A lot of people know the name Elon Musk. They're even more familiar with the planet Mars. When you put the two together, you get SpaceX, a private company created by Musk that manufactures spacecrafts and provides space travel services with the goal to eventually travel to and colonize Mars. A lot of people are excited about the idea of space travel, and especially more about possibly living on another planet. But what happens when we get there?
After numerous talks about possible human life on Mars, my boyfriend and I figured that we'd end up living in dome cities, not able to go outside of them unless you wore a space suit. There would have to be artificial fields where we would grow crops and most likely the first people in space would be better off being vegetarians because we don't know about transporting animals like cows and pigs. Sure we've put dogs and monkeys in space but they're smaller than cows and they also didn't survive. We would also have to put in place a whole new time system, including a new calendar. A day on Mars is 24 hours and 37 Earth minutes and a full year on Mars is 687 days. What we consider a year on Earth wouldn't even be half a year on Mars and we may not even have Leap Years.
But then there's the idea of terraforming. Terraforming is the hypothetical idea where we take a planet and alter it's atmosphere, land, and/or ecology to turn the planet into another Earth. But it's entirely hypothetical and we're not even sure if we could really do it. But would it even matter to turn Mars - or any other planet for that matter - into another Earth if we'd end up treating it just like we do Earth? Would we waste it away and maybe use the excuse that we could terraform it back into a perfect Earth? Or would we think for a second and try to treat the second chance as a clean slate? Then I wonder why we wouldn't try to terraform Earth back to reverse some of the damage we've done.
But what if we do make it to Mars and just make little dome cities? Who would run these cities? Would there be an America, British, and maybe Russian colony all settled a good distance from each other? Or would they just be their own country? But even before thinking about who would run these cities, we have to send the right people. Planetary scientists who specialize in Mars and doctors would be the best people to send first. Obviously we'd send astronauts too, but Musk's plan is to send the every day person to Mars. Could a teacher of second grade math survive on Mars? Sure they would have people who'd be able to help them adjust to life, but would we send kids too? It takes years of training to get into space and we haven't even sent humans past the International Space Station in a long time, so would it be safe to send regular, everyday people to Mars without preparing them for an extremely long journey and then have them live on a planet whose atmosphere is vastly different than our own?
Eventually, children would be born on Mars too. They would be born used to Mars but would they be able to come back to Earth? A new movie called The Space Between Us plays with the idea that a human born on Mars wouldn't be able to survive very well on Earth because of the different atmospheres and I started to wonder if it would actually be a real problem with children born on Mars.
Traveling to Mars is far in our future and while I might be alive when the first people make it to Mars, there's a slim chance that I'll ever get there myself. With new money now being funded to NASA for Mars exploration and SpaceX working hard to get rockets into space, it seems like life on Mars isn't just a dream anymore. Maybe one day humans will create a country on Mars and we might be an interplanetary species, but there's still a lot of work to be done to ensure that we don't crash and burn on the way there.
