A Simulated Mars Tour | StarTalk

Hi Neil, welcome to Hi Seeds and Hawaii Space Exploration Animal Looking Simulation! I'm really excited to give you guys a tour, so come on, let's go.

This is the biology lab, and this is our astrobiologist Cyprian. So, most of the experiments we're doing here in this lab are designed to figure out how we can live on Mars from what is already zero using biology. One of the alternatives I'm working on is this insane bacteria, which are basically green microbes. You can see them here; they do photosynthesis like plants and are very interesting in this context because we could use nutrients from the ground, gases from the atmosphere, and water, which we can follow in different forms on Mars. Once we have grown them, we can use them to produce basically everything we need.

Fantastic! Alright, so we remember to bring the green bacteria. Sabrina is doing amazing work here, and so are some of the other crew members you'll meet soon. All of our work is powered quite literally by the Sun, so let's look outside. You can see the solar panel system; there it is! That's where we get almost all of our power.

We have to go outside to go cave exploring, collect rocks. We put on these suits, we do our science, we do our exploring, we come back, we recompress for five minutes, and then we can enter the habitat again. Around the corner is maybe the second most important feature to have after the power system—our toilet. It's inverse: without water, no flushing.

Then one thing you didn't see through the window is we have a solar stocks ID that is used to distill the stuff that is contained in these little buckets. So, question: if we really needed to, could we use what we're collecting in these toilets to grow food?

No way. Not even I would really want to do it inside the house. Yeah, pretty—the smiles look very nice. No, we haven't had to go there, but we could.

Okay, well, that's almost your entire tour of simulated Mars. Last thing before we go, Neil, I just want to rerun it home today: we Martians heard your podcast about what you would do with trash on Mars. My answer is: what trash? Everything continues to have a use; the cycle—it's a loop, and that's how we're gonna survive in space. We look forward to seeing you as soon as we get back to Earth, or maybe you'll join us here on Mars. Thanks, guys!