How the 1st humans will live on Mars — getting there will be the easy part

[Buster's Uncle]

Here's how the first humans will live on Mars — and why traveling the 140 million miles to get there will be the easy part
Business Insider
By Jessica Orwig  21 hours ago



(Aidan Monaghan/20th Century Fox)



No human has ever set foot on Mars, but that hasn't stopped science fiction writers like Andy Weir, author of the best-selling novel "The Martian," from imagining what it would be like to live on the dusty Red Planet.

In one word: Miserable.

Mars is a lifeless wasteland that would make Siberia feel like an island paradise.

But the frigid temperatures, lack of breathable oxygen, and dangerous radiation levels are only some of the many features that would make life on Mars a veritable, red-stained hell.

Winters would be twice as long and harsher than anything on Earth. And while there is water on Mars, it's all locked in ice. Still think it's worth going to live on Mars?

TED speaker and technologist Stephen Petranek thinks so — enough to write an entire book on "How We'll Live on Mars." And the producers at TED have summed up the main points in Petranek's book in this amazing graphic.

Check it out below, and learn how the first human Martians will live:



(http://ideas.ted.com/)


http://news.yahoo.com/heres-first-humans-live-mars-184523470.html

[Mart]

The problem with Martian atmospheric pressure is, that it is something like 0.7 to 1.0 % of that on Earth.
Making atmospheric generators, like the idea on Aliens 2, where the base was inhabited by terraformers to make the planet habitable by generating breathable atmosphere, would be something making it possible. Titan, Saturn's moon has 150 % Earth's atmosphere, despite smaller mass, so Mars could have much denser one too.

[Buster's Uncle]

Titan benefits from a gas torus effect - it's in a steep gravity well, and the gas molecules that escape the outer atmosphere almost all stay in the same orbit and get swept back up on subsequent passes around Saturn.  Mars is a different case.

-Besides, a big industrial complex is just too expensive and slow to be workable.  Hitting Mars with a lot of comets and ice asteroids would be a lot more promising.  Probably nothing you could do in that area would be long-lasting on a geological time-scale, but tens of thousands of years of thick atmosphere is probably doable, and some substantial replenishing mechanisms can surely be worked into the biosphere it would be necessary to create for good terraforming, possibly extending it into the millions.