Oon Yeoh
People have always been interested in Mars. There have been countless comic books, radio shows and movies about the red planet. In recent years, there have emerged various plans to actually colonise Mars, possibly within a generation. Some think it’s doable – and indeed, a necessity – while others think it’s a foolhardy plan.
Renewed focus and excitement about Mars were triggered by the successful landing of NASA’s InSight lander late last month after a journey of six years and nearly 500 million kilometres.
InSight’s mission has little to do with the colonisation of Mars or even preparation for it. InSight stands for Interior Exploration Using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport. As its name implies, it will study the Martian underworld, listening for tremors and collecting data on the interiors of that planet.
“Mars is an incredible natural laboratory right next door to Earth,” Lori Glaze, the acting director of NASA's planetary sciences division, said during a news briefing late last month. “We really want to understand how we came up with this diversity of rocky planets in our solar system — they're all very different, each one of them is unique in its own way, and trying to understand how they ended up so differently is a really important question.”
A seismometer deployed by a robot arm will listen for tremors. Another instrument, a heat probe, will burrow five metres into the ground and measure the rate at which heat rises through the planet. Antennas on the lander will track its position so that scientists can deduce how much Mars wobbles on its axis. (The amount of wobble reflects the size of the planet’s core and whether it’s molten or solid).
MUSK’S PLANS FOR MARS
Perhaps to capitalise on the buzz over InSight, the news site Axios released a trailer for an interview it had done with Tesla founder Elon Musk, a day before InSight was scheduled to land late last month. Musk’s SpaceX program envisions a settlement on Mars within a few years.
“I know exactly what to do,” Musk said in the interview. “I’m talking about moving there.” Musk is confident he can make it happen but that doesn’t mean he thinks it’ll be easy. History has shown that even sending an unmanned probe to Mars has been a big challenge. So far only 40 per cent of Mars missions by various international space agencies have been successful.
NASA is the only one to have succeeded in a landing (the most recent one prior to InSight was the Curiosity rover in 2012). In 2016, the European Space Agency attempted to put its own probe on Mars, but it crashed into the surface.
Musk added that he thought the ad for going to Mars would be like Shackleton’s ad for going to the Antarctic. Musk was referring to an apocryphal newspaper ad that Sir Ernest Shackleton supposedly placed in the Times of London newspaper which read: “Men wanted for hazardous journey, small wages, bitter cold, long months of complete darkness, constant danger, safe return doubtful, honour and recognition in case of success.”
SpaceX aims to send the first humans to Mars in 2024. The plan is to send two cargo ships, alongside two crew ships to Mars. In the years prior to that, unmanned ships would have been sent there with plenty of supplies. The first humans to arrive will be tasked with building up the infrastructure to support a colony there. The following year, 2025 would be the earliest point Musk thinks a Mars colony could be established.
That’s less than a decade away, which is really exciting stuff. But some famous scientists are not convinced. Billy Nye, “the Science Guy”, a famous science educator and CEO of The Planetary Society, has poured cold water on the idea of colonisation of Mars.
OF MARS AND ANTARCTICA
He points out that even a place like Antarctica isn’t a place where humans want to live. "Nobody's going to go settle on Mars to raise a family and have generations of Martians," Nye said. "It's not reasonable because it's so cold. And there’s hardly any water. There's absolutely no food, and the big thing, I just remind these guys, there's nothing to breathe."
You can also count Neil Degrasse Tyson, another famous scientist, as a sceptic of Mars colonisation because of how inhospitable the place is. “We’d rather stay where it’s warm and comfortable,” he said.
Tyson also cites Antarctica as an example of why it’s impractical to try to colonise Mars. As cold and inhospitable as Antarctica may be, it’s still far warmer and liveable than any place on Mars. Yet, you don’t see any attempts for a permanent human settlement there. No doubt there are humans there but they’re mainly scientists spread across 37 Antarctic bases. They’re there to do research and not to settle down and raise a family.
Could humans colonise the Antarctic? Of course it’s possible to do that but the environment is so harsh, it would have to involve an enormous and continuous resupply effort for food and other living essentials. That said, at least there’s air to breathe and water to drink in Antarctica. You can’t say the same for Mars.
If colonising Antarctica, which is right here on earth, is so impractical, imagine what it’d be like to try to colonise Mars. To survive on Mars, there would need to be terraforming on a planetary scale or as Tyson puts it: “an entire infrastructure in which you live that mimics Earth.”
That’s why Katharine Hayhoe, Director of the Climate Science Center at Texas Tech University says that “Mars is not an escape hatch for planet Earth. If we don’t take action to reduce and eventually eliminate our carbon emissions, they will overwhelm human civilisation as we know it, long before Mars is ready to be colonised by large numbers of people.”
Still, efforts by the likes of Musk should be encouraged. Without idealism, we’d never make progress. And we shouldn’t shy away from attempting things just because they’re difficult or even seemingly insurmountable. At one time, going to the moon seemed like an impossible task.
John F. Kennedy famously said in 1962 that the US undertook missions like going to the moon “not because they’re easy, but because they’re hard”. It was because of that spirit and attitude that seven years later, in 1969, Neil Armstrong stepped foot on the moon. Whether we can eventually colonise Mars or not is yet to be seen. But if we do make it, it’s because of idealistic people like Musk.
Oon Yeoh is a consultant with experiences in print, online and mobile media. Reach him at oonyeoh@gmail.com.