Physically getting them there is just part of the story. Will they be alive when they get there? Will they have any purpose for being there except to just exist? Will they eventually look back to Earth with longing and wish they lived here rather than in a place where even breathing can't be taken for granted?
But the most important thing, I think, is whether he - or anyone else - is going to get permission to do so under the regulations for protecting Mars from Earth life.
Suppose he wanted to send a million people to live in Lake Vostock in Antarctica under the ice? It is more hospitable than Mars in many ways - not least - that you are surrounded by liquid water. It is also the most oxygenated water on Earth probably, hyper-oxygenated. And you don't need shielding from cosmic radiation. I think much more viable place for a new colony myself than Mars - not having daylight is a minor inconvenience compared with all those advantages.
But he would not be permitted to do that. Reason is because Lake Vostock has been separate from the surface for some millions of years. Even though life there is likely to be quite similar to surface life - only had a few million years of independent evolution - still - the scientists want to be able to find out what the life is like as it is now, without contaminating it with surface Earth life. They want to know what types of lifeforms manage to seed Lake Vostock naturally - and what they have evolved into, whether there is a thriving ecosystem there already - and what it is like, and how complex it is.
Even if the lifeforms are almost identical to ones we already know - still - they want to know - is it exactly identical? How much has it diverged and in what ways as a result of millions of years of isolation in this cold, dark, oxygen rich environment? Contamination with surface life is a major issue for them.
In the case of Mars - it is far more isolated from Earth than lake Vostock. There is a chance that some life might have made its way from Earth to Mars - but if so - just a few very hardy lifeforms - maybe chrooccocidiopsis for instance and halobacteria. Most microbes on Earth couldn't survive the transit on a meteorite to Mars, subjected to cosmic radiation and the vacuum of space. Also you only have that opportunity every few tens of millions of years when you get an impact onto Earth of a meteorite of ten kilometers diameter or more - smaller impacts don't produce debris moving fast enough to get through the Earth's atmosphere and exit from it at escape velocity. And then when the material gets to Mars it has to find a suitable habitat there - and habitats for life on Mars may be rare - and it has to be a suitable lifeform to survive in that habitat.
Indeed, there are of course no confirmed examples yet of any life being transferred to another planet.
So - life on Mars may be like lake Vostock - essentially same forms of life, all that is there are these cyanobacteria and halobacteria that last seeded Mars a few tens of millions of years ago. Still - scientists will want to study the life there without Earth contamination. Especially since it evolved for some tens of millions of years in an environment with high levels of cosmic radiation, and thin atmosphere, and surface rich in perchlorates and sulfates rather than chlorides and sulfides, and almost no water on the surface.
But more interestingly, Mars is so isolated from Earth that it could easily have other lifeforms based on some other basis. Even - just ordinary DNA - but - with different capabilities such as - for instance new form of photosynthesis. We have just two main types of photosynthesis on Earth - the type that depends on taking CO2 out of the atmosphere, and the type used by Halobacteria which uses a method similar to the method our eyes use to see colour to generate energy more directly from light.
What if Mars life has evolved some other totally different form of photosynthesis never explored on the Earth?
Or - maybe life based on XNA rather than DNA? Or not spiral molecule based at all, some other way of encoding it?
It could also have complex organic structures that are somewhere in between life as we know it and inorganic life. These particularly could be fragile to introduced Earth life that would just eat these structures up as food.
So - for all these reasons - I think that when the time comes to it, Elon Musk simply will not get approval to send humans to Mars. Nor Mars One, nor NASA, or ESA or anyone.
The planetary protection officers say that they think it will be possible. But they don't make the final decisions. The decisions are made by COSPAR workshops, international gatherings of scientists from all nations world wide. And in those workshops you'll have astrobiologists and such like who have to look at all the evidence carefully. I just don't see how they can be expected to approve sending humans to Mars until we thoroughly understand what is there and what the effect will be of introducing Earth life ot the planet.
It would be different if we knew that the surface of Mars was totally uninhabitable. But we don't. Indeed there is a fair bit of evidence suggesting that there may be various habitats on the surface of Mars.
Just a few droplets and thin films of water here and there, occasionally, for a few hours of the year. But that is plenty for bacteria - and complex organics for that matter in between life and non life, to thrive. For that matter - it also means that Earth life could potentially reproduce on Mars - at any rate we have not yet shown that it is impossible for it to do this.
