Just recently 18 new Earth sized exoplanets have been discovered.
They range from 70% Earth size to more than twice
as large as our planet,
and we know at least one of them for certain
has conditions that almost mirror ours on Earth.
So there are worlds out there that we could possibly
live on.
This isn't science fiction. This is getting clearer by the
day.
But some of these planets are hidden,
hidden in plain sight.
They have the ability to be trained and conditioned into
becoming a world that is fit for us humans.
Mars appears in the skies of red barren wasteland,
like quite literally something out of a movie.
But it hasn't always been like that.
In fact, the past was much better for Mars.
At least it would have been for us.
It's like gazing into our future as a planet.
But if it was like that in the past,
could we roll back time?
I mean, we're pretty good at changing the climate of
our own planet,
as you could tell. So why couldn't we change Mars?
We've been looking up forever for thousands of years,
but now, finally, we have the ability to actually consider
venturing out to the unknown.
But unknown doesn't always mean bad.
Many good things can come from leaving home,
and it might be a good idea.
Over the course of history,
many species, communities, kingdoms, civilizations have come into contact with
one another.
Some of these ended up in healthy relationships,
but others not so much.
If history is any judge,
then we should probably be the ones venturing out and
making our own first contact.
Being proactive, not reactive. It's almost always the civilization that
receives contact from another
that ends up being ultimately destroyed in the process.
It's not something you want to be on the receiving
end of,
but space? Space is a completely different story.
Many missions succeed, and we can reap the benefits of
those for years to come.
But others
others fail, and fail hard.
Of all 56 missions to Mars,
so far only 26 have been successful,
less than 50%. It's a coin flip at best,
and we'd be risking the best and brightest of our
minds.
But the outcome?
The outcome could be ginormous.
The idea of terraforming Mars,
or also known as Earth shaping Mars seriously
has been brought up very often in the past few
years.
It's by no means easy,
and to be honest, with the current technology we have
in 2019,
it's not even close to possible.
Recently newly discovered layers of ice beneath Mars's North Pole
may be some of the biggest reserves of water on
the planet.
If melted, the water would literally cover the planet in
at least 1 1/2 meters of water.
That's a lot, not nearly as much as Earth,
but it's enough to work with.
These ice caps came from Mars's previous ice ages.
As the planet warmed, the ice was covered with Martian
sand.
This prevented it from heating and further evaporating into Mars
carbon dioxide atmosphere.
But the important part isn't the ice on the surface,
but the ice deep inside Mars.
It most likely exists and is important to understanding our
potential new home.
In order to make the surface habitable,
we need to understand the insides first.
Just like caves on Earth that are deep under the
surface,
life could exist there. Whatever it may be,
we don't know.
A problem though is that
Mars doesn't have a magnetic field,
at least not anymore. So any life on the planet
is being constantly bombarded with radiation.
Originally Mars iron core was able to generate a magnetic
field,
but over time the core cooled,
hardened and the magnetic field disappeared
about 4 billion years ago.
Solar storms and coronal mass ejections from the sun hitting
Mars also didn't help.
These things are basically Emps and extremely altered magnetic fields,
and this can single handedly ruin a planet.
But I kind of lied
because Mars does have an extremely weak magnetic field.
It's around 40 times weaker than ours,
except it's only in the southern hemisphere of the planet.
This, as you may guess,
isn't exactly ideal. If we want to live on Mars
long term,
we need to make another magnetic field.
There's no way around it.
This sounds stupid and pretty much impossible,
except that it really isn't.
Mars's weak magnetosphere can be protected and slowly grown.
The Mars Global Surveyor from
1997 to 2006 measured Mars's magnetic field from over 400
kilometers above the planet,
and it found that these magnetic fields on the surface
of the planet are stronger than those on Earth.
If these small areas are protected from solar winds,
these bubbles of many magnetospheres could be havens for life
on the planet.
If they're strong enough, they're perfect and our best bet
for now
to protect these areas, NASA has proposed a pretty weird
idea.
