Bakersfield.
Okay, okay. It’s just like McKittrick, CA. Yes, that pic pretty much shows the entire town!
Would it suck worse than living in North Korea?
At least in North Korea you know why things are terrible; there’s is just no reason that Fresno sucks as hard as it does.
Stranger
I see this comment frequently and have never understood it. Radiation in space is certainly significant compared to earth but not an immediate danger. Further, it has rarely if ever, until recently, been measured. Here is one of the recent actual studies of the issue:
I can imagine people of a certain extremist libertarian mindset wanting to do it as a way to escape what they see as the oppression of Earth goverments.
I’m thinking of the type of person who wants to live on something like the Freedom Ship, or someplace like what the failed Galt’s Gulch in Chile was supposed to be.
Of course they’d be disappointed because any startup Mars colony would have to be a repressive environment with many strict rules and rationing in order to simply survive.
Good point; North Korea would be a libertarian paradise by comparison.
Freefall and .38g are not the same thing, of course. The issues you mention might well be a problem on Mars but I’d imagine they’d be less so than in pure freefall.
Your point about a space habitat being a better choice (since “gravity” could be created by a spinning habitat) is certainly well taken and I’m not quibbling with that, though there’s the fact that in space, EVERYTHING has to be imported. On the surface of Mars, there are at least some natural resources - e.g. building walls might be fabricated out of the sand, allowing for easier expansion.
I think the biggest problem would be that it’s very, very difficult to have a completely closed environment be sustainable long-term. Witness the Biosphere experiments. . It all sounds great in science fiction stories but those that go into much detail at all place SIGNIFICANT emphasis on the chores related to the plants / animals that are used to make it habitable.
Doesn’t it take something like 5 years just to travel there?
A decade of travel time probably invalidates any concept of “tourist”.
It doesn’t take any particular amount of time to travel there, since there are no existing systems that would allow humans to travel to Mars.
But it wouldn’t take years even for a minimum energy Hohmann transfer orbit. Done at the correct launch window such a trip would only take 8.5 months between Earth and Mars.
That’s still way to long for Mars tourism. Especially since you’ll have to wait around on Mars for a while until the next minimum energy launch window back to Earth, and the return trip will again take another 8.5 months.
So a trip from Earth to Mars and back to Earth is going to take something on the order of 2 years.
3 months is more like it at least for orbiters/rovers
Maybe I was remembering commentary on the Europa Report film (though it looks like was about 2 years in the film). Apparently, the travel time there is in the 5-6 year range, for NASA’s planned mission.
I think there are quite a few problems that living on Mars presents.
Like others said, never going outside.
Returning to Earth would be a (literal) pain. Three months to get there, three months back, and Mars is about one-third g, so that’s half a year of bone loss and muscle atrophy to have to build back up, more so if you actually stick around for a while.
Even assuming a magical method of terraforming (so you could go outside), it wouldn’t be comfortable. Mars is too far outside the green zone. The most you could hope for would be high 50 degrees Fahrenheit. Probably cooler. If you like that kind of weather, that’s fine.
But Mars doesn’t have an iron core, so it doesn’t have a magnetic field. That ties into two things: an increase in cosmic rays (you already got a heck of a dose on the trip here and back), and the fact that the Martian atmosphere is slowly bleeding away (undoing all your magical terraforming. Damn you, physics!).
Then there’s the very high likelihood that the first colonists will die. It’s a new colony in a method that’s never been done before, and the potential for disasters is enormous. Traditionally (just thinking of early American colonies here), that’s not a good recipe for survival.