Colonizing Mars - very difficult. That is to say - a few billionaires could set up home there - but is never in near future going to be a place for ordinary folk without massive subsidies.
If you didn't call it Mars, but just asked someone
Do you want to go live in a place with
But call it "Mars" and the romance of films about Mars and its long history of fascination for Earth and suddenly lots of people want to go there. But think they are inspired by films and stories, and Star trek Sci. Fi. and ideas of a Mars like Barsoom with an oxygen rich atmosphere and interesting aliens lumbering around it :). Even if they know it is not like that - somehow that still has an influence on their thinking.
Plus just the mystique of a place that no-one has visited - same for the Moon. But that would soon fade - if anyone sets foot on Mars - that pioneer immediately destroys that mystique and it becomes a visited place, and the reality would set in that in reality it is a hostile place not at all suitable for setting up home.
So, there has to be a reason for going there. And - so far anyway - there is nothing on Mars that is worth the expense of returning it to Earth.
Terraforming Mars is a multi millennia project with many things to go wrong. Personally I think, though it's great to think about the ideas and work them out in detail, we shouldn't attempt it until we have shown that we are a stable civilization likely to keep our technology for millennia.
And we have some responsibility to our descendants not to mess up Mars. Maybe at some point they will need it, and will know how to terraform it properly - or will have something else they want to do with it that we haven't imagined yet. If so highly unlikely anything we do now will make it a better place for our descendants tens or hundreds or thousands of generations into the future with the knowledge they would have then.
Also, it doesn't make sense as the "next step for humanity" when you can build a Stanford Torus for 10,000 people in a few decades, for far less cost than terraforming Mars, and when the asteroid belt has enough material to build Stanford Torus habitats with a thousand times the surface area of Mars.
So that leaves scientific exploration. But arguably it's not at all a good idea for humans to visit the surface of Mars to explore it - because - the thing that is of most interest about Mars is its potential for discovery of past and present day life.
Our rovers are carefully sterilized to make sure we don't introduce Earth life to the planet - and the guiding principle is that an individual mission should have less than a 1 in 10,000 chance of introducing life to the planet.
A crash landing of a human occupied ship on Mars would count as an immediate fail in planetary protection, and that can never be reduced to less than 1 in 10,000 with present day or near future predictable technology.
So - I think no need to look further - personally I feel no way should we colonize the Mars surface or send any human there right now. But we might well be able to explore it from orbit around Mars via telepresence using tools like the Virtuix Omni - the omnidirecitonal platform used for gaming - and the Occulus Rift so you feel as if you really are there on the surface - more "there" than you would be in a clumsy spacesuit and with the dark reddish light of the sun percolating through the perpetual fine dust in the Mars atmosphere obscuring colours to human eyes.
Also the only study I know of that compares telepresence exploration of Mars with human surface exploration found that a single mission to Mars orbit using telepresence can explore the surface of Mars more thoroughly than three missions of the same size of crew to the surface exploring it with humans in spacesuits and driving rovers.
So - if main focus is science return - even if you could somehow solve the contamination problem (and I don't see how you can do that) - it would still make sense to go to orbit instead. NASA should do a follow up study, they never have as far as I know - but am pretty sure it would come to the same conclusion, even more so now, with rapid development of telerobotics.
But why even consider the surface when it greatly increases the risk of contaminating Mars?
There are ideas that we could go to the surface of Mars "once the present biological exploration phase is over" - but - ExoMars in 2018 is going to be the first rover sent to Mars with a reasonable hope of detecting past and present Mars on the surface unambiguously - according to current understanding of Mars surface. So the biological exploration phase hasn't really started quite yet. And if we find interesting Mars originated life, then some at least think we should never send humans there. There are also issues for terraforming and the potential accidental transformation of Mars by introducing life via a human mission there.