Indeed, as someone fascinated by exobiology - I personally hope that we do find life on Mars. If so - then sadly humans would not be permitted to explore the surface directly.
But still we can explore it via telepresence with telerobotic avatars on the surface. Maybe in the future humans could go there if we can develop ways that spaceships and spacesuits can be totally sterilized - with the spacesuits doubling as biohazard suits that contain all Earth life within them - but is hard to see that at present with present day technology.
Reason it is so hard to see that possible right now is - that apart from anything else, none of our current spacecraft could survive a crash landing on Mars if their landing system failed, and still contain all the lifeforms inside the spacecraft. It would rip open and the life would spill out over the planet - and then get dispersed in the global dust storms. It's hardly worth going on to examine whether the spacesuits and airlocks could contain Earth life.
Sometimes people suggest that life in habitats would not be able to survive on Mars. But you get extremophiles everywhere. Lifeforms able to survive in reactor cooling ponds or on granite cliffs in Antarctica, or in hydrothermal vents, may also be living in your clothes, and on your skin. And 99% of the microbes in any given habitat, by number, can't be cultivated and hardly anything is known about most of the uncultivable archaea.
See also my articles on Science20 such as this one for the evidence of possibilities of liquid water on Mars right now:
Where To Search On Mars For Droplets, & Shallow Flows Of Liquid Water - Where Microbial Life May Flourish
and many other answers here on quora.
Now - there are places we can go safely - the Moon - or to create free colonies in space without this impact on scientific integrity of the missions. And we can have colonies in orbit around Mars eventually.
But - personally - don't see humans on the surface for at least many decades into the future - only way that would be possible is if the surface turns out to be totally inhospitable to Earth life - and even then there would be questions to ask about whether introducing e.g. aerobes etc to Mars surface at an early stage is advisable if you ever plan to terraform it.
But the way things are going at the moment - seems unlikely that Mars is totally inhospitable on the surface. At any rate unlikely that we will be able to prove that it is in the near future.
For instance, this may be caused by liquid water, thin films:
And this idea supported by Mars simulation experiments, that you get droplets of water forming at interface of salt and ice by Nilton Remmo, scientist for Phoenix and for the Curiosity remote weather station on Mars - the "swimming pools for bacteria"
Also you have the discovery by DLR of cyanobacteria and lichens that are able to photosynthesize and metabolize in Mars surface conditions using just the water vapour in the atmosphere. You also get halobacteria in the Atacama desert that can survive inside salts (abundant on Mars) using natural microscopic pores in the salt to gather the water vapour at well below 100% humidity.
So - I think we'll get many people saying that we can go to Mars, and saying that planetary protection won't be an issue. But when time comes to actually study it carefully and to decide whether to approve such a mission -after the astrobiology experts review all the evidence - I can't see COSPAR approving it myself.
When that happens - I don't think, when the time comes to it, that they will want to go against the requirements of planetary protection. Certainly Mars One has said they will fulfill all their international obligations and surely Elon Musk would also. And for that matter - then the US itself, as all signatories of the Outer Space Treaty has an obligation to make sure its citizens keep to the terms of the OST. It doesn't matter how they get into space either - the US is still obligated to make sure its citizens abide by the OST under international law - Netherlands for its citizens likewise, etc. And the builders of the spacecraft and those who provide launch facilities are similarly also obliged - and everyone with space faring capabilities, or the slightest space faring aspirations, even N. Korea has signed the OST, showing that they recognize the value of planetary protection.
Hopefully when that happens, these entrepeneurs will not just give up, but instead put their efforts into work on viable space settlements e.g. in orbit around Mars exploring it via telepresence.
That would be awesome, to have a million people in orbit around Mars exploring it via telepresence with several million telerobotic avatars on the surface (you'd have several avatars to each person). And would most likely cost far less than sending them to the surface. It also eliminates the most dangerous phase of such a mission - landing humans on Mars. Instead you just land their avatars - and if one of those ships crashes - well you've lost a lot of expensive telerobotic avatars - but nobody has died.
They could use the Martian moons for materials, or indeed the NEOs or asteroid belt or further afield, to build their orbital colonies around Mars - so long as you are in no hurry, is relatively easy to move materials from just about anywhere in the solar system to anywhere else via repeated flybys and gravity assists.
I don't know if that would interest him though. Hope it would. Would be a major challenge also to do that without contaminating Mars but I think it could be done with great care and advancing technology.
