MARS: Humanity's Most Dangerous Mission

Just recently, 18 new Earth-sized exoplanets have been discovered. They range from 70% Earth size to more than twice as large as our planet. We know at least one of them, for certain, has conditions that almost mirror ours on Earth. So, there are worlds out there that we could possibly live on. This isn't science fiction; this is getting clearer by the day.

But some of these planets are hidden, hidden in plain sight. They have the ability to be trained and conditioned into becoming a world that is fit for us humans. Mars appears in the skies as a red, barren wasteland, like quite literally something out of a movie. But it hasn't always been like that. In fact, the past was much better for Mars—at least it would have been for us. It's like gazing into our future as a planet.

But if it was like that in the past, could we roll back time? I mean, we're pretty good at changing the climate of our own planet, as you could tell. So why couldn't we change Mars? We've been looking up forever, for thousands of years, but now finally we have the ability to actually consider venturing out to the unknown.

But unknown doesn't always mean bad. Many good things can come from leaving home, and it might be a good idea. Over the course of history, many species, communities, kingdoms, civilizations have come into contact with one another. Some of these ended up in healthy relationships, but others not so much.

If history is any judge, then we should probably be the ones venturing out and making our own first contact—being proactive, not reactive. It's almost always the civilization that receives contact from another that ends up being ultimately destroyed in the process. It's not something you want to be on the receiving end of.

But space? Space is a completely different story. Many missions succeed, and we can reap the benefits of those for years to come. But others? Others fail and fail hard. Of all 56 missions to Mars so far, only 26 have been successful—less than 50%. It's a coin flip at best, and would be risking the best and brightest of our minds.

But the outcome? The outcome could be ginormous. The idea of terraforming Mars, or also known as Earth shaping Mars, seriously has been brought up very often in the past few years. It's by no means easy, and to be honest, with the current technology we have in 2019, it's not even close to possible.

Recently, newly discovered layers of ice beneath Mars's North Pole may be some of the biggest reserves of water on the planet. If melted, the water would literally cover the planet in at least one and a half meters of water. That's a lot—not nearly as much as Earth, but it's enough to work with.

These ice caps came from Mars' previous ice ages. As the planet warmed, the ice was covered with Martian sand. This prevented it from heating and further evaporating in a Mars carbon dioxide atmosphere. But the important part isn't the ice on the surface; it's the ice deep inside Mars. It most likely exists and is important to understanding our potential new home.

In order to make the surface habitable, we need to understand the insides first. Just like caves on Earth that are deep under the surface, life could exist there—whatever it may be, we don't know. A problem though is that Mars doesn't have a magnetic field—at least not anymore—so any life on the planet is being constantly bombarded with radiation.

Originally, Mars's iron core was able to generate a magnetic field, but over time the core cooled, hardened, and the magnetic field disappeared about four billion years ago. Solar storms and coronal mass ejections from the Sun hitting Mars also didn't help. These things are basically EMPs and extremely alter magnetic fields, and this can single-handedly ruin a planet.

But I kind of lied, because Mars does have an extremely weak magnetic field—around 40 times weaker than ours—except it's only in the southern hemisphere of the planet. This, as you may guess, isn't exactly ideal. If we want to live on Mars long term, we need to make another magnetic field.

There's no way around it. This sounds stupid and pretty much impossible—except that it really isn't. Mars's weak magnetosphere can be protected and slowly grown. The Mars Global Surveyor from 1997 to 2006 measured Mars's magnetic field from over 400 kilometers above the planet, and it found that these magnetic fields on the surface of the planet are stronger than those on Earth.

If these small areas are protected from solar winds, these bubbles of mini magnetospheres could be havens for life on the planet if they're strong enough. They're perfect and our best bet for now. NASA has proposed a pretty weird idea by placing a magnetic shield—pretty much just a huge magnet—at a very specific point in Mars's orbit called L1. An artificial magnetosphere could be formed that would protect the planet entirely.

Now, of course, it sounds super fancy and hard, and yeah, I agree, but the science is there. L1 is a Lagrangian point—basically just consider these parking spots in space. Whatever you place there won't move relative to Mars's surface. So this magnetic shield would be in the same place at all times above Mars and would counteract the harsh solar wind that is ruining Mars's atmosphere right now.

If we had a magnetic field, the solar winds and radiation wouldn't affect Mars's atmosphere as much, and with the atmosphere no longer slowly withering away, we could maintain it and grow it over time. That radiation wouldn't be causing mutations on the new Martians. Those ice caps—they would melt on their own, and that could be the start to living on the planet.

We only need to raise the temperature by about 4 degrees Celsius or about 7.2 degrees Fahrenheit. It's melted carbon dioxide ice on Mars's northern polar cap through a little bit of global warming, maybe through factories on Mars recycling the harmful atmosphere and then later emitting greenhouse gases. It would slowly warm over time, but we wouldn't be able to notice it on a day-to-day basis.

It's still gonna be rough. It's really cold living on the equator of Mars, though might not be so bad. The average temperature on Mars is around negative 50 to negative 60 degrees Celsius—it's cold—but run the equator, temperatures can get upwards of 25 degrees Celsius. This is almost dumb luck; that is such a perfect temperature, and that'd be the ideal place to be.

Mars is really sandy, and dust storms are extremely common. On Earth, we do have some crazy weather—for example, hurricanes—they destroy cities and sometimes entire countries, but they always follow the same life cycle: they form, they destroy, and then they die. But the winds on Mars can be strong; gravity isn't as strong as it is on Earth, and the atmosphere isn't as thick.

