![]() Moving beyond paraterraforming is a more ambitious goal that could require centuries, and that’s full-scale terraforming. ![]() While it would cost a ton of money to build, paraterraforming sections of Mars with a sample of Earth’s biosphere inside pressure domes, caves, and underground caverns is something that we could achieve within years of arrival of the first equipment. As on Earth, air, water, and food will have to come through carbon, nitrogen, and water cycles. While the small spacecraft in which astronauts fly today carry food and oxygen as consumables and use a simply chemical method to remove carbon dioxide from the air, this type of life-support system will not swing on a colony. Examining things from this perspective, let’s consider what an off-world colony would need, and see how those requirements mesh with different locations.įurthermore, in addition to adequate pressure, we’d need a specific mixture of gases: enough oxygen to support human life, plus nitrogen to dilute the oxygen to avoid fires and to allow microbes to support plant life. It’s because off-world colonies would improve the chances of human civilization surviving in the event of a planetary disaster on Earth. It’s not because Earth is becoming overpopulated with humans (although it is). It’s not because it would be cool to have people on multiple worlds (although it would). To explore this issue, let’s be clear about why we’d want an off-world colony in the first place. Meanwhile Mars One is in the process of selecting candidates for the first-ever Martian colony, and NASA’s heavy launch vehicle is being developed specifically to launch human missions into deep space, with Mars as one of the prime potential destinations.īut is the Red Planet really the best target for a human colony, or should we look somewhere else? Should we pick a world closer to Earth, namely the moon? Or a world with a surface gravity close to Earth’s, namely Venus? ![]() has two operational rovers on the planet a NASA probe called MAVEN and an Indian Mars orbiter will both arrive in Mars orbit later this month and European, Chinese and additional NASA missions are in the works. The collective space vision of all the world’s countries at the moment seems to be Mars, Mars, Mars. ![]()
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