Elon Musk has promised to populate Mars. This book offers a reality check

Subscribe to CNN’s science newsletter Wonder Theory. Explore the universe with news about exciting discoveries, scientific advances, and more..

CNN
—

Promise start life again on Mars may seem tempting and even feasible as the climate crisis intensifies and space and rocket technology advances.

But the reality would be terrible, according to one book which claims that Elon Musk’s intention to populate the Red Planet is doomed to fail in the next 30 years.

Written by Kelly and Zach Weinersmith:City on Mars: Can we populate space, should we populate space, and have we really thought this through?” won the 2024 Royal Society Trivedi Prize for Science Book and was published in November 2023.

The husband and wife authors explore what life would actually be like in the harsh conditions of the Red Planet and clear up any misconceptions about what it might entail.

Kelly Weinersmith, a biologist and associate professor at Rice University in Houston, and Zach Weinersmith, a cartoonist, delve into all the different questions humans will face if we become a multiplanetary species. How would we build space farms to feed everyone? What about having and raising children? Will settling Mars spark a new space race?

The authors were initially enthusiastic about the prospect of humans living on Mars, but the authors say their research has turned them into space settlement skeptics. “Care The Earth is 2 degrees warmer for Mars, it would be like leaving a dirty room and living in a toxic waste dump,” they wrote in the book’s introduction.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

CNN: Why did you want to write this book?

Kelly Weinersmith: We are child prodigies. We were very excited about the space settlement that was happening. We wrote a book called “soon: Ten New Technologies That Will Improve and/or Destroy Everything,” and two of the new technologies we talked about in this book were cheaper access to space and mining on an asteroid. We thought that with these two technologies, we could either deliver all the equipment needed to support human life in space, or use space resources to build space settlements. So while people have been saying for decades that it would happen soon, we thought maybe now it will finally happen.

CNN: But isn’t that what you came up with after researching and writing the book?

KV: The more we got into it – by the second year of the four-year research process, we thought, “OK, there are a lot of things we don’t know that we still need to figure out.” And if we do this anytime soon, it could be an ethical disaster.

CNN: Could humans populate Mars in the near future?

KV: Musk says that in the next 30 years there will be a million people on Mars. There is no way we can increase the population of Mars to a million people without something catastrophic happening, either in terms of us not being able to have children there and mothers and children dying or getting cancer.

If you want to do this, then it will have to be a slow generational effort to get to the point where we can be self-sufficient on Mars.

It’s such a harsh environment that requires sophisticated equipment to support life, and I just don’t see that happening on Mars in the near future.

CNN: What is achievable in our current lives?

KV: Lots of research and it’s interesting I think. I’d like to see, for example, a research station on the Moon where we have rodent colonies and we can see how they behave after a couple of generations. Perhaps in our lifetime we will see people land on Mars, do some research and return home, this is quite possible, but I don’t think we will have children on Mars.

CNN: You highlight reproduction as one of the main problems. Why?

KV: One of the places we started from was biology and medicine. This was our first eye-opening moment. I think we assumed that the 50 years of research we got from astronauts on space stations orbiting the Earth told us everything we needed to know about how humans react to gravitational regimes other than Earth’s, and How do people react to cosmic radiation?.

But it turns out that the astronauts (there) are protected magnetosphere (the protective bubble that surrounds the Earth’s atmosphere), and we know that being in free fall, which is essentially like zero gravity, is predictably bad for bones and muscles. This microgravity explains why vision tends to deteriorate over time, and spending time in space can lead to long-term cognitive decline.

The longest stay in space was less than a year and a half, and astronauts predictably experience something like 1% bone loss in their thighs every month. Even if on Mars (where gravity is 0.1% per month) 38% of Earth’s surface gravity), you can imagine it’s really bad, like when labor starts and you have to hope your hips are strong enough to handle it. We were just surprised at how many problems we thought we had overcome. But it turns out that we have very little data about how adults will behave, let alone how childbirth will go.

Zach Weinersmith: Much more research needs to be done in the area of ​​reproduction simply because it is a large and open question. For all we know, it could be completely harmless – we’d be surprised by this, but a lot more research needs to be done on this. At first glance, one would assume that (babies) would have a higher than normal level of abnormalities that would have to be dealt with without any of the (medical) help that we take for granted on Earth.

CNN: Why is the environment on Mars so hostile?

ZV: It’s fundamentally important to understand that humans evolved on Earth, and Mars simply lacks many of the things we have on Earth. That’s about 40% gravity, and we know that people have all sorts of serious problems in microgravity, but what happens at 40%, we just don’t know.

The soil is loaded perchloratewhich is known to cause hormonal imbalances. We don’t really have a lot of data on the long-term effects of high doses of this substance, because why would we need it? But apparently this is not very good for developing people.

You have an extremely delicate atmosphere. Essentially, this means that you cannot go outside without a space suit. However, the atmosphere is powerful enough to cause dust storms around the world, as well as large local storms. There is also this thing called regolith, in which there are jagged rocks and glass, all of which are thrown around, which is bad for technology, bad for people. Also, if you’re going to go solar, you better have a really good backup system, and you’ll have to spend a huge amount of time maintaining it.

Additionally, if you are anywhere near the surface, you are exposed to high levels of radiation because the Martian atmosphere is very thin, and since Mars is very weakly magnetic, it does not have a magnetosphere as strong as Earth. has.

KV: Mars is on average 140 million miles (225 million kilometers) away, meaning there will always be a communication delay: (at least) three minutes, and sometimes as much as 22–24 minutes. Therefore, in case of an emergency, you will never be able to call doctors on Earth.

CNN: What about space control?

KV: There are a lot of unknowns. In 1967 we received Outer Space Treaty through the United Nations, and this is the main document regulating space. It’s only about 2000 words. This is a very short document, and it had to be vague on purpose because the people who wrote it knew that it was impossible to predict how the future would unfold. We’ve now reached the point where things are starting to get worse in space, but we don’t have clear guidelines on what’s allowed. You are definitely not allowed to claim sovereignty.

Additionally, anyone going into space is the responsibility of some nation, so Musk will almost certainly be responsible for the United States.

Some questions are less clear, such as what can be done with resources in space. You have no clarity on who is allowed to go where, how long they are allowed to stay there, what they are allowed to do with these resources, you can imagine, space race part two between the USA and China. This time, instead of just leaving and coming back, which doesn’t prevent anyone else from doing the same, you land and create a research station in the best part (of Mars or the Moon), which means that someone else can no longer I use this place. So we can assume that the stakes will be higher this time, which is a bit worrying given the current geopolitical circumstances between China and the US.

CNN: How would we eat on Mars?

ZV: Something else that requires a huge amount of research is circular ecology. That is, say, how do you get an underground sealed bubble that is sort of an intensive agricultural zone that produces oxygen and other consumables? We don’t really know how to do this.