A home called Mars

Do you really want to live out the rest of your life on Mars? This is the premise (and promise) of a project by a Dutch organisation called Mars One, which aims to settle humans in a permanent colony on the Red Planet by 2025. In essence, it will be a one way ticket to Mars, because bringing them back to Earth will cost even more than sending the first astronauts there.

More than 200,000 people applied for a place on the US$ 6 billion mission which the Dutch non-profit organisers plan to film for a reality television series. The original applicants were whittled down to 660 last year and to the final 50 men and 50 women this month through a series of filmed interviews.

People have been shortlisted from around the world, including 39 from the Americas, 31 from Europe, 16 from Asia, seven from Africa and seven from Oceania.

The shortlisted candidates will now be tested in groups to test their responses to stressful situations before finding out at the end of the year if they have made the list of 24 people chosen for the mission.

But why Mars? The Red Planet, named after the Roman God of War, is not at all fit enough for human habitation, being little more than a desert wasteland with no running water.

Nevertheless, it is our closest celestial neighbour apart from the Moon and the easiest to reach even with known propulsion technologies. This Mars deserves our long term attention.

Inhospitable

The first settlers will really have to wage a war against the inhospitable plant to settle in. There is evidence that water once flowed on the surface of Mars but those days are long gone. However, its polar ice caps do contain water, which will be very difficult to extract at first. In fact, the volume of water ice in the south polar ice cap, if melted, would be sufficient to cover the entire planetary surface to a depth of 11 metres.

Mars is much smaller than earth, a factor which may work in favour of the first few settlers. It is, in fact the second smallest plant in the Solar System. Since Mars does not have any oceans, the land area is almost equal to the extent of dry land here on Earth.

Another favourable factor is that the length of a Martian day is also almost 24 hours. Of all the planets in the Solar System, the seasons of Mars are the most Earth-like, due to the similar tilts of the two planets’ rotational axes.

The lengths of the Martian seasons are about twice those of Earth's because Mars’ greater distance from the Sun leads to the Martian year being about two Earth years long.

Martian surface temperatures vary from lows of about - 143 °C at the polar caps to highs of up to 35 °C in equatorial summer. The first settlers will have to battle these adverse weather conditions as well, apart from the lack of anything resembling an atmosphere. Thus cumbersome protective suits will have to be worn at all times when they work outside their modules.

Criticism

Although there is every chance that the project may never get off the ground at least in the envisaged form (NASA has separate ambitions to send men to Mars), the scientific community already has a wealth of information from a number of orbiters and rovers that can be passed off to the would-be explorers.

The project, as expected, has drawn a lot of criticism. Last year, researchers at Massachusetts Institute of Technology found that any manned mission to Mars would result in the crew dying after 68 days, while other critics have pointed out that the estimated cost of Mars One is a fraction of the amount proposed by NASA.In any case, before any humans are sent to Mars, the Dutch organisation plans to send a robotic lander and communications satellite to the planet.

If that goes well, the next step will be to send an “intelligent” rover to scope out a landing spot for habitation modules and life support systems which will be sent up on rockets before the first humans arrive.

Dutch entrepreneur Bas Lansdorp, co-founder of Mars One, was quoted as saying: “The large cut in candidates is an important step towards finding out who has the right stuff to go to Mars. These aspiring Martians provide the world with a glimpse into who the modern day explorers will be.”

The shortlisted 100 now face a series of tests to assess how well they work in groups under pressure. Part of their training will take place within a simulated Martian environment right here on Earth. Candidates not selected will have a chance to reapply in a new application round that will open in 2015.

Resolve

Regardless of whether we ever go Mars (my opinion is they will at some point), there is one question about Mars that will take some time to resolve: Does life exist on Mars, in any form ? Mars surely does not have any ‘intelligent’ life now, but there could be microscopic forms of life in some places on Mars. Life forms have been found thriving in some if the most inhospitable environments on Earth. Thus it can safely be assumed that such life forms could exist elsewhere in the Solar System. If life does not exist, can we help ‘create’ it on Mars? This process is called Terraformation, where Mars (or any other planet) is transformed into another Earth in a process that spans thousands of years over hundreds of generations.

It will not be an easy or inexpensive process, but Man does need another nearby home in the galaxy before he can even think of leaving the solar system to explore other planets in deep space.

Terraformation will make human habitation much safer and self-sustainable. In this light, Mars One may have taken the first baby steps necessary to explore our celestial neighbour, which may one day be our second home.