If you grew up watching a cartoon called the Jetsons, you might have expected to be traveling through the galaxy with a personal jet pack by now -- or a car-sized rocket.
In fact, mankind has been to the moon and sent several robots to Mars.
“Engine ignition, two, one, zero and liftoff as the countdown to Mars continues. The perseverance of humanity launching the next generation of robotic explorers to the red planet.”
But when authors Zach and Kelly Wienersmith looked closely at the question of when people might actually colonize Mars or the moon, they concluded we’re a long way off.
“After four years of research we realized there are a lot more problems to solve than just sending mass to space and getting humans there. There’s way more that we don’t know about yet.”
Kelly Wienersmith starts from the ground up, analyzing stuff that covers the moon. It’s called regolith.
“The dust on the moon doesn’t look like the dust on Earth, so if you put it under a microscope, it looks like sort of jagged, knife-like rocks and pieces of glass. It tends to clog up equipment. It’s electrostatic, so it tends to cling to things, and there’s some concern that if you breathe it scars your lungs, making it very hard to breathe.”
So we’d have to keep it out of our lunar homes, but – she says -- those homes might have to be covered with the regolith.
“I had imagined sci-fi-style habitats with glass, looking at the earth from the moon on your vacation, but space has a lot of radiation. Most of the proposals I see assume it’s going to be a problem, so they propose covering the habitat in meters of that regolith I was talking about to absorb the radiation before it gets into the habitat. So we’re going to move to the moon, and we’re going to live like moles or ants.”
And how would we feed ourselves in this hostile environment? Wienersmith told the host of a talk show produced by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation that we are carbon-based creatures who eat carbon-based food.
“Probably the most concentrated sources of carbon that you’ll find on the moon are the bags of feces and vomit left behind by the Apollo astronauts.”
In their book, she and her husband suggest life on Earth would be easier here, even if climate change or nuclear war wreak havoc.
“If you set off a nuclear weapon on Earth that would be bad. There would be radiation to deal with, but you could still go outside and breathe the air, which you couldn’t do in a place like the moon or Mars. There would still be water. There would still be crops. There’d be a lot of things that we take for granted.”
But in space, we will have to develop many new technologies to make life possible – systems that will be affordable and reliable despite the many challenges of operating far from Earth.
“All of the equations that we need to come up with these systems that can run on their own and can run without breaking for years at a time, we don’t have that stuff figured out completely yet.”
We’ll need ways to recycle our water, to generate energy and to reproduce.
“We know a little bit about geckos having sex and having babies in space. We know a little bit about rats and mice, and what we know is a little disconcerting, like the muscles are not strong enough after spending some time in free fall, and so there’s difficulty expelling the rat pups.”
To ensure survival of the human race, she adds, you would need a colony of more than 90 people – men and women of reproductive age who would agree to be assigned a mate.
“Your partner would always be chosen by a computer based on matches that would maximize genetic diversity.”
And Wienersmith doubts most people would be okay with that. The book is A City on Mars: Can We Settle Space, Should We Settle Space, and Have We Really Thought This Through.
Special thanks to ABC Conversations, Australian Broadcasting Corporation, for providing audio for this report. You can hear their full interview with Kelly Wienersmith at https://www.abc.net.au/listen/programs/conversations/kelly-weinersmith-life-on-mars-elon-musk/103519898