But the most important thing, I think, is whether he - or anyone else - is going to get permission to do so under the regulations for protecting Mars from Earth life.
Suppose he wanted to send a million people to live in Lake Vostock in Antarctica under the ice? It is more hospitable than Mars in many ways - not least - that you are surrounded by liquid water. It is also the most oxygenated water on Earth probably, hyper-oxygenated. And you don't need shielding from cosmic radiation. I think much more viable place for a new colony myself than Mars - not having daylight is a minor inconvenience compared with all those advantages.
But he would not be permitted to do that. Reason is because Lake Vostock has been separate from the surface for some millions of years. Even though life there is likely to be quite similar to surface life - only had a few million years of independent evolution - still - the scientists want to be able to find out what the life is like as it is now, without contaminating it with surface Earth life. They want to know what types of lifeforms manage to seed Lake Vostock naturally - and what they have evolved into, whether there is a thriving ecosystem there already - and what it is like, and how complex it is.
Even if the lifeforms are almost identical to ones we already know - still - they want to know - is it exactly identical? How much has it diverged and in what ways as a result of millions of years of isolation in this cold, dark, oxygen rich environment? Contamination with surface life is a major issue for them.
In the case of Mars - it is far more isolated from Earth than lake Vostock. There is a chance that some life might have made its way from Earth to Mars - but if so - just a few very hardy lifeforms - maybe chrooccocidiopsis for instance and halobacteria. Most microbes on Earth couldn't survive the transit on a meteorite to Mars, subjected to cosmic radiation and the vacuum of space. Also you only have that opportunity every few tens of millions of years when you get an impact onto Earth of a meteorite of ten kilometers diameter or more - smaller impacts don't produce debris moving fast enough to get through the Earth's atmosphere and exit from it at escape velocity. And then when the material gets to Mars it has to find a suitable habitat there - and habitats for life on Mars may be rare - and it has to be a suitable lifeform to survive in that habitat.
Indeed, there are of course no confirmed examples yet of any life being transferred to another planet.
So - life on Mars may be like lake Vostock - essentially same forms of life, all that is there are these cyanobacteria and halobacteria that last seeded Mars a few tens of millions of years ago. Still - scientists will want to study the life there without Earth contamination. Especially since it evolved for some tens of millions of years in an environment with high levels of cosmic radiation, and thin atmosphere, and surface rich in perchlorates and sulfates rather than chlorides and sulfides, and almost no water on the surface.
But more interestingly, Mars is so isolated from Earth that it could easily have other lifeforms based on some other basis. Even - just ordinary DNA - but - with different capabilities such as - for instance new form of photosynthesis. We have just two main types of photosynthesis on Earth - the type that depends on taking CO2 out of the atmosphere, and the type used by Halobacteria which uses a method similar to the method our eyes use to see colour to generate energy more directly from light.
What if Mars life has evolved some other totally different form of photosynthesis never explored on the Earth?
Or - maybe life based on XNA rather than DNA? Or not spiral molecule based at all, some other way of encoding it?
It could also have complex organic structures that are somewhere in between life as we know it and inorganic life. These particularly could be fragile to introduced Earth life that would just eat these structures up as food.
So - for all these reasons - I think that when the time comes to it, Elon Musk simply will not get approval to send humans to Mars. Nor Mars One, nor NASA, or ESA or anyone.
The planetary protection officers say that they think it will be possible. But they don't make the final decisions. The decisions are made by COSPAR workshops, international gatherings of scientists from all nations world wide. And in those workshops you'll have astrobiologists and such like who have to look at all the evidence carefully. I just don't see how they can be expected to approve sending humans to Mars until we thoroughly understand what is there and what the effect will be of introducing Earth life ot the planet.
It would be different if we knew that the surface of Mars was totally uninhabitable. But we don't. Indeed there is a fair bit of evidence suggesting that there may be various habitats on the surface of Mars.
Just a few droplets and thin films of water here and there, occasionally, for a few hours of the year. But that is plenty for bacteria - and complex organics for that matter in between life and non life, to thrive. For that matter - it also means that Earth life could potentially reproduce on Mars - at any rate we have not yet shown that it is impossible for it to do this.
Indeed, as someone fascinated by exobiology - I personally hope that we do find life on Mars. If so - then sadly humans would not be permitted to explore the surface directly.
