Reality of Martian Living. Part 2

Courtesy NASA

I like creative story telling.  I also like movies and TV.  Not everything Hollywood produces is good, but people have different definitions about good and bad.  I won’t get into a discussion about your preference in entertainment.  That is a short way of saying I like Archer (FX’s animated spy comedy).  If you do, or do not, like or watch Archer is not the point.  What is the point is that for the Season 3 finally of Archer they did a two-part story in space.  One of the central plot points revolved around tricking the female protagonist into accepting the mission so she could bear the children of a mutinous crew on an orbiting space station that was being hijacked to Mars.  

The reasoning mutineers used was soon Earth would be overpopulated, in constant war, but using the lessons learned on the space station; enlightened explorers could terraform Mars, and then explore the stars.  That is fictional entertainment on television.  However, it isn’t a dream held by a single writer of a television show.  Many people would jump at the chance to live Mars.  I am not one of them.  I used to be, but then I learned a few trivial facts, and promptly changed my mind.  

Mars One is a Dutch organization trying to get people to invest in the dream of launching, not just a manned mission but, a permanent colony on our little red neighbor planet.  The idea is highly intriguing, until you learn more about their plan.  It involves sending four people every two years to live on mars.  The catch is that you, and your remains, will stay there forever.  Once you leave, you’re never coming back.  This fact puts a damper on things.  Even pioneers of the American West had the option of going back where they came from if things didn’t work out.  While the idea of visiting Mars is laudable, permanent residency is not quite as feasible as you might first think.   

Let’s get one thing straight.  I am not saying that a mission to Mars is impossible, impractical, or insane.  I am simply stating that this isn’t reasonable to believe that establishing a colony there makes any long-term sense.  I could use this blog to single out one particular proposal, like Mars One, but that would be missing the point.  This is about permanent living on Mars, not any particular proposal.

Mars is not Earth, and there are key things that differentiate the two.  Earth has an abundance of life.  It’s so abundant that we haven’t even cataloged it all.  We are still looking to see if Mars has EVER had even rudimentary life.  Earth has an oxygen rich atmosphere that supports that life.  Mars has an atmosphere, but it is 100 times thinner than Earth’s.  Earth has liquid water in abundance.  The only water we have found on Mars is in ice form.  Earth has a protective magnetic field, but Mars doesn’t.  Temperature is a different story.  Mars can be quite nice with temperatures as high as 90 degrees Fahrenheit (32 Celsius), but can see temperatures as low as -190 F.  Earth also has abundant resources that Mars does not appear to have.  All of these factors make life possible on Earth, and yet not Mars.

Let’s start with the atmosphere.  Humans need oxygen in order to live.  Without it, we will die in minutes.  Mars has oxygen in its atmosphere, but it is a fraction of the minor gases that make up only 1% of the air.  On Earth, oxygen makes up around 20% of the air.  Carbon Dioxide (CO2) makes up 95% of the air on Mars.  With the atmosphere being so much thinner, humans must use pressurized space suits, buildings, and spacecraft in order to live on the surface.  Making the atmosphere breathable would take an enormous volume of gas.  We wouldn’t be able to transplant enough of our own air onto Mars to make both planets habitable, so terraforming would have to use resources already existing on the planet, and everything we have learned about Mars suggests that sufficient quantities of those resources do not exist.  Since Terraforming is impractical, residents would live their lives in the limited confines of whatever colony they could build.

Water would be the next priority.  Without water, humans can only live about three days.  There is water on Mars, but scientists can’t agree on how much is actually there, or if it is even in a potable form.  There are indications that it might exist in liquid form, but there hasn’t been conclusive proof.  The polar icecaps have seasonal water in the form of ice, but they are primarily composed of ice in the form of CO2 (dry ice).  There is water ice just underground but it's unknown just how much is there.  Without a sufficient source of water, any settlement would be impossible to sustain.  It wouldn’t be just for drinking either.  Large quantities of water would be needed for sanitation, cooking, manufacturing and, most critically, irrigation.  What is unknown is how much would be lost to the soil or atmosphere.  You could make things as efficiently as possible, but you would still lose a percentage to the environment.  Over time, this percentage would significantly affect the colony, and it would need to be replenished.  Since any colony would be required to be as self-sustaining as possible, Mars would have to be the source of that water.   The only problem I can see is that we don’t fully understand the water cycle on Mars, so we don’t know how finite the existing supply is.   This would be a barrier to any permanent outpost.

