• Question: will we ever live on mars?

    Asked by curtis to Rob, Rebecca, Josh, Chris on 23 Jun 2015.
    • Photo: Chris Armstrong

      Chris Armstrong answered on 23 Jun 2015:

      I think we will, but never in great numbers.
      Similar to how we have a few people currently living in the ISS, I think it will primarily be a research hub where a few humans live for a year or so at a time to do Mars things.

      There’s numerous plans (including the hilariously terrible, Mars One mission) that talk about terraforming Mars to the point where it would be generally habitable but I don’t think any have traction, the smaller size of Mars means it can’t support the atmosphere we need to survive.

    • Photo: Rebecca Dewey

      Rebecca Dewey answered on 23 Jun 2015:

      I don’t think so personally. Mars is very cold and has very little atmosphere. It would take a lot of money and effort to make Mars a habitable place, and that’s not even taking into account how much it would cost to get there! I think we’re more likely to find ways to make Earth more able to support our growing population.

      There may well be some scientists who go to Mars for experiments, and live out the rest of their lives there – or they might go to the moon or (my personal favourite) Europa, one of the moons of Jupiter, that has been found to have the most likely conditions to support life of anywhere else in the solar system (other than Earth, of course!), but I wasn’t counting just living there for science experiments.

      We don’t know what will happen in the future for sure, but in my opinion, I think that by the time we have the technology (and the resources, including the cost) to make another world habitable, then we might have faster ways to travel through space, and so we might be looking at planets in other solar systems – but that is a long long long way in the future!

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