Could You REALLY Survive A Trip To Mars? | Answers With Joe

this video is supported by curiosity stream so you want to go to Mars do you want to be the Neil Armstrong in the Red Planet when have schools named after you want to be a trivia question in bars for decades well congratulations and thank you the world needs more people like you and by that I mean absolute lunatics with a total disregard for their own life going to Mars is hard and look I get the frustration that we haven't been to Mars yet I was born on the heels of Apollo and I grew up totally believing that we would be going to Mars at some point in my lifetime no look how gray this beard is I mean come on people get a move on but no seriously the moon is 250,000 miles away Mars is 34 million miles away at its absolute closest point that's 136 times further and as p Danny once said mo miles mo problems you did say miles did he it was about space travel that song no there are of course plans in the works with SpaceX suggesting they could get there in their starship vehicle by 2024 meanwhile NASA is focusing on the moon with the Artemis program to try to establish a moon base there and then using that as a way station to Mars sometime in the 2030s but why you may be asking go there at all why would you ask that what's wrong with you you can pin it on our natural human need to explore you could say that we're running out of space and resources here and we need to set something up somewhere else you can say that until we become a multiplanetary species we will always be in danger of extinction and we would absolutely will go extinct when the Sun Goes red-giant all these arguments been made but here's the thing about Mars and every other planet in the universe for that matter it's not earth earth is the egg inside which we were formed we evolved here over billions of years to be perfectly adapted to this one planet and it's infinitely specific conditions everything else in the universe wants to kill us seriously though go outside point up at the sky you can go like eight kilometers that direction everything beyond that for 93 billion light years until you reach the very end of space and time will kill you so about a year ago I did a video where I talked about why going to Mars would be a terrible idea and it was well-received so since there might be a few people living in a cave somewhere that I didn't manage to piss off of that video I thought let's just dive deeper into that and ask the question seriously could you even survive a trip to Mars like seriously what kind of toll would this take on the human body is it something that you could even survive and if you do what kind of long-lasting effects would it have so to start things off let's just get clear about the scale of what we're talking about here now anybody who follows this channel I'm sure you already know this but let's just lay the groundwork here for just what an endeavor this is getting to Mars isn't like hopping over to the moon in a few days Mars and Earth run different elliptical paths around the Sun with Mars year taking almost a full two earth years so a large part of that time it's on the other side of the Sun from us we can only launch to Mars and specified launch windows which only occur every 26 months and because the distance is so long and the fuel is so heavy we have to take the most energy-efficient route which is known as the Hohmann transfer this uses the orbital velocity of the ship around earth as well as a velocity of Earth's orbit to coast up to Mars orbit which takes around nine months by the time you land on Mars or it'll be on the other side of the Sun from where you started once at Mars as a return window you have to meet Noor to come back to Earth which is just three to four months before you spend another nine months traveling back all in all a full trip to Mars and back the shortest possible trip with current technology is at least a 21-month missions just for perspective the record for the longest continuous space flight by any human being in history was 14 months sent by valor para cough in 1995 yes the shortest possible trip to Mars is a full seven months longer than the longest time any human being has ever been in space now before anybody splits hairs and says that the time that you spend on Mars doesn't count because you're not in space wrong wrong look take off your spacesuit in space you die take off your spacesuit on Mars you die don't fool yourself being on Mars is being in space just with ground and for anybody who wants to further split hairs yes there are people out there who have spent more time in space collectively over the course of their careers than a trip to Mars would accrue but not very many only ten ash in cosmonauts mostly cosmonauts has spent more time in space than one trip to Mars would take and that time in space did a number on their bodies first of all your head swells in space on earth gravity is constantly pulling your blood down towards your feet so we have evolved to push blood up into our head so when you're in zero-g you just have this constant overpressurization of blood rushing to your head scott kelly once said that being in space constantly feels like you've just been hanging upside down for a few minutes there's just this constant rush of blood it's not just uncomfortable and well weird-looking it can also lead to sinus pressure which can be painful and lead to breathing problems but perhaps the side effect that bothers NASA scientists the most in terms of the pressure in the head is that it distorts your vision astronauts have suggested since the 1970s that being in space altered their vision in some way but it's only in the last recent few years that NASA really looked into it and it turns out that yeah all that swelling up into your head can actually cause your eyeballs to squish a little bit and make you become a little bit more farsighted in the best case scenarios can actually cause retinal damage in worst-case scenarios and for reasons that have not been fully explained yet it happens more often to men than women and more often in the right eye than the left eye even more distressing is that some studies have shown that the immune system actually becomes weaker when you're in weightlessness and on top of that bacteria actually become more virulent when they're weightless meaning the longer you're in space the more vulnerable you are to disease and astronauts are also subjected to higher levels of co2 when they're in weightless conditions because even though there are co2 filters say in the space station when they exhale because of zero-gravity it just kind of pools around your head and increased inhalation of co2 can lead to cognitive effects like a decline in decision-making and problem-solving but the biggest Bugaboo is bone loss which is something that space agencies have been aware of for quite some time now our connection with the ground every single time we take a step that sends a signal through our bodies to put calcium into our bones to strengthen and rebuild them even just sitting upright in normal gravity causes your muscles to kind of tighten around your bones and applies a little bit of force there without any of that in space your body stops reinforcing your bones and it starts filtering your cows your kidneys which can lead to kidney stones which are fun also astronauts who have been in space for longer than six months usually show heightened levels of homocysteine which can be a marker for cardiovascular disease now most of these up to this point there are solutions for fans can blow the co2 around glasses can correct for visions supplements can