Gardening On Mars

Calopteryx writes "Following Obama's announcement of the intention to send humans to Mars by the mid-2030s, New Scientist reports on plans to piece together the elements of a starter kit for the first colonists of the Red Planet: 'The creation of a human outpost on Mars is still some way off, but that hasn't stopped us planning the garden.'"

Comments

Re:Why Mars and not the Moon?

[Locke2005]

Why would you want to go to all the trouble and energy of escaping the Earth's gravity well, only to drop back into another gravity well? I say we shoot for the asteroid belt -- it has both the necessary resources and easier access to them. Sure, it lacks gravity, but so does the moon.

Re:And

[CannonballHead]

continued survival of the worlds vegan population indicates that there are no major health problems with such a diet.

Don't you have to take supplements to make up for things missing in the vegan diet? I have read this several times in nutrition books, based on studies. And some of them were major health problems, depending on which supplement was not taken... especially for pregnancy.

Planetary visits are an obsolete idea

[bradbury]

The entire concept of planetary visits, colonies, etc. is the one of the most out-of-date (read waste-of-time) ideas currently circulating. The only people that promote it are those with misguided romantic ideas about humans exploring Mars as they did the Earth in the 16th-18th centuries. They should be discarded as out of date given that (a) humans are not designed (due to insufficient and error prone DNA repair systems in their genome) to endure long term space voyages or planetary habitation outside of the magnetosphere of the Earth (where high radiation doses are a constant threat); (b) progress in robotics and AI is likely to make sending robotic explorers much more productive and less hazardous than sending humans by 2030; and (c) if we pushed on molecular nanotechnology just a little harder by 2030 we would be disassembling Mars for material to build the Matrioshka Brain rather than thinking about growing food on it for colonists (no point building a farm if you are only going to disassemble it).

I like the romantic exploration ideas just as much as the next person -- but it just isn't justified given current rates of technological progress. It is also worth pointing out if we ever get to the point where we modify our genomes (or those of astronaut explorers) to be radiation tolerant we can also engineer them to be lack-of-gravity tolerant [1]. In which case living at the bottom of a gravity well makes no sense -- instead we should be migrating to O'Neill style colonies or long term interstellar "arks" (presumably to remove the "single-point-of-failure" problem humanity faces by living on a single planet or around a single star).

1. Modifying large numbers of cells to be radiation & lack-of-gravity tolerant in adults will be very hard (read nearly impossible) without molecular nanotechnology (e.g. chromallocytes) in adults. The only way to do this correctly is to breed a new species of human designed for space environments. Unless you can engineer them to mature much faster (doubtful) that implies you need to take transgenic-human-birth-dates + ~25-30 years before one can seriously consider long term exploration/colonization efforts.

Re:Planetary visits are an obsolete idea

[Anonymous Coward]

You know, I can't help but start laughing at this post;

While certainly true that humans are not biologically adapted to conditions on a long space voyage, Humans are not biologically adapted to crossing large oceans either. Nor are they biologically adapted to flying at high altitudes.

Humans routinely do these things though.

Something you might (or might not, given the tone of your post) find interesting:

http://pop.aip.org/phpaen/v14/i5/p053502_s1?isAuthorized=no
[abstract about inflation of magnetic fields using high density plasmas]

Essentially, you could create a massively inflated magnetic field around the spacecraft by circulating a high-velocity plasma jet through the magnetic field. If we are already taking a small fission plant with us (to power our craft as we leave the sun behind) this is less of a problem. Additionally, we could potentially use the same expanded magnetic field as a solar sail, since in space the field would expand to a *ahem* "Very considerable" size.

The major issue would be with micrometeorites.

As for Mars itself:

Mars as an incomplete magnetic envelope. It has multiple magnetic dipoles, that do not fully expand outside the planet's atmosphere. By supplementing the martian magnetosphere with a series of stabilizing plasma producing satellites, and capturing the solar wind particles and recirculating them through an artificial network of magnetic currents, a semi-stable magnetic envelope could possibly be produced, but it would require a project on par with our GPS and COM-SAT network around the earth.

(the goal would be to create something similar to the van-allen belts that circle the earth; being essentially solar wind particles that have become trapped in the earth;s magnetosphere, and which expand/enhance it. This phenomenon is well known; See for instance, Io's effect on Jupiter's magnetosphere.)

http://www.solarviews.com/eng/io.htm

Re:Why Mars and not the Moon?

[Skarecrow77]

Actually, Mars and the Moon aren't very similar at all other than the superficial difference of "they're both outside LEO, and neither one has an oxygen atmosphere". You can get better approximation of living and working on Mars in antarctica, or hell even Wyoming, than you can on the Moon.

The moon is absolutely positivly not a prerequsite for Mars. You certainly can (and should!) design hardware that simultaniously serves dual roles on both the Moon and Mars, in order to save expenses, but there is no "study" or "experimentation" that needs to be done on the moon to prepare us for Mars.

We had comprehensive, workable, plans based on existing (not future) hardware and technology to get to Mars since at least the mid 90s. We didn't do it because of internal NASA bickering and politics. Everybody thinks "oh we can't get to mars for X reason without Y technology". When you ask other scientists about X reason, they explain that X is bunk, and that the real reason the first group is so "concerned" with X reason is because Y technology is the pet project of that team.

Of course then this same second group explains to you that the REAL reason we can't get to Mars is because of reason Z, which will convinently be fixed by THEIR technology Q, which they could get finished quickly if only they had more funding.

It's all about getting funding for your pet project.