.^[6]” (from Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_habitat)
5. Not in the video, but no better propulsion technology than chemical rockets, ion thrusters, and MAYBE rudimentary solar sails will ever exist. Fusion is too hot for any materials you could make. Hyperspace and warp drive are mere fantasies
6. The dirt is filled with toxic perchlorates which would contaminate all the construction and cause lung disease besides being toxic to crops
7. How will you get all the construction equipment and materials to Mars?
8. How will you ever get more than a few dozens of people at most to Mars
9. Again, there is no air (no, you can’t geoengineer or terraform it. That is so far beyond human technological capacity it’s just laughable)
10. All construction of habitats would have to be done in spacesuits while being bombarded with ionizing radiation

They make the point that even the day the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs landed was a nicer day than any day on Mars, since mammals, plants, insects and other life SURVIVED it

Estimates are that a self-sustaining high tech civilization would require 500 million to 1 billion colonists, but we can’t even get to 100….

As well, there are few launch windows, when Earth and Mars are making approaches to each other and travel time would be 6-9 months in a tiny can, unlike the 3 days to the moon, which we can launch to every day

It’s all a Big Lie, a delusion, a fantasy. That seems like enough for now

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