But still we can explore it via telepresence with telerobotic avatars on the surface. Maybe in the future humans could go there if we can develop ways that spaceships and spacesuits can be totally sterilized - with the spacesuits doubling as biohazard suits that contain all Earth life within them - but is hard to see that at present with present day technology.
Reason it is so hard to see that possible right now is - that apart from anything else, none of our current spacecraft could survive a crash landing on Mars if their landing system failed, and still contain all the lifeforms inside the spacecraft. It would rip open and the life would spill out over the planet - and then get dispersed in the global dust storms. It's hardly worth going on to examine whether the spacesuits and airlocks could contain Earth life.
Sometimes people suggest that life in habitats would not be able to survive on Mars. But you get extremophiles everywhere. Lifeforms able to survive in reactor cooling ponds or on granite cliffs in Antarctica, or in hydrothermal vents, may also be living in your clothes, and on your skin. And 99% of the microbes in any given habitat, by number, can't be cultivated and hardly anything is known about most of the uncultivable archaea.
See also my articles on Science20 such as this one for the evidence of possibilities of liquid water on Mars right now:
Where To Search On Mars For Droplets, & Shallow Flows Of Liquid Water - Where Microbial Life May Flourish
and many other answers here on quora.
Now - there are places we can go safely - the Moon - or to create free colonies in space without this impact on scientific integrity of the missions. And we can have colonies in orbit around Mars eventually.
But - personally - don't see humans on the surface for at least many decades into the future - only way that would be possible is if the surface turns out to be totally inhospitable to Earth life - and even then there would be questions to ask about whether introducing e.g. aerobes etc to Mars surface at an early stage is advisable if you ever plan to terraform it.
But the way things are going at the moment - seems unlikely that Mars is totally inhospitable on the surface. At any rate unlikely that we will be able to prove that it is in the near future.
For instance, this may be caused by liquid water, thin films:
And this idea supported by Mars simulation experiments, that you get droplets of water forming at interface of salt and ice by Nilton Remmo, scientist for Phoenix and for the Curiosity remote weather station on Mars - the "swimming pools for bacteria"
Also you have the discovery by DLR of cyanobacteria and lichens that are able to photosynthesize and metabolize in Mars surface conditions using just the water vapour in the atmosphere. You also get halobacteria in the Atacama desert that can survive inside salts (abundant on Mars) using natural microscopic pores in the salt to gather the water vapour at well below 100% humidity.
So - I think we'll get many people saying that we can go to Mars, and saying that planetary protection won't be an issue. But when time comes to actually study it carefully and to decide whether to approve such a mission -after the astrobiology experts review all the evidence - I can't see COSPAR approving it myself.
When that happens - I don't think, when the time comes to it, that they will want to go against the requirements of planetary protection. Certainly Mars One has said they will fulfill all their international obligations and surely Elon Musk would also. And for that matter - then the US itself, as all signatories of the Outer Space Treaty has an obligation to make sure its citizens keep to the terms of the OST. It doesn't matter how they get into space either - the US is still obligated to make sure its citizens abide by the OST under international law - Netherlands for its citizens likewise, etc. And the builders of the spacecraft and those who provide launch facilities are similarly also obliged - and everyone with space faring capabilities, or the slightest space faring aspirations, even N. Korea has signed the OST, showing that they recognize the value of planetary protection.
Hopefully when that happens, these entrepeneurs will not just give up, but instead put their efforts into work on viable space settlements e.g. in orbit around Mars exploring it via telepresence.
That would be awesome, to have a million people in orbit around Mars exploring it via telepresence with several million telerobotic avatars on the surface (you'd have several avatars to each person). And would most likely cost far less than sending them to the surface. It also eliminates the most dangerous phase of such a mission - landing humans on Mars. Instead you just land their avatars - and if one of those ships crashes - well you've lost a lot of expensive telerobotic avatars - but nobody has died.
They could use the Martian moons for materials, or indeed the NEOs or asteroid belt or further afield, to build their orbital colonies around Mars - so long as you are in no hurry, is relatively easy to move materials from just about anywhere in the solar system to anywhere else via repeated flybys and gravity assists.
I don't know if that would interest him though. Hope it would. Would be a major challenge also to do that without contaminating Mars but I think it could be done with great care and advancing technology.
About the Author
Robert Walker
Writer of articles on Mars and Space issues - Software Developer of Tune Smithy, Bounce Metronome etc.Studied at Wolfson College, Oxford
Lives in Isle of Mull
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