Tag: Mars

First Mars Colony On The Horizon

The search for potential astronauts to help create the first Mars colony is well underway.

On Monday, Dutch company Mars One officially launched a reality-show type bid on Twitter and YouTube to recruit volunteers to be part of the pioneering space missing, and so far they have been contacted by up to 10,000 people.

The trip will leave Earth in 2022, with a view to reaching Mars in 2023. It will involve four people spending seven months in a small capsule during the journey, and the trip will be one way, with no reasonable expectation of return. But the sheer popularity of this mission upon its launch shows that there is no shortage of people willing to be the first ambassadors in the next step of space exploration.

It will be a unique test to see if humans really are capable of living and even populating outside Earth, but another key motive for sending people to live there is to determine, more accurately, is Mars is capable of sustaining other forms of life.

Executive director of Explore Mars, an organisation devoted to exploring life on Mars, said that “there is a strong, growing body of evidence that there could be subsurface life on Mars. However, we may not be able to confirm that unless we send people.” Simply, there are limits to what current robots can achieve physically compared to humans, in terms of drilling and digging, and humans could most likely undertake in a few minutes what a current make of man-made robot can do in an entire day.

However, for the advantage of sending human explorers to Mars, there is a disadvantage. People will inevitably bring with them billions of microbes and bacteria which will potentially compromise the eco-balance of Mars and any life that may be found there. This is a risk of which the Mars pioneers are well aware, and the general consensus is that every precaution will be undertaken to minimise the biological impact of the primary Mars colony.

Certainly, the mission will not be without risk to either the human colony or to existing life on Mars, but now that the limits to current robot exploration are drawing close, to send people to Mars as a next step makes sense.

Martians On Mars? Nah, Probably Not

The idea that the legend of Martians on Mars is actually true has taken a further blow as the building blocks of life, which are present on the red planet, did not actually come from any life forms. Granted, it was a long shot in the beginning, but it’s nice to have a little bit of faith in these things. It allows us to make lots of bad Sci-Fi films.

Martian
Exhibit A

Anyway, the journal Science published its findings about the building blocks of life on Mars. Carbon is required for life on the red planet, the green planet, our planet, and any other planet that hopes to support life as its the main organic molecule that makes up practically everything. If you’ve ever taken a class in chemistry then you’ll realise just how often carbon pops up.

The scientists from Washington D.C. who ran their research from the Carnegie Institution for Science discovered that Mars actually has lots of reduced carbon. Reduced carbon is actually a different form of carbon. To put it simply, reduced carbon is a molecule that’s bonded either to a hydrogen atom or to itself. I’m not going to go into exactly how bonds work or anything, the point is that these are much smaller molecules as carbon normally has four bonds to utilise.

Ok, we’ve answered that. But does it answer the claims by geeks all around the world that Martians on Mars isn’t just a fantasy? In a way it does as this carbon was found to have been produced by volcanic activity. And that’s certainly possible since Mars has the largest known volcano around. On a side note, to give you a sense of scale of Olympus Mons (latin for Mount Olympus) it’s nearly three times the size of Mount Everest when it’s above ground level. Furthermore, it has a large moat surrounding its base that’s thought to be there due to its weight pressing down on the surface of the planet. But the truth is that there are other smaller volcanoes on the red planet as well.

Mount Olympus
That's the volcano.

It doesn’t mean to say that life on Mars doesn’t exist as this is only a small sample, but it does hit that myth and reduce its credibility significantly. What this research does mean, though, is that there could have been life on Mars at some point. It also tells us that life could exist on Mars in the future. And that’s something to be happy about as it’s always been one of those space possibilities of tomorrow.