How We Will Survive on Mars

Phenomenal TED talk by Stephen Petranek, in which he makes the case that within 20 years, humans will live on Mars, and how that will happen. The messaging in this talk is remarkable similar to that Elon Musk uses when being interviewed or giving a talk from the stage.

Stephen Petranek is an American writer, and editor of Breakthrough Technology Alert. He has previously edited the Discover magazine, and The Washington Post‘s magazine. Petranek was the founding editor and editor in chief of This Old House magazine for Time Inc., and was senior editor for science at Life magazine. He is co-founder and President of Arc Programs. He also writes for the Daily Reckoning. Petranek has written the book How We’ll Live on Mars, which was published in 2015.

Key Points

Why Go

• Why colonize Mars: back-up of human species and knowledge in case Earth ceases to exist the way we know it (asteroid impact, gamma ray, global pandemic, nuclear war, etc.). Also, exploration is in our DNA. Some of the greatest advances in technology came to be because we explored the unknown.
  
• The plan to go to the moon inspired an entire generation, and going to Mars will be even more inspiring.

Facts About Mars

• The surface area one can stand on is more or less the same on Earth and Mars, even though Mars is less than half the size of the Earth.
  
• Seasons and years are about twice as long on Mars.
  
• Mars has only 38% of Earth’s gravity.
  
• The distance between Earth and Mars will be the shortest only once every 2 years, and it will take about 8 months to get there.

How to Live on Mars

• Water, oxygen, food, shelter and clothing are required to live on Mars.
  
• Water: The soil on Mars contains up to 60% water. A lot of craters have sheets of ice in them. Large amounts of underground water and glaciers. A WAVAR device can extract all the water humans need to survive from the highly humid atmosphere on Mars.
  • WAVAR is short for Water-Vapor Adsorption Reactor, and is a process that has been studied for its potential in directly extracting water from the atmosphere of Mars by alternately blowing air over a zeolite adsorption bed and heating the bed to extract the adsorbed water. An advantage of this process is its mechanical simplicity and applicability to any point on Mars’s surface.
    
• Oxygen: The atmosphere on Mars is filled with carbon dioxide (CO₂). CO₂ is about 78% oxygen. The MOXIE instrument (Mars OXygen In-situ resource utilization Experiment), developed by NASA, basically sucks in the atmosphere on Mars and pumps out oxygen.
  • In-Situ Resource Utilization (ISRU) is a technical way of describing what most of us call “living off the land“.
  • In a study researchers report that by the end of 2021 Moxie was able to produce oxygen on seven experimental runs, in a variety of atmospheric conditions, including during the day and night, and through different Martian seasons.
    
• Food: 80% dried earth food, 20 % hydroponically grown food. We would work towards growing more food once we have running water on the surface of Mars.
  
• Shelter: Build houses of bricks using the soil on Mars and polymer plastic. This will be required due to cosmic radiation. Alternatively, may live underground in caves or lava tubes of which there are plenty.
  
• Clothing: Dava Newman (a scientist at MIT) has created a sleek space activity suit called the the Bio-Suit that will keep us together, block cosmic radiation and keep us warm.
  • The suit provides pressure through compression directly on the skin via the suit’s textile weave, patterning, and advanced materials rather than with pressurized gas. It is designed to help astronauts move around more easily than gas-filled suits allow.
  • Newman is the author of the introductory engineering textbook Interactive Aerospace Engineering and Design, and has published more than 300 papers in journals and refereed conferences, and holds numerous 
    compression technology patents.

Terraforming Mars

• Heat up the frozen carbon dioxide at the poles of Mars. This will create a thicker atmosphere at Mars, which will further heat it up through a runaway greenhouse effect. Heating it up could be done with solar sail directing sun rays towards one of the poles.
  
• A thicker atmosphere makes Mars warmer and would protect us from cosmic radiation. The warmer climate will give us running water, which will allow us to grow crops.
  
• More vapor will go into the air, and be trapped by the thicker atmosphere, which will form clouds giving us rain and snow.
  
• The thicker atmosphere will also create more pressure, so that we will no longer need the spacesuits.
  
• The final challenge will be making the atmosphere breathable. Considering the recent progress in the field of genetics, some time in the future we might be able to adapt our genes in such a way that we would be able to breathe the air on Mars.

Watch the video of Stephen Petranek’s TED talk below