New Mars Forums

It was the Soviet satellite Sputnik that triggered to US to go to the Moon in the first place, and I do not believe that neither Europe nor the US will sit still if China suddenly reach Mars or the Moon. A new space race is what we need, and I wouldn't mind China triggering it.

How do we know this for sure? I haven't even seen any good pictures of the lunar surface, and this must be a clear indication on how little we know about our Moon. I am sure these elements can be found if we start looking for them with the same kind of equipment we are using to find stuff on Mars. If am wrong, then there are still lots of alternatives that can be used for chemical reactions. This includes alternative rocket fuels.

I think we could actually end up with more people on Mars than on Earth, because big parts of the terrestrial ecosystem may end up being protected from human intervention a bit like the national parks of our time. The cradle of our civilization and the habitat of all our biodiversity will be considered extremely valuable, maybe even "holy", while there will not be anything stopping people from turning the empty deserts of Mars, the Moon and other similar places into continuous cities.

The densest parts of Hong Kong have a density of 200.000 people per square kilometer, and a similar density should be even easier to obtain in a low gravity environment. The surface area of Mars is 144,100,000 km2, and we could therefore theoretically fit 29 trillion people on its surface. That is 4400 times the current world population.

However, I believe my original figure of 20 billion is more realistic in the long term, but I have always imagined that the long term future of Mars would be more like a continuous city than another green planet. Still, the areas where people live will be extremely dense because this will make it cheaper to build domes over their heads. If cities are built dense enough, then the whole idea of terraforming may become completely irrelevant.

All of this is anyways far into the future, and I will be happy if I get to see just a few people living on Mars and the Moon in my lifetime.

Non-scientists are not allowed to move to Antarctica. However; my own country Norway has an outpost close to the North Pole (Svalbard/Spitsbergen ) and there are so many people who want to live there that the government have had to put in place restrictions on new settlements. People want to move there for a number of different reasons, but what attracts most is simply the adventure of living in such an exotic place. The total number of privileged people living there are now 2600, and 1600 of them live in the capital Longyearbyen. It could easily grow to 100,000 if the restrictions were removed. I believe Mars would attract the same kind of people.

Don't worry too much about transportation up to such a structure, because this could easily be taken care of by smaller air ships - or maybe even an elevator. Having a cable from the ground up to the structure would also make it possible to power it with electricity from a terrestrial power plant.

Edit: Before people start objecting regarding the weight of such a cable: You don't have to use a single 30 kilometer cable at all, because it could easily be divided into 3 cables of 10 kilometers each suspended between air ships at different heights.

I think a high percentage of the first babies born on Mars will die before they are 3 years old, because humans and other mammals are not adapted to the Martian environment. However, this is in a brutal way not necessarily a bad thing because it speeds up the process of evolution and adaptation.

Other mammals like rats may evolve many times as fast though. An average rat has a life span of less than two years, and is able to reproduce when it is only 3 months old. That means that it can go through 4 cycles of evolution and adaptation every single year, and 400 in a human 100-year lifespan. It would take humans 10,000 years to go through the same adaptation process. Genetic engineering of humans based on the genetic changes we observe among generations of rats in a low-gravity environment may not be as crazy as it sounds.

I am not an expert within this field at all, but wouldn't the air resistance be almost nothing 20-25 kilometers above ground? If there is no air resistance then wouldn't accelerating a space ship to an almost infinity speed require very little energy? Here is a graph I found on air pressure:

I was actually thinking about the possibility of using an airship to lift a rocket above most the atmosphere, just like SpaceShipOne is using an airplane. An airship have two obvious advantages over an airplane:
1. It can go higher
2. It can lift a lot more
On the downside:
1. more expensive
2. slower

I believe the most efficient shape of such an airship is a sphere, because this is how you would get the most volume out of each square meter of surface area.

An spheric airship with a radius of 10 meter will have a volume of (4/3)pi*r³ = 4188 m³. The surface area will be 4*pi*r² = 1256 m². Volume / Area = 3.33. It will probably not be able to fly. But what happens if we make the radius 1 km? Volume/Area is now 333,33. This is significant because the weight of the materials in your ship will depend mostly on the surface area, not the volume. A huge spheric airship would be able to lift almost anything, and probably enough equipment to get far far out to space. Size clearly matters! (but I hope you understand that a 1 km radius was a theoretical example).

Projecting the future population of Mars is an interesting exercise.

I believe it all comes down to how much energy you can produce, and that there is almost no limit on the land itself.

Converting energy to food is not really that hard, and is already taking place in many rich countries. Growing tomatoes in Northern Scandinavia during the Winter when it is pitch black outside and the temperature is around -35C is not a problem at all long as you have a cheap reliable source of energy. The same applies to desalination of sea water for agriculture which is a big industry in some of the small countries around the Arabian gulf. Growing food on Mars would require energy for both heating plants and extracting water, but can support a population of at least 20 billion if we find a cheap and reliable source of energy.

Putting in place restrictions on population growth would just be ridiculous, because human creativity always finds new ways of feeding more mouths.

Human settlements of Mars will already have adapted to the Martian environment, and might therefore object to the whole idea of terraforming because that will put big areas of their environment under water.