A scientific idea with a human consequence
There is a pleasant simplicity to the phrase living on Mars.
It sounds almost domestic, like an old Victorian with white picket fence.
One imagines a house with a peculiar view, a redish horizon outside the window, perhaps a greenhouse nearby, and Earth hanging somewhere in the sky as a bright reminder of home. The phrase is so ordinary that it conceals the extraordinary difficulty of what is actually being proposed.
Mars is not waiting for us, it doesn't particularly care either way.
It is not hostile, because hostility requires intention. Mars is simply indifferent. It has no, breathable air, little atmospheric pressure, intense radiation, severe cold, abrasive dust, reduced gravity, and no convenient biological system into which human beings can insert themselves.
To live there, we must bring the Earth with us. Not the whole Earth, of course. That would be inconvenient. We must bring a miniature one, a slice of life as it were.
The first problem is the associated biology.
The human body is not a general-purpose machine. It evolved under one gravity, beneath one atmosphere, within one magnetic field, surrounded by a vast microbial and ecological system that we usually notice only when something goes wrong.
Mars has about 38 percent of Earth's surface gravity.
We know quite a bit about humans living at one gravity, and we have decades of experience with humans living in nearly zero gravity. What we do not possess is a large body of evidence concerning people who spend years at 0.38 gravity.
That missing bit of information matters enormously.
Will bones weaken more slowly than they do in orbit, or will Martian gravity be sufficient to maintain them? Will muscles adapt satisfactorily? What happens to the cardiovascular system after ten years? More importantly, what happens to pregnancy and childhood? A settlement cannot truly be called permanent until children can be born and raised there safely.
This may prove to be one of the largest biological questions in the history of space exploration.
Then there is the radiation thing!
Earth protects us with a thick atmosphere and a planetary magnetic field. Mars provides considerably less of both attributes. Anyone spending years on its surface will accumulate radiation exposure unless habitats are sufficiently shielded.
The solution is not particularly mysterious. Put some kind of mass between the people and the radiation.
Water can help, so can specialized shielding. Most conveniently, so can Mars itself.
A serious Martian settlement may therefore look less like the glittering glass cities of science fiction and more like an underground mining community. Habitats could be covered with several meters of soil, built into hillsides, or placed inside natural lava tubes.
The future Earthy Martians may live underground.
This is not aesthetically romantic, but neither are cancer statistics.
Engineering introduces a second category of difficulty.
On Earth, failure is often inconvenient. On Mars, failure may become an atmosphere problem.
A broken air conditioner in Phoenix is unpleasant.
A broken environmental-control system on Mars may kill everyone in the base.
That changes the philosophy of design.
Martian equipment must be repairable and spare parts must be available. Systems must fail gradually rather than catastrophically. Critical machinery will require backups, and backups for the backups will occasionally seem excessive until the first time they are actually needed.
Air must be recycled and water must be recovered, much like "Dune." Waste must be transformed into viable raw material. Food will have to be systematically grown and stored.
The settlers will discover that words such as garbage and sewage belong to civilizations wealthy enough to throw resources away.
Mars will not initially permit such extravagance.
Even carbon dioxide, which dominates the Martian atmosphere, becomes useful. Oxygen can potentially be extracted from it. Water ice can provide drinking water, oxygen, and hydrogen. Local minerals may eventually become building materials.
This principle has an impressive technical name: in-situ resource utilization.
It means, more simply, that if a colony must import everything from Earth forever, it is not really a colony. It is an extremely distant campsite.
There is also the conundrum of the dust.
Martian dust is fine, electrostatic, chemically troublesome, and likely to enter machinery with enthusiasm. It can coat solar panels, damage seals, contaminate habitats, and create health problems if brought indoors.
Future Martian engineers may therefore spend less time dramatically exploring the frontier than cleaning filters.
This is entirely consistent with human history.
Civilization has always depended upon maintenance workers more than monuments suggest.
And then we arrive at the critical nexus of psychology. This may be the problem most easily underestimated.
Suppose six people live together in a sealed habitat. They cannot go outside without protective equipment. They cannot take a weekend trip home to planet Earth. They cannot stand beneath trees, swim in an ocean, smell rain, or walk anonymously through a crowded city.
Earth will be tens of millions of kilometers away.
Communication itself becomes strange. Depending upon the relative positions of the planets, a radio message may require many minutes to travel in one direction.
There will be no ordinary telephone conversations with Earth. A person may ask a question and receive the answer half an hour later.
For the first Martians, loneliness will therefore be technological as well as emotional.
Crew selection will matter enormously. Intelligence will not be enough of a deciding factor.
Courage will not be enough of an attribute. And great technical skill will not be enough to stand on its own.
The ideal settler may be the person who can repair a pump at three in the morning while tired, frightened, and annoyed with the person holding the flashlight and still behave reasonably.
Psychological stability will become basic infrastructure. Personal privacy will become a precious commodity and conflict resolution will become a required survival skill.
A Mars settlement will also eventually confront something more complicated than machinery: independence.
At first, the settlers will depend heavily on Earth. Then less heavily, progressively, as the years venture on.
Eventually they may ask why decisions affecting life on Mars should be made by people who have never been there. The separation of distance will encourage pack autonomy.
Mars and Earth cannot share perfectly synchronized governments, economies, or cultures when communication delays are unavoidable and transportation takes months.
A collective Martian identity will emerge, guaranteed.
Perhaps slowly and reluctantly but it will emerge eventually.
And this is where the expression two-planet species becomes more serious than it first appears.
It does not mean placing human footprints on Mars.
We placed footprints on the Moon and did not become a two-world civilization.
It does not mean building a scientific station.
We have scientific stations in Antarctica, but Antarctica has not become an independent branch of human civilization.
Becoming a two-planet species means creating a population capable of surviving when Earth cannot immediately rescue it.
That requires biology we do not yet fully understand, engineering of exceptional reliability, local industry, agriculture, medicine, social institutions, and perhaps most difficult of all, people willing to exchange the enormous comfort of Earth for the enormous responsibility of building another home.
The first Earth version Martians will probably not think of themselves as heroic every morning.
They will worry about crops, argue over schedules and be concerned with repairing machinery.
They will miss sunlight filtered through leaves and wide open breathable spaces.
And gradually, through thousands of ordinary acts performed in an extraordinary place, Mars may cease to be somewhere humans visit.
It may become somewhere humans are from.
That is what living on Mars will actually ask of us.
Not merely the courage to go but do we have the discipline to stay.
Read the Reviving Mars fictional short story series:
Anthology 1 - The Subterranean Era