By far the greatest barrier is the lack of a magnetic field.  Evidence suggests that Mars once had a magnetic field, along with a thick atmosphere and water.  Some scientists theorize that four billion years ago it lost the magnetic field, and along with it, most of its water and atmosphere.  Magnetic fields are extremely important to life bearing planets, because they keep the solar weather from affecting the surface.  

Sun Storm! Courtesy NASA

CME from SOHO. Courtesy NASA

At this point, I need to emphasize that the sun creates weather.  Every planet with an atmosphere has weather because of the energy of the sun, but the sun’s weather doesn’t stop at the edge of a planet’s atmosphere.  The sun continually loses a staggering amount of mass every second, and since matter can’t be created or destroyed it has to go somewhere.  It streams away from the sun out into the solar system in the form of charged particles that we call the solar wind.  Sometimes the sun loses mass in the form of a solar flare.  Solar flares are storms on the sun.  Sometimes these flares spew out a wave of charged particles in the form of a Coronal Mass Ejection or CME.  These storms hit any planet in their path, and can affect it with varying intensity.  Some storms are more powerful than others are.  A single solar storm, such as one caused by and X class flare (most powerful); can hit planets with billions of kilowatts worth of energy.  The vast majority of that is deflected or absorbed by our magnetosphere and upper atmosphere.  On Earth, we get beautiful auroras, but the more dire consequences involve disruptions to our communications, electronics, and power grids.  The Carrington event in 1859 sent auroras as far south as the Caribbean, caused disruptions in telegraph operations, including shocking operators and sparking fires.   

The surface of Mars is affected by solar weather, and solar storms become an additional hazard to anyone living there.  Granted, the solar weather isn’t as strong by the time it reaches Mars, but it is still powerful enough to be a significant risk.  It would be imperative for any colony to keep close tabs on the sun’s weather, so they could take appropriate precautions.  If the storm was powerful enough, it could pose serious risks of radiation exposure, damage electronics, cripple power systems, and destroy life support.  This would be an extremely rare event, but one that would be a crisis that could put lives in jeopardy.

Solar storms don’t happen all the time, and occur in cycles.  Sometimes the sun is quite active, like it is now, or it can be quiet, going long periods without any CME’s.  Colonists wouldn’t be exposed to higher doses of radiation only during solar storms, but they would constantly be bombarded by radiation greater than they would on Earth.  This wouldn’t kill the colonists outright, but it would increase their risk of cancer.  How great that risk would be isn’t an exact science.  Population studies would have to be done over time to determine the statistical probability that people would get cancer. 

Unfortunately, we don’t have any data on the risk of cancer, because we haven’t conducted any experiments regarding this outside Earth’s magnetic field.  No one can say for certain what the risks of this exposure would be over a prolonged time.  We have educated guesses, but nothing concrete.  All we can say is that the exposure will increase, and take as many precautions as possible.  

One thing I haven’t mentioned up until now is soil.  We normally don’t think of soil as being anything other than earth, but it is more than that.  For soil to grow plants, it needs nutrients, particularly nitrogen.  Although much of the nitrogen modern farmer’s use is synthetic, most nitrogen used by plants is made by symbiotic organisms.  Mars doesn’t have these organisms, which means that the colonists would have to do one of two things.  1) Import fertilizer from Earth, or 2) Import the organisms and seed Mars.  

This brings us to the issue of human impact on the planet.  Our current standard of living leaves a significant impact on our planet.  We mine minerals, use non-renewable resources, and create pollution.  It doesn’t matter how hard we try, it is inevitable that any colony will have an impact on Mars.  The colonists will produce trash, sewage, and gaseous emissions.  Of course, they will do their best to limit all of that with recycling and frugal practices, but pollution in some form is inevitable.  They will have to use resources like Martian soil, and available minerals for anything that is manufactured or produced.  As scarce as water is on Mars, they will be forced to use what is available to supplement their long-term supply.  All of that will have an impact, but what that impact will be is anyone’s guess.

