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Asked by Matacton to Camilla, Dan, Katie, Mike, Rhys on 16 Jun 2015.
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Camilla Weiss answered on 16 Jun 2015:
Hi Matacton,
At the moment it would be very hard for humans to live on Mars, but not impossible. One problem is Mars doesn’t have a breathable atmosphere – it’s mostly carbon dioxide. We might be able to use this for fuel in some way but it means that humans will have to live specially oxygenated habitats. It’s possible that we can use any water on Mars and break it down into oxygen for us to breathe though, although the amount of water on Mars is still being researched.. We can grow food indoors under artificial lighting so that might not be too much of a problem. Another big problem is radiation – Mars isn’t as protected from space radiation and cosmic rays as we are on Earth. This means anywhere that humans live will have to be heavily shielded. All these issues are solvable though with a good amount of engineering and science but I think it will be a long time before large amounts of people are living comfortably there.
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Katie Sparks answered on 16 Jun 2015:
Living on Mars would be hard, it doesn’t have an atmosphere we can breathe and it is much colder than Earth, especially on a night. It takes a long time to get there, around 9 months, so your body would have to be able to cope with that, at the moment, 6 months is a really long time and your body takes a long time to recover.
There’s also not a lot of water (if any) on Mars, so growing things would be hard, we’d have to take our own water and work out a way of making more.
Also, there isn’t any way of getting back….
Basically, there are lots of things to overcome, but it’s not impossible.
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