If you didn't call it Mars, but just asked someone
Do you want to go live in a place with
- Almost no air,
- Night time temperatures cold enough for CO2 to freeze out as dry ice,
- Your house needs to have 4.5 tons per square meter of radiation shielding all around it and probably no windows, just view screens - or tiny windows
- Your house must be built like a tank to withstand ten tons per square meter of outward pressure
- Your house will last for a few decades then needs to be replaced
- You have to make all your oxygen from ice and will depend on machines to scrub CO2 and other gases from the air
- You can only go outside if you wear complex machinery around you and if that machinery fails, or you tear your suit you die
- When you go outside - then you run a small but significant risk of cancer which builds up the longer you stay out of doors
- Your house will cost perhaps a hundred or a thousand times a house on Earth
- There is no land to grow crops - you will have to make your own soil and it needs to be covered in greenhouses also solidly built to withstand tons of outward pressure.
But call it "Mars" and the romance of films about Mars and its long history of fascination for Earth and suddenly lots of people want to go there. But think they are inspired by films and stories, and Star trek Sci. Fi. and ideas of a Mars like Barsoom with an oxygen rich atmosphere and interesting aliens lumbering around it :). Even if they know it is not like that - somehow that still has an influence on their thinking.
Plus just the mystique of a place that no-one has visited - same for the Moon. But that would soon fade - if anyone sets foot on Mars - that pioneer immediately destroys that mystique and it becomes a visited place, and the reality would set in that in reality it is a hostile place not at all suitable for setting up home.
So, there has to be a reason for going there. And - so far anyway - there is nothing on Mars that is worth the expense of returning it to Earth.
Terraforming Mars is a multi millennia project with many things to go wrong. Personally I think, though it's great to think about the ideas and work them out in detail, we shouldn't attempt it until we have shown that we are a stable civilization likely to keep our technology for millennia.
And we have some responsibility to our descendants not to mess up Mars. Maybe at some point they will need it, and will know how to terraform it properly - or will have something else they want to do with it that we haven't imagined yet. If so highly unlikely anything we do now will make it a better place for our descendants tens or hundreds or thousands of generations into the future with the knowledge they would have then.
Also, it doesn't make sense as the "next step for humanity" when you can build a Stanford Torus for 10,000 people in a few decades, for far less cost than terraforming Mars, and when the asteroid belt has enough material to build Stanford Torus habitats with a thousand times the surface area of Mars.
So that leaves scientific exploration. But arguably it's not at all a good idea for humans to visit the surface of Mars to explore it - because - the thing that is of most interest about Mars is its potential for discovery of past and present day life.
Our rovers are carefully sterilized to make sure we don't introduce Earth life to the planet - and the guiding principle is that an individual mission should have less than a 1 in 10,000 chance of introducing life to the planet.
A crash landing of a human occupied ship on Mars would count as an immediate fail in planetary protection, and that can never be reduced to less than 1 in 10,000 with present day or near future predictable technology.
So - I think no need to look further - personally I feel no way should we colonize the Mars surface or send any human there right now. But we might well be able to explore it from orbit around Mars via telepresence using tools like the Virtuix Omni - the omnidirecitonal platform used for gaming - and the Occulus Rift so you feel as if you really are there on the surface - more "there" than you would be in a clumsy spacesuit and with the dark reddish light of the sun percolating through the perpetual fine dust in the Mars atmosphere obscuring colours to human eyes.
Also the only study I know of that compares telepresence exploration of Mars with human surface exploration found that a single mission to Mars orbit using telepresence can explore the surface of Mars more thoroughly than three missions of the same size of crew to the surface exploring it with humans in spacesuits and driving rovers.
So - if main focus is science return - even if you could somehow solve the contamination problem (and I don't see how you can do that) - it would still make sense to go to orbit instead. NASA should do a follow up study, they never have as far as I know - but am pretty sure it would come to the same conclusion, even more so now, with rapid development of telerobotics.
But why even consider the surface when it greatly increases the risk of contaminating Mars?
There are ideas that we could go to the surface of Mars "once the present biological exploration phase is over" - but - ExoMars in 2018 is going to be the first rover sent to Mars with a reasonable hope of detecting past and present Mars on the surface unambiguously - according to current understanding of Mars surface. So the biological exploration phase hasn't really started quite yet. And if we find interesting Mars originated life, then some at least think we should never send humans there. There are also issues for terraforming and the potential accidental transformation of Mars by introducing life via a human mission there.
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
4.8m answer views110.4k this month
Top Writer2017, 2016, and 2015
Published WriterHuffPost, Slate, and 4 moreHuffPost, Slate, Forbes, Newsweek, Business Insider, and Science 2.0