Don’t get me wrong. I’m all for space exploration, and the recent achievements of private companies like SpaceX get me really excited about what the near future of space travel will bring.
Being able to visit Mars as a tourist is probably something that people who are alive today will get to experience. That would be awesome.
Setting up the first Mars colony would probably be incredibly satisfying and fulfilling work for those who get to perform that task. Much awesomeness there too.
But once the basic infrastructure of the first Mars colony is established, why would anyone choose to live, permanently, on Mars? To me, it would be similar to living in the most remote, isolated and barren desert on earth. No one talks about how amazing that would be, so why would it be any more appealing if you were doing it hundreds of million of kilometres away?
There are people who willingly live and work in places like an Antarctica for years and years. Antarctica, by the way, probably does qualify as “the most remote, isolated and barren desert on earth”. Probably only a small minority of people would fall into that category, which is just as well, because there are a very limited number of slots for such an endeavor.
Curiosity, I guess - I mean, I’d love to go there to explore firsthand, and maybe have a chance at being the person (or part of the group) that discovers evidence that there was once life there, but for me, the curiosity isn’t sufficient to outweigh the fact that it would be a one way trip. However, it’s statistically almost an inevitability that for some people, that equation weighs to a different result.
Mars wouldn’t be worth going to if you could get there as easily as walking to the corner store. It’s a cold, dim, dusty and suffocating wasteland. The idea that it’s worth going to because it is so costly in time, money and quite possibly lives to get there is insane.
I’d go, if I were younger and single, even if it were one-way. Only a minority of people are doing anything that meaningful, while being stuck on earth.
I once read a fascinating thread* about daily life for the staff living in the Antartic research station.
In the restrooms, there are large containers full of condoms, for anyone to take for free…
Just sayin’…
*It was on the somethingawful.com forums a few years ago. You can search there if you’re a paid member, which I’m not
It would be possible to construct an environment here on earth, where people could live pretty much the way they’d have to live on Mars. I understand there is little demand for it, and if any exist, there are few tenants. Except those sent there by not very lenient judges. Basically, the reason for that is that Mars is a shithole, and nobody wants to live iike that.
Yes, there’s the adventure. But your day to day life is stuck in a tiny crowded artificial environment, where if anything goes wrong you’ll die.
And going outside requires wearing elaborate survival gear. So imagine never being able to go outside again, for the rest of your life. Even in Antarctica you can go out for a walk and feel the wind on your face for a few hours when you get cabin fever. On Mars you have to strap your cabin on your back and carry it with you.
Living in a shack on Baffin Island for the rest of your life isn’t something that would appeal to most people. Yes, Mars isn’t the same as Baffin Island. It’s a lot more inhospitable. The summit of Mt Everest is warmer and the air is better. Yes, there’s the adventure, but you have to really want to accomplish something that can only be accomplished on Mars before it would be worthwhile.
There is one aspect about permanent habitation on Mars that the vast majority of people seem to neglect; setting aside issues like lack of pressure, exposure to much higher levels of UV, charged particle, and cosmic radiation, the lack of nitrates in the soil requiring many tons of fertilizer material to be imported (presumably from Earth unless we can find or synthesize them from in situ resources), et cetera, the 0.38 g acceleration of Mars natural gravity make have serious long-term detrimental effects on the human body, especially the cardiovasculare and musculoskeletal system, but observation from freefall physiology has also provided significant evidence of effects on the cellular level including degradation of energy storage capability and function of the immune system.
In terms of socialization and comfort, Mars would such or not insofar as basic needs are provided and a suitable population of personalities is present. There would be no walking under open skies, of course, which I would find personally abhorent, but there are people who are fine living nearly all of their lives indoors. However, for long term habitation off-Earth, solar orbiting habitats are a far more sensible objective, both from practical and aesthetic perspectives; these could be spun to generate pseudogravity via centrifugal motion, and could be made large enough to provide vast open spaces using in situ resources providing the best possible simulacrum of terrestrial habitation compared to outposts on any planet or moon in our solar system.
Consider how much information there must be on an entire planet. Mars will keep hundreds of scientists busy conducting useful research for decades.
But that doesn’t require people to live permanently on Mars. People could go to Mars, work there for a number of years, and then return to Earth. Some might even spend their entire career there before retiring to Earth. There’s no reason to think of a trip to Mars as being one-way.
Like others, I’d have done it when I was younger, but wouldn’t now. I don’t like the health effects of lower gravity, although we’ve never spent 6-12 months on Mars so we don’t know what the health effects would be exactly. Maybe in another ten years or so I’d go as a one-way trip, since I’d be getting older and not planning on living all that much longer anyway.
I’d much prefer life in a large rotating orbiting colony, but that will be more complicated and expensive than building a dome or something on the moon or Mars, so we’ll probably build a lunar or Mars colony first. It’s good practice, but not much of a long-term solution to anything if permanent colonization is the goal.
Being able to walk under open skies is nice, but I wish people would get over the idea we need to find a new planet. We aren’t going to find a planet with Earth normal gravity for many thousands of years most likely and by that time we’ll have adapted to living in space.
If I had to move to another planet, I think a floating city above Venus might be a nice trade off between a surface base and orbiting colony. At certain altitudes, the temperature, gravity and air pressure is comparatively comfortable, as long as your AC doesn’t break and you don’t mind a little sulphuric acid during your morning walks.
