Elon Musk Isn't Telling Us Something About Mars

Elon Musk says that the future of humanity is on the planet Mars and as the richest person on Earth Elon says that he is dedicating all of his resources towards the end goal of building a city on Mars we are doing it a million of us are going to live under a giant space Dome and form a utopian society while all of the losers are stuck back on old Earth sounds great right well in theory yeah but I've got to tell you the deeper I look into this whole situation the more I'm thinking that there's something Elon Musk isn't telling us about Mars Elon Musk likes to talk about this idea of a window in time life on Earth has existed in one form or another for over 3 billion years and it's it's only now in our lifetime that the human species has achieved the technology required to leave the Earth and visit an entirely new planet while that makes us an incredibly special generation of people it also shoulders us with an incredible new responsibility a window has opened for the first time in 3 billion years but we have no way of knowing how long it will stay open and if we squander this opportunity now it may never come again so Elon proposes that we send 1 million people to Mars along with 100 million metric tons of supplies and materials to help them establish a self-sustaining City on the red planet all it's going to take is a fleet of 1,000 Starship Rockets all flying back and forth from Earth to Mars every 2 years to achieve this great Crossing it's all a bit heavy potentially even a little cult-like but it does make a decent amount of sense but why the obsession with Mars well when it comes to choosing a Planet B we don't have a whole lot of options at hand unfortunately there's the cold gray Wasteland of the Moon conveniently located but severely lacking in livable potential there's Venus an acidic molten hellscape with an atmosphere so thick and hot that none of our probes sent there have been able to survive more than a few minutes and then there's Mars it's not exactly move in ready definitely a bit of a fixer upper but there is some potential here Elon has even gone so far as to say that he does optimistically believe that one day we could make Mars a planet like Earth for example Mars does have an atmosphere it's much thinner than the earth but still offers a lot more than the moon and at least it's not the pressure cooker environment of Venus Mars has a much weaker gravity than the earth but still much stronger than the moon Mars is flush with natural resources like water we know that at one time in the the distant past Mars was covered in oceans of liquid water and a lot of it is still there Frozen away in polar ice caps Mars is also red it's a really cool color so when it comes to our solar neighborhood Mars is the one least likely to kill us but that doesn't make it safe either and to be fair Elon has been pretty straight up about this minor inconvenience he once said about the Journey to Mars it will be cramped dangerous difficult very hard work and you might die hope you like it obviously no one thinks that Mars is going to be a nice comfortable place to live on day one but just how rough is it actually going to be well the average temperature is around -60° C or -76 F though in the peak of Summer at the equator of the planet Mars can reach a maximum temperature of around 20° C which is actually pretty nice but it doesn't mean you'll be kicking it on a lounge chair with a nice beverage every day the atmosphere on Mars is pretty much non-existent and what is there is mostly carbon dioxide the volume of atmospheric gas on Mars is less than 1% of what we have here on the earth so there's really not much to work with and in addition to there being nothing there to breathe there is also nothing there to protect the surface of Mars from cosmic radiation which is bad as much as the sun sustains our life here on Earth that's only because our atmosphere is able to block out all of the bad radiation that would just kill us all if we were exposed to it or it might turn us into superheroes but somebody would have to be willing to find out the gravity is also much lighter on Mars Mars is much smaller and lighter than the earth so the gravity is only about onethird as strong there that's actually a really good thing for us because after 7 months of weightless space flight the human body is going to be significantly weakened so regaining strength on Mars will be easier than Earth trying to come back home after an extended stay though that is going to be very challenging to overcome then there are these epic dust storms that can cover the entire planet in some cases dust is going to be a huge issue on Mars it gets everywhere all of our equipment is going to have to be thoroughly sealed against dust getting inside and ruining everything solar panels are going to be a pain in the ass to keep clean so Mars is definitely not going to be a safe place and like Elon has said people will probably die the margin for error with everything on Mars will be so slim any little mistake or equipment failure can cost a person their life I once saw Elon tell an interviewer on CNN that he would only ever go to Mars personally if he knew that SpaceX would continue after his death so even as the boss Elon isn't super optimistic about his chances of survival we're doing it for the Mars City though right it'll all be worth it when we're we're living under that shiny space Dome the reality of Life on Mars will require significant protection from the elements that means radiation microm meteorites atmospheric exposure and dust storms what's going to happen to that giant Dome the first time that an 8 km High Cloud of electrostatic dust rolls through who's going to clean it radiation is going to be a big concern for long-term settlements on Mars exposure to radiation from the Sun is about 40 to 50 times greater on the surface of Mars compar