What Does Colonizing Mars Look Like? | MARS

What will life be like in a early Mars colony?

ROGER LAUNIUS: Let's take some stages in terms of how we might do things on Mars. There is exploration, somebody going out and coming back. The next stage would be some sort of research station. We will mostly resupply it from Earth. You cycle people in and out on a regular basis. I would contend that that would look a lot like Antarctica. You don't have to fly into space, obviously, to go to Antarctica. But it's not easy to get to. And it's not easy to sustain life there.

NARRATOR: At the very bottom of the world, there's a cheerless land where the long night is 125 degrees below 0 and murderous winds howl at 200 miles an hour across a desert as desolate as the moon.

CHARLES ELACHI: Before we used to send people to Antarctica, they crossed the Antarctic continent and came back and waited three, four years before you sent the next expedition.

NARRATOR: Then in 1954, a dozen nations decided to man 50 stations built around the continent. Now, the emphasis shifted to science.

CHARLES ELACHI: Today, you literally have hundreds of people who actually live in the station throughout the year.

JOSEPH LEVY: There are more scientists working in Antarctica today from more different countries than there probably have ever been in the past. And what that means is, globally, we need to think about how we collaborate and manage and work together. I think it's a good model for how policy and engineering and politics can come together to produce great science.

JOHN BRUNSFELD: The McMurdo Station is a kind of analog to the kind of activity we hopefully want to do on Mars someday because McMurdo is, in fact, a city. This is where you have infrastructure, where you have power, where you have supplies.

BK GRANT: We have everything from people who cook the food to people who prepare science cargo. We all live and work together. And we have essentially one goal. And that is to support the science.

DAVID DINGES: What happens in the Antarctic is what will likely happen on Mars. We'll create a kind of early version of community. And what we really want to do is make sure that we understand how humans can cope with the next level of risk living on Mars, trying to feed everybody, and coping with different visions of what should happen next. And that's going to require a much different level of understanding how to do this. We'll get there. We just got to move to it in steps.