deal with the calcium situation and of course regular exercise can prevent bone loss but perhaps the biggest one is radiation exposure astronauts on the ISS received ten times the normal amount of radiation and they're inside the Earth's magnetic shield passengers on a trip to Mars would be exposed to much greater radiation from much longer period of time and that's not just solar radiation but also cosmic rays cosmic rays are much higher energy particles usually protons and neutrons that can do a lot more damage to DNA and it's a lot harder to shield from the solar wind in scientists at the Brookhaven National Laboratory have done experiments with mice where they bombard them with something akin to cosmic rays to see how it affects them and they found that their ability to go through a maze went down significantly meaning that the cosmic rays may be damaging their brain tissue the speculation is that it's also damaging other organs like their digestive system and their heart and their lungs and that kind of thing and astronauts are gonna be exposed to that for nine months just to get to Mars now it might be a good time to kind of address the elephant in the room for some of you out there I'm sure who already thinking this and and it's that that that duration of the flight to Mars what's not set in stone Mars and Earth have elliptical orbits so even when you get one of those transfer windows it's a little bit different every time every trip to Mars is a little bit different the SpaceX plan to get to Mars for example has a refueling in orbit which actually might give them a little bit more fuel that they can burn give them more velocity might get them in there a little bit quicker some of them are saying six months for that extremely optimistic people say three months and there are other theoretical propulsion systems like nuclear thermal propulsion that says that they could possibly get us there in ninety to a hundred days that's three to four months there's also the possibility of scaled up ion drives that don't have a whole lot of thrust to them but they burn for a very long time and over over time it actually can pick up incredible speeds and there are also different return trajectories and different windows that people could take which some say could put us on Mars for up to 18 months some say we stay there might be a lot shorter but we managed to take a more indirect route may be using Venus as a gravity assist the point is the shortest possible duration that I was able to find was 21 months so I'm going with that but it could be much much longer so let's just say everything goes perfectly nothing blows up you don't hit a straight asteroid you don't get taken by some gelatinous aliens on the way and you're survive reentry and you survive landing and you get to be on Mars then what well when Space Station astronauts and cosmonauts come home from the ISS this happens they're usually so weak and discombobulated from their time in zero-gravity that a whole landing crew assembles to physically carry them to ground transportation and this is after only six months on the ISS that ground crew is not going to be waiting for you on Mars most astronauts report a bit of a react LeMay ssin period when they get back to Earth where their muscles and joints are kind of getting used to the gravity again but beyond all that there's a sensory motor cortex as a retired astronaut Leroy Chiao once described about going weightless your inner ear thinks you're tumbling the balance system in there is going all over the place meanwhile your eyes are telling you that you're not tumbling you're upright the two systems are sending all this contradictory information to your brain this usually leads to a few days of nausea as people get used to the weightlessness well once you've acclimated to the weightlessness the same thing will happen to you again when you get on land astronaut Mark Kelly wants describe when he got back to land he would turn his head and it felt like the whole world was flipping end over end so here's your situation you've landed on Mars after an extremely long-duration spaceflight your muscles and joints are a key is they're trying to get back used to the gravity your eyes are readjusting back to where they used to be before you went up into space you're cognitively declined from all the co2 and cosmic rays that might have hit you and on top of all that every time you turn your head the world does somersaults and you don't even have muscle memory to rely on because now you're in one-third gravity you're in a gravity situation that you've never been before in your entire life and while you're in this state you have to enter and operate and work in an environment where if you make one single mistake it would not just kill you it would kill everyone on the ship welcome to Mars Mars is like living in Antarctica except you know no air actually Mars has air but it only has about 1% the pressure of the air that we have here and most of that is carbon dioxide which we 100% can't breathe and because the atmosphere is so thin there's not much to retain the heat at night so temperatures can go from an average high of two degrees Celsius in the summer to an average low of negative 76 degrees Celsius in the same day it was thought that Mars used to have a thicker atmosphere but it doesn't have a magnetic shield like we do here on earth so its atmosphere was picked away by solar wind just one atom at a time molecule by molecule over billions of years and that same lack of a magnetic field in the thin atmosphere that that lack of a magnetic field caused means that there's almost no protection against solar radiation in cosmic rays meaning the first humans living on Mars are probably gonna live underground or at least be covered by ground to limit exposure to that radiation ground that is toxic in 2008 the Mars Phoenix lander discovered large amounts of perchlorates in the Martian soil per chlorate is a salt solution which might be why some of the water that we've seen on the surface of Mars might still be in liquid form because it's turned it in a sort of a brine it's also a component of rocket fuel and munitions and according to the EPA perchloric acid is corrosive to the eyes skin and respiratory tract and short-term exposure to high doses may cause sore throat coughing labored breathing deep burns loss of vision abdominal pain vomiting or diarrhea it also disrupts the function of the thyroid gland which can totally mess with your metabolism and cause weight loss it also oxidizes when it's hit with UV rays which the surface of Mars is hit with you the Rays all the time constantly which means that the soil is not gonna be very good to plant stuff in no matter how much poop you put in it long story short that famous red dust on the surface of Mars is going to be everywhere it's gonna be a problem now imagine your body is weakened in your immune system is weakened from being in zero gravity for nine months you're being constantly bombarded with radiation and cosmic rays you're eating stuff that comes out of soil that has toxic elements in it you're drinking your own pee and you're stuck in a really tight confined space with a dozen or so other people that are in the same situation that you are and then one person gets sick after nine months of weightlessness affecting your immune system your body is very prone to infections now it's true that space habitats are extremely clean but they're not sterile throw in all the vomiting and diarrhea and coughing they might be coming from perchlorate exposure and you're bound to shake loose a few body critters that are looking for some