By placing a magnetic shield,
pretty much just a huge magnet,
at a very specific point in Mars orbit called L1,
an artificial magnetosphere could be formed that would protect the
planet entirely.
Now of course this sounds super fancy and hard,
and yeah, I agree, but the science is there.
L1 is a LaGrange point.
Basically, just consider these parking spots in space.
Whatever you place there won't move relative to Mars surface,
so this magnetic shield would be in the same place
at all times above Mars.
It would counteract the harsh solar wind that is ruining
Mars atmosphere right now.
If we had a magnetic field,
solar winds and radiation wouldn't affect Mars atmosphere as much,
and with the atmosphere no longer slowly withering away,
we could maintain it and grow it over time.
That radiation wouldn't be causing mutations on the new Martians,
those ice caps. They would melt on their own and
that could be the start to living on the planet.
We only need to raise the temperature by about
4°C or about 7.2°F to melt the carbon dioxide ice
on Mars.
Northern polar cap through a little bit of global warming,
maybe through factories on Mars recycling the harmful atmosphere and
then later emitting greenhouse gases.
It was slowly warm over time,
but we wouldn't be able to notice it on a
day-to-day basis.
It's still going to be rough,
it's really cold. Living on the equator of Mars though,
might not be so bad.
The average temperature on Mars is around -50 to
-60°C. It's cold, but around the equator temperatures can get
upwards of
25°C. This is almost dumb luck that it's such a
perfect temperature
and that'd be the ideal place to be.
Mars is really sandy and dust storms are extremely common
on Earth. We do have some crazy weather,
for example hurricanes. They destroy cities and sometimes entire countries,
but they always follow the same life cycle.
They form, they destroy, and then they die.
But the winds on Mars can be strong,
gravity isn't as strong as it is on Earth,
and the atmosphere isn't as thick.
When all of this is put together,
dust from all around the planet can be pulled several
kilometers into the sky.
The lack of moisture in the atmosphere prevents any of
this dust from clumping together,
so it kind of just floats around until eventually it
settles.
Some of these dust storms are localized and pass rather
quickly,
but others others are deadly.
Some dust storms, if large enough,
can last up to several months on end
with us essentially surrounding the planet,
and temperatures soar up hundreds of degrees.
This is something we've never experienced on Earth,
and it's something that needs to be answered before we
even consider long term survival on the Red Planet.
But all of this comes with a pretty deep question.
We don't even have the entirety of Earth mapped yet.
We know there's life here.
We're the only ones so far.
But with Mars, we don't know.
We haven't mapped most of the planet yet.
If we go through with terraforming the planet,
we could and would most likely wipe out any life
that currently lives there.
Do we allow life to take its course,
or are we going to completely destroy what could have
been the only other life we'll ever find?
An Article 9 of the
1967 Outer Space Treaty, which was signed by
109 different countries on Earth,
strictly forbids the harmful contamination of any moon or celestial
body that isn't Earth.
But here arises another problem.
Are Martians subject to the laws of their home planet?
Sure, we could tell them not to do things,
but who's going to enforce it?
What's the point in having rules if there is no
one to enforce them?
There are no police. There is no law on Mars.
There's nothing there to begin with.
We are quite literally starting humanity over an opportunity to
build a world from scratch.
If we build a new home,
we'd also be building a new species.
Evolution would take its course,
and after long enough, the humans who built Mars will
no longer represent the humans who left Earth.
That's assuming we even get there and can even execute
any of our plans.
Everyone who has ever left the comfort of Earth's atmosphere
has felt the genetic effects of it.
Later on. Cardiovascular diseases are much more likely.
Cancer risk shoots up, bone marrow is lost and continues
to wither away.
And this is just from going to the moon.
Mars is over 200 times as far away,
and the radiation you'd be receiving on that journey there
would be much worse than anything we've ever experienced.
For all that we know,
the trip itself could kill us.
