The Possibility of Moving to Mars | StarTalk

The recent discovery of liquid water on Mars! We knew it had water in the distant past. There are dried meandering riverbeds, river deltas, and flood plains, and all the telltale signs of water moving either slowly or quickly in the history of the Martian surface.

So to have active contemporary evidence for there being liquid water oozing out the sides of crater walls, that revisits the conversation about what resources a colony that we put on Mars would have available to them.

There's a whole branch of NASA called ISRU (In-Situ Resource Utilization). It's the idea that why bring everything with you on your voyage if you can exploit resources at your destination? If you're driving from New York to Los Angeles, you don't carry a gas tank with all the gas that's necessary for that or all the food for four days.

No, you stop at quick marts along the way, and when you get to LA, somebody's going to sell food there. It's something we so take for granted in a populated, civilized world that in space exploration, you have to really think that through.

So sure, liquid water—that's a plus! But there's still the matter of oxygen and food and other things that are kind of fundamental to life as we know it.