action all it takes is for one colony to take root and one person in that enclosed space and an outbreak is more than a little gonna happen and then there's just a simple fact that Mars is a dangerous place there are definitely going to be some injuries as people just try to get react Lemaitre to this new type of gravity dust storms have been known to encircle the entire planet which could mess with power generation all that dust can get into the seals that can affect the airlocks and something else to keep in mind in those very long duration ISS missions they had regular cargo ships resupplying the station with stuff there will be no cargo ships on a trip to Mars you have to have everything for the whole 21 month trip there for you and if something goes wrong you're on your own on the ISS and even on the moon we have almost instantaneous communication there's a 20 minute gap from Earth to Mars in communications so if you need to get in touch with earth for something you're on your own and after all of that you've got to take that nine-month trip back home with all the hazards and the perils that I was talking about to get you over there only this time it's after spending several months and that death trap called Mars but let's just say you survive all that and everything goes perfectly and you land back on earth congratulations you beat the odds every day for the rest of your life is a gift yes schools with your name on them yes media attention galore and yes you will probably not be able to hold your head up in the short term you can probably expect to be bedridden for a while expect about a bajillion medical tests to be done on you and probably a very intense physical therapy regimen also expect to be in quarantine for a while when the Apollo astronauts came back from the moon they were in quarantine for three months and there's far less likelihood of there being bacteria on the moon and there are on Mars and by the way if there is any bacteria on Mars it would probably be under the ground you know where where you're gonna be living and digging into to protect from the radiation and we have no idea what that would do to the human bodies so yeah I didn't even mention that earlier expect a long period of sensory recovery once you get back into the Earth's gravity you know that whole thing of turning your head in the world does somersaults long-term obviously your cancer risk has gone way up your cognitive abilities might be in decline but that's probably recoverable the thing that they're most concerned about though is cardiovascular issues today there are only 24 people who have ever flown outside the safety of the Earth's magnetic shield those are obviously the Apollo astronauts that went to the moon in 2016 a study was published where they looked at the long-term effects of what those astronauts you know encountered outside of our magnetic shield they basically compared their results with other astronauts that were in low-earth orbit as well as other astronauts that for whatever reason didn't ever go up into space they found that the Apollo astronauts had a five times higher likelihood of cardiovascular disease and tests that were run with maestro the same results now why this is happening they're not entirely sure but it seems that deep space radiation might mess with endothelial cells which are the cells that make up the the lining of the blood vessels which can apparently lead to clots that can lead to strokes and heart attacks further on down the line also keep in mind that the Apollo astronauts are seeing this much of an effect after only two weeks outside of the Earth's magnetic shield you brave Mars Explorer are gonna have that for two years how much would this affect your cardiovascular system could this possibly shorten your life I really don't know NASA often talks about the unknown unknowns everything I've talked about in this video the good news is we know about it we know it exists we can we are we will plan to counter those problems and if you'd like to know more about those measures let me know I make videos you know it's the unknown unknown so the Keith the NASA Administrator is up at night the big surprises that come up along the way that we didn't even know we're there and you brave Mars traveler will get to discover those things so why am I being so negative about this you seem to be saying with that piercing glare you're giving me right now I can feel it I can feel it I'm not trying to be negative some of the smartest people in the world are working on solutions to these problems and I have faith that they're gonna find them it's just you know like many of you I about thinking why the hell haven't we gone to Mars you know why didn't we go right after we went to the moon and it was only after I spent a lot of time with this subject that I realized that going to Mars is just a completely different beast than going to the moon and there was no way we were technologically mature and ready to make that leap there was just so much more we had to learn before that you know the space station might be boring and it might be routine but we have learned so much from being up there during all that time the space station has been occupied for almost 20 years now that's amazing and it's only because of all that time and all the experiments and all the people that have done the work up there that we can even consider going to Mars now we just had the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing and of course there was a lot of videos and content that went out there about it and I was looking through some of them and there was a thread that I stumbled upon that I started to realize that the Apollo program really shouldn't have happened it was a product of the Cold War in a need to you know best an ideological enemy and we were not prepared to follow up with that not technologically not financially we rushed to do a thing and there just wasn't anywhere to go from there today the space industry is mature technology has evolved and there's more players in the game only this time they're being cooperative about it instead of being competitive the first space race that was just for show this space race the real space race it's gonna be a hell of a thing to watch now as I said before there will be no resupply missions to Mars if we get out there we got to pack everything that we need for that 21 month journey right at the start and a really cool documentary that I found that talks specifically about that is called packing for Mars which you can watch on curiosity stream this documentary produced in partnership with ESA looks at what we could take with us what we need to go earlier on separate cargo missions to wait for us to get there and what resources we could utilize on location in Mars it's an interesting question to ponder and it's one that we're gonna have to figure out before we go there this of course is just one of many documentaries about Mars specifically one of hundreds on space and space travel and one of thousands on all kinds of topics including nature futurism in the arts curiosity stream was created by one of the founders of the Discovery Channel so it's kind of like what the Discovery Channel was meant to be just high-quality brain food that keeps you coming back for more because you're awesome viewers this channels and get free access to curiosity stream for 30 days and after that it's only $2.99 a month which is insane it's just it's just such a good deal you can get that by going to curiosity stream comm / Jo Scott now we're all turning the streaming 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Channel: Joe Scott