When all of this is put together, dust from all around the planet can be pulled several kilometers into the sky. The lack of moisture in the atmosphere prevents any of this dust from clumping together, so it kind of just floats around until eventually it settles. Some of these dust storms are localized and pass rather quickly, but others? Others are deadly.

Some dust storms, if large enough, can last up to several months on end, with dust essentially surrounding the planet and temperatures soaring up hundreds of degrees. This is something we've never experienced on Earth and is something that needs to be answered before we even consider long-term survival on the Red Planet.

But all of this comes with a pretty deep question: we don't even have the entirety of Earth mapped yet. We know there's life here—we're the only ones so far. But with Mars, we don't know. We haven't mapped most of the planet yet. If we go through with terraforming the planet, we could and would most likely wipe out any life that currently lives there.

Did we allow life to take its course? Or are we going to completely destroy what could have been the only other life we'll ever find? An Article 9 of the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, which was signed by 109 different countries on Earth, strictly forbids the harmful contamination of any moon or celestial body that isn't Earth.

But here arises another problem: are Martians subject to the laws of their home planet? Sure, we could tell them not to do things, but who's going to enforce it? What's the point of having rules if there is no one to enforce them? There are no police; there is no law on Mars. There's nothing there to begin with.

We are quite literally starting humanity over—an opportunity to build a world from scratch. If we build a new home, we'd also be building a new species. Evolution would take its course, and after long enough, the humans who built Mars would no longer represent the humans who left Earth. That's assuming we even get there and can execute any of our plans.

Everyone who has ever left the comfort of Earth's atmosphere has felt the genetic effects of it. Later on, cardiovascular diseases are much more likely; cancer risk shoots up; bone marrow is lost and continues to wither away. And this is just from going to the moon. Mars is over 200 times as far away, and the radiation you'd be receiving on that journey there would be much worse than anything we've ever experienced.

For all that we know, the trip itself could kill us. It'll take, on average, 7 months to reach Mars—7 months just to reach our destination. This itself is already risky. Astronauts on the International Space Station only stay on the station for about six months at a time to prevent their health from being jeopardized. However, the long-term deep space habitat could be lethal. Our astronaut colony could grow sick before they even get there, and that would probably be the worst outcome of them all.

There's many more psychological reasons that this could go wrong as well. Being locked up, drifting away into the nothingness of space with literally nothing but centimeters of engineering between you and nothing, it's going to take the strongest people we have—both physically and mentally—to handle a task of such magnitude.

On Earth, if you don't like your boss, you could quit. If you don't like your roommate, you can move out. But on Mars, help is at best seven months away. All it takes is for one person to get pushed too far, and the entire mission, the entire colony—perhaps—could fall apart. Dates would also change.

The year we have on Earth works perfectly for us. The seasons align, and everyone uses the same system. But Mars is much further away from the Sun than Earth; it has a longer orbital period. A year on Earth is pretty much 365 days, but on Mars, this is closer to 700 days—almost twice as long. Martians would have to adopt a new calendar.

Days on Mars are slightly longer than days on Earth—only by about 30 minutes or so. And this doesn't seem like a huge deal, but over time, our clocks would slowly get out of sync. But on the bright side, they get slower—at least compared to those people on Earth. So at least you have that going for you.

If we want things to go smoothly, it's gonna take time. The best course of action is what we're doing now: slowly researching the planet using machines. It's safer and honestly the only thing that we can really do at the moment. We learn more and more each day.

But even then, humans are capable of things that we just can't program. We can't program that fight-or-flight response into a rover. A robot colony isn't even as effective as one single human. The amount of work done by a rover on Mars in an entire year could be done by a human in, like, a week. Sure, it's safer to use robots, but it also isn't as effective.

The risk is there, as I said, but the reward makes up for it a thousand times over. But humans work in funny ways. For some reason, we drift towards the most challenging tasks. We don't shy away from anything. On Earth, space is just the next level. All it takes is for one mission to do well, and the snowball effect begins.

It would be extremely interesting to see how this journey would not only affect the astronauts but life and culture on Earth. Engineering and science fields would probably boom and would become saturated with new jobs and companies—many of which would help both the Martian and Earth resident. Mail would no longer only require an address, city, state, and country, but also a planet.

The initial founding fathers of our Martian colonies would have to be the most self-sufficient people to ever exist. It takes at least eight minutes for a message to be radiated from Earth to Mars and another eight minutes for a message to return. In a life-or-death situation, this won't cut it.

The Martians will have to be able to handle everything—good and bad—on their own. In order to test these potential future heroes, they are locked in isolation in environments like Antarctica—far away from any other civilization—sometimes at planned and prepared locations that have features much like the Martian landscape.

And this has made me think: in order for us as a species to progress—honestly, the only other place we could probably go—we have to put so much planning and work into the entire process. It's hundreds, thousands of years in the making—tens of billions of dollars poured into this process. But yet at the end of the day, it comes down to the small handful of people who lay the groundwork for the future of humanity.

The largest and quite frankly most important thing we've ever done in the history of our existence is one of the loneliest journeys imaginable. In order to succeed, we have to isolate ourselves. Is it right to put these people through something so insanely important in small, isolated groups—left all alone to build their own world? Or is it better to think things slowly, allow technology to progress, and allow our machines to do the heavy lifting—a world built by something we built?

It's a weight calculation. What's the point in sending humans to Mars with today's technology if in 15 years we'll be thousands of times more advanced? Regardless of whether it's tomorrow or in 50 years, Mars will be waiting, and eventually, it'll be ours.

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