It'll take on average seven months to reach Mars,
seven months just to reach our destination.
This itself is already risky.
Astronauts on the International Space Station only stay on the
station for about 6 months at a time to prevent
their health from being jeopardized.
However, the long term deep space habitat could be lethal.
Our astronaut colony could grow sick before they even get
there,
and that would probably be the worst outcome of them
all.
There's many more psychological reasons that this could go wrong
as
well-being locked up, drifting away into the nothingness of space
with literally nothing but centimeters of engineering between you
and nothing. It's going to take the strongest people we
have,
both physically and mentally to handle a task of such
magnitude.
On Earth, if you don't like your boss,
you could quit. If you don't like your roommate,
you can move out. But on Mars,
help is at best seven months away.
All it takes is for one person to get pushed
too far
and the entire mission, the entire colony,
perhaps could fall apart.
Dates would also change. The year we have on Earth
works perfectly for us.
The seasons align and everyone uses the same system,
but Mars is much further away from the Sun than
Earth is,
and has a longer orbital period.
A year on Earth is pretty much
365 days, but on Mars this is closer to 700
days,
almost twice as long. Martians would have to adopt A
new calendar.
Days on Mars are slightly longer than days on Earth,
only by about 30 minutes or so,
and this doesn't seem like a huge deal.
But over time, our clocks would slowly get out of
sync.
But on the bright side,
get aged slower, at least compared to those people on
Earth.
So at least you have that going for you.
If we want things to go smoothly,
it's going to take time.
The best course of action is what we're doing now,
slowly researching the planet using machine.
It's safer and honestly, the only thing that we can
really do at the moment.
We learn more and more each day,
but even then, humans are capable of things that we
just can't program.
We can't program that fight or flight response into a
Rover.
A robot colony isn't even effective as one single human.
The amount of work done by a Rover on Mars
in an entire year could be done by a human
in like a week.
Sure, it's safer to use robots,
but it also isn't as effective.
The risk is there, as I said,
but the reward makes up for it 1000 times over.
But humans work in funny ways.
For some reason we drift towards the most challenging tasks.
We don't shy away from anything on Earth.
Space is just the next level.
All it takes is for one mission to do well
and the snowball effect begins.
It would be extremely interesting to see how this journey
would not only affect the astronauts,
but life and culture on Earth.
Engineering and science fields would probably boom and would become
saturated with new jobs and companies,
many of which would help.
Both the Martian and Earth resident
Mail would no longer only require an address,
city, state, and country, but also a planet.
The initial founding fathers of our Martian colonies would have
to be the most self-sufficient people to ever exist.
It takes at least 8 minutes for a message to
be radioed from Earth to Mars,
and another 8 minutes for a message to return
in the life or death situation.
This won't cut it. The Martians will have to be
able to handle everything good and dad
on their own in order to test these potential future
heroes.
They are locked in isolation in environments like Antarctica,
far away from any other civilization.
Sometimes it's planned and prepared,
locations that have features much like the Martian landscape.
And this has made me think,
in order for us as a species to progress to
honestly the only other place we could probably go,
we have to put so much planning and work into
the entire process.
It's hundreds, thousands of years in the making,
10s of billions of dollars poured into this process.
But yet, at the end of the day,
it comes down to the small handful of people who
lay the groundwork for the future of humanity.
The largest and quite frankly,
most important thing we've ever done in the history of
our existence
is one of the loneliest journeys imaginable.
In order to succeed, we have to isolate ourselves.
Is it right to put these people through something so
insanely important in small,
isolated groups, left all alone to build their own world?
Or is it better to take things slowly,
allow technology to progress, and allow our machines to do
the heavy lifting,
A world built by something we built?
It's a weight calculation. What's the point in sending humans
to Mars with today's technology if in 15 years we'll
be thousands of times more advanced?
Regardless whether it's tomorrow or in 50 years,
Mars will be waiting and eventually
it'll be ours.
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