Views: 221,146

Rating: 4.8948069 out of 5

Keywords: answers with joe, crewed mars missions, spacex, spacex starship, nasa, apollo, artemis moon mission, moon mission, astronauts, long duration space flight, ISS, scott kelly, cosmic rays, cardiovascular disease, perchlorate

Id: -n9uz_cOjT8

Length: 21min 55sec (1315 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 19 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/still-at-work]

This is a good video and really lays out all the problems with getting to and from Mars.

But personally, I find the question Joe puts forward (for educational purposes) when taken alone should be treated the same way as if someone asked "can you survive a trip to the bottom of the deepest part of the ocean."

You can answer no, as no human body could surive that environment, or you could answer yes, as with enough preperation and the right equipment you could survive and, in fact, I believe a few have already done so.

The answer to get to mars is the same, you can survive it if you prepare well and bring all the right equipment. Some of the equipment still needs to be invented but none of it is outside the current scope of modern technology.

When people propose going to mars with less then needed equipment and say that its too difficult, I just want to laugh and responed with "yes and scuba diving to the bottom of the mariana trench is also impossible, you would need a submersible of incredible hull strength to survive the crushing pressures" and in the same way that is obvious so is it obvious that we should probably need to have better space ship then the technology of the space station to go to mars.

I find it strange that any space related technology that is not already demonstrated is often considered far off near scifi level of impossible. Resuable rockets were scoffed at by the larger community right up until the point they worked. So too will rotating habits, transit time to mars in 3 months, and radiation protection for the crew during the journey. We know these are not impossible, not even hard from a physics point of view, just we never fleshed out the engineering. Yet we think these technologies are somehow far in the future and can't be considered for traveling into deep space today.

There are many problems with getting to Mars, however, as Joe points out in the video, very smart people are working on them. And they are all solvable problems.

SpaceX is effectively removing the mass limitation. This bottleneck has kept the scope of many mars journeys restricted in whst technologies they can implement. But if up mass to orbit is less of an issue then numner of options opens up greatly. The starship alone can probably house many of these technologies to keep a small crew alive and healthy to Mars and back. Eventually specialized vehicles for the deep space transit will be built that make traveling to mars far more safe then a short duration on the ISS.

Getting to Mars will be hard, an order of magnitude harder then anything else we, as a species, have tried before. But for all the mountain of obsticles, Mars is still with reach.

[u/aquarain]

The distance is too great. The challenge too extreme; there is too much peril on the journey. So stay home. Tend the hearth and wait to host the bold adventurers on their return from Far Samarkand. It's ok.