• Question: Do you think in the future, that humans will expand and live on Mars or a different planet when we inevitably ruin Earth.

    Asked by to Nat, Nate, Roberto, Sam, Sarah on 20 Jun 2014. This question was also asked by .
    • Photo: Sam Connolly

      Sam Connolly answered on 20 Jun 2014:

      There are already plans to get people to live on Mars, though it probably won’t happen for quite a long time. I think people will definitely move to other planets as soon as it’s possible though, yes! It’s a bit pessimistic to say we’ll definitely ruin the earth though!

    • Photo: Nate Bastian

      Nate Bastian answered on 20 Jun 2014:

      Yes, I think it’s definitely possible that humans will put a colony on mars. Hopefully, but the time that we do that, we’ll have learned how to live in harmony with our environment.

    • Photo: Sarah Casewell

      Sarah Casewell answered on 20 Jun 2014:

      Yes, I think it’s likely we will, but we will have to find out better ways of living – we won’t be able to just landfill rubbish so we’ll have to live sustainably. Living on Mars means we may have to take everything we need with us, so hopefully we’d be much more careful about resources.

    • Photo: Natasha Stephen

      Natasha Stephen answered on 20 Jun 2014:

      NASA have confirmed that they would like to have the first astronaut on Mars by 2035, which is still some time away so it is likely to be many, many decades before we see humans colonizing Mars or any other planet for that matter!

      It is likely to be Mars though and not one of the other terrestrial planets (these are Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars) because even though Venus is closer to Earth than Mars is and more similar in size (Mars is just over half the diameter of Earth so quite a lot smaller!), it just wouldn’t be able to support life! Venus, like Mercury, is closer to the Sun than Earth so they are both very HOT planets on the surface! Temperatures can reach +470C, which is way too hot for humans! It’s also too hot for liquid water to stay liquid, which we would also need to survive and the atmospheres on both would be toxic to us as they’re mainly carbon dioxide! In addition to all of this, it also rains acid on Venus, so not ideal at all! Mars would be a much safer bet!

    • Photo: Roberto Trotta

      Roberto Trotta answered on 26 Jun 2014:

      It is technologically not possible yet — the distance to Mars is vastly bigger than the distance to the moon, and thus far we have only sent people to the Moon. It takes 3 days to reach the Moon in a rocket, and about 6 months to go to Mars — it’s a completely different game!

      There are many technological challenges to overcome to be able to send somebody to Mars, and most importantly, to get them back safely. Radiation, lack of gravity, long duration of the mission (imagine, you have to bring with you all the water, air and food for at least 6 months… plus, how would you get back?!), and the challenge of keeping a crew of several astronauts mentally stable for such a long time, all squeezed together in a very small space.

      Apart from this, colonizing Mars would be a very tough challenge: we’d have to do something called “Terraforming” – basically, change the entire climate of the planet to make it suitable for life. This would take hundred, and probably thousands of years to achieve and we simply don’t have the technology to do it yet.

      So I don’t think this will happen any time soon — and before we are able to do Terraforming, all the problems here on Earth (over-population, lack of resources, pollution, climate change) will have forced us to find a solution closer to home — starting with looking after our own planet in a better way!

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