If microbes are introduced to the Martian soil, to facilitate the nitrogen cycle for crops, it will change the planet.  It is something that would need to be addressed, and the obvious ethics of introducing a foreign organism would have to be answered.  Unfortunately, we don’t even know if that is even possible.  There are indications that the soil could be used to grow food, but no one knows for sure.  They don’t even know if microbes could survive the conditions on Mars.  It’s only theory at this point.

What are these colonists going to do with their time, other than just try to survive?  Certainly, there is a lot of research that can be done, but research is only as valuable as its results.  Private industry will only support research they can use to produce a product or service they can sell.  Pure research is usually funded by governments.  This is because pure research does not produce a product or service, but it makes those products possible.  

Since research won’t support the colony alone, something else has to finance these expensive ventures.  Mars One hopes to pay for it by selling broadcast rights.  Being in the broadcast industry gives me a little bit of insight to this, and I’m not sure this will bring in as much money as they are counting on.  I could write an entire blog about broadcast programs and audiences (a required course for my BS in communications), but what I won’t in this article.  All I will say is that all TV shows eventually run their course.  TV shows have their audiences, and what plays in one country, might not be successful in another.  That leaves the exploitation of Martian resources as a possible means of revenue, but that raises all kinds of environmental and ethical questions (which I’m not going to discuss).

Government funded projects are subject to the whims of politics.  Projects can fall out of favor, and expensive ventures can lose funding if they become unpopular.  Governments have to fund projects that are most likely to produce the most useful data.  A colony funded by a nation, or a coalition of nations, would likely last for a little while, but would be under constant threat of losing its funding.

That begs the question of who will ultimately fund an outpost on Mars.  I don’t believe that the private sector or governments will be able to manage to pay for a colony as separate entities.  More than likely, it will have to be a combination of both private and public funds that will need a comprehensive and profitable business model in order to sustain a permanent colony.

What is unknown is the long-term viability of a colony.  Even if it manages to overcome the environmental and financial hurdles, how long can it maintain itself?  What happens when it runs out of financial backing on Earth?  Could it sustain itself completely independent of Earth?  While it may be possible, I highly doubt it.  When and if the colony fails what happens to the colonists?  Will society mount a rescue mission, or do we let them fend for themselves?  Who will pay for a rescue mission if it is a bankrupt private enterprise?  If the expedition were to go bankrupt there would be no choice, but to send a rescue mission financed by government.  I am of the opinion that it isn’t a matter of if the venture would fail, but when.

The most daunting problem is one that is difficult to quantify.  How the will all the difficulties encountered affect the colonists on a psychological level?  Certainly there have been numerous studies on the effects of isolation and living in a confined space have on humans, but all of the tests have either been on Earth, or based on a finite amount of time spent in space.  No one has ever ventured beyond the moon, or left Earth permanently, so we don’t know.  We don’t know what it will be like to struggle every day for the most basic needs, like breathable air, potable water, and a reliable food source.  How do you cope with the fact that you will likely never see your relatives face to face again?  What happens when someone suffers a mental or emotional breakdown?  Can any person remain sane under conditions that force you to solve complex problems just to survive?  Eventually the day-to-day struggle would wear on the most stalwart individual.  A single colonist suffering from crippling depression, PTSD, or a psychosis would threaten the colony.  You could try to weed out the individuals most likely to suffer from a mental breakdown, but you wouldn’t be able to eliminate the risk.  There is simply no way of knowing what will push a person over their individual psychological limit.  There are just too many examples of people that have done things that were uncharacteristic of their normal behavior.

A permanent colony is a nice thought, but I think it will never be a practical reality.  There are just too many financial, environmental, ethical, and physical barriers to make living on Mars a reality.  There is only one planet in our solar system capable of sustaining life in a manner that isn’t a daily struggle for the most basic needs, and it isn’t Mars.  As much as we may want to find a new planet, and start civilization off with a clean slate it just isn’t practical.  We might be able to support an outpost on a short-term basis, but permanent won’t work.