• Question: Can you explain how it would be possible for humans to live on Mars? Is there a water supply or would it be possible to grow food?

    Asked by 353spce23 to Aisling, Colin, Ned on 9 Mar 2016.
    • Photo: Ned Dwyer

      Ned Dwyer answered on 9 Mar 2016:

      There is no water on Mars so nothing would grow and we could not live there. However we could build some sort of module there with an appropriate environment so we could live and grow stuff there. However we would have to bring everything from Earth and it would be ridiculously expensive. In my opinion the money would be better spent resolving problems on Earth

    • Photo: Aisling Shannon

      Aisling Shannon answered on 10 Mar 2016:

      It would have to be a man-made module with a controlled environment as Martian gravity is much lower than earth, the “air” is not suitable for humans, the temperature is much colder and the dust storms can cover the whole planet.
      As Ned says, it would be really expensive and of benefit to a very small number of people, while if you spent the same money even on satellites, you would be able to understand so much about the earth and solve many of Earths problems.

    • Photo: Colin Shirran

      Colin Shirran answered on 11 Mar 2016:

      It is not true that there is no water on mars, there certainly is. It is mostly found as frozen water-ice unfortunately and is quite sparse. It is thought that there is more ice under the ground as we go further up mars closer to the poles where the ice caps are. Perhaps it will be best to have a base around some point there. However, having said that I don’t think there will be enough water available in any form at the beginning to rely on our supply being solely from the martian surface. We will have to bring a lot with us and re use it within a closed loop bio-regenerative life support system. Within this system we would be capable of growing plants, not in soil although that may be somewhat possible, we will probably concentrate on using aero- or hydroponics to grow our food. This would also be used to produce our oxygen as well within the habitat. We have a lot of the technologies available for this, the issue is proving that it will work and support humans reliably for a long time away from earth. If anything goes wrong we can’t be sure that we can save the people there. Earth is a long way away.

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