compared to the surface of Earth this is because Mars has no active molten core and therefore no magnetosphere to repel cosmic rays and solar winds and the lack of atmosphere leaves us more vulnerable to meteors while we are staying on the red planet earth has a very dense atmosphere so when meteorites hit it at a speed of up to 72 km/s the intense heat generated by friction causes the rock to burn up long before it reaches the ground and even if something does get get through it's going to end up a lot smaller on impact than it was out in Space the atmospheric pressure on Mars is less than 1% of ours on Earth so that meteorite is still going to be relatively whole and moving very fast when it hits our Dome that won't end well and exposure to this low pressure environment is going to be an even bigger problem for the human body if there were to be a breach in the habitat and a depressurization then our blood would boil and our eyeballs would explode so going underground would be a great way to solve some of the biggest challenges that the planet Mars throws at us and Elon knows this very well there's a clip of Elon answering questions at a conference back in 2017 and when asked about how the tunnel boring idea would relate to his Mars colony plans Elon said this I do think getting good at digging tunnels could be really helpful for Mars building underground habitats with good radiation shielding you could build a whole City Underground if you wanted to people would still want to go outside from time to time but you can build a tremendous amount underground with the right boring technology on Mars I do think there is a lot of overlap in that area so the Mars city is still on but it's probably going to look more like a cave we're still cool with that right now here's a tricky one how do we feed a million people on Mars we all saw Matt Damon growing potatoes in the soil of Mars using nothing but his own poop and a homemade Contraption to make water from hydrogen and oxygen could we actually make something like that happen in a future Mars colony let's start with the idea that we can take a plant that evolved in the soil of the earth and just sew that into soil from an alien world and get the same result of a healthy functioning plant does that actually work well yes and no unfortunately we don't have a sample of Martian soil in our possession just yet that we do have a very good idea of what Martian regolith is made of we have spent a very long time driving robots around on it in theory Matt Damon was right about Martian soil having all of the nutrients necessary for plants to grow oxygen hydrogen nitrogen carbon potassium phosphorus it's all there one of the obvious disadvantages of the Martian soil is that because there is no life on Mars that we know of at least there isn't that level of organic matter that we enjoy here on Earth with soil that is full of worms and bugs and decomposed plant and animal matter that's why Matt Damon added his own poop to his potato farm there actually was an experiment conducted in 2014 that used imitations of moon and Mars soil to grow a variety of plants in a greenhouse the results of this study were very interesting the plants grown in simulated Moon soil performed worse than the earth soil control group but the plants grown in simulated Mars soil actually performed significantly better than the moon plants matching and in some cases even exceeding the Earth soil control group the Mars soil actually produced the highest overall biomass out of the three groups now this study wasn't perfect they did add some organic matter to the moon and Mars soil samples in the form of cut grass but still a fascinating result unfortunately one thing that neither Matt Damon nor the 2014 study took into account was the high presence of something called calcium perorate in the Martian soil back then we just didn't know it was there but now we do and that complicates things this perorate is a salt and we know pretty well that plants don't like to grow in salt and even if they could the perorate is toxic in large amounts and the plants would absorb those toxins through the growing process and in turn produce poison food which is bad so the danger level will be high the city will be under underground and the food will be scarce are we sure we really want to do this it's hard not to think about the movie Blade Runner when you get into this heads space a big aspect of Ridley Scott's World building in that film was this constant advertisement for offworld migration a new life awaits you in the off-world colonies the chance to begin again in a golden land of opportunity and adventure and in the context of Blade Runner setting in the miserable hellscape of future Los Angeles the implication is that if people need that much encouragement to go then these colonies must be even worse than staying around on a dying Earth or we could think about a more historical analogy like the European settlement of North America most of those people who crossed the ocean into the unknown did it to escape from something either poverty or religious prosecutions skipping out on bad debts or just straight up running from the law they were promised land freedom and a new beginning in the new world for many of them that promise worked out they flourished in America and built the most powerful Nation on Earth that's the story we all know and love but on the flip side a lot of people were not able to survive the Hostile and unforgiving new environment they found themselves in Starvation freezing to death getting murdered by rightfully pissed-off native people eaten by bears America was a dangerous place but people went anyway now a few hundred years into into the future maybe humanity is ready to try it all over again on Mars in the words of Elon Musk success is far from certain but excitement is guaranteed

Channel: The Space Race

Views: 312,501

Keywords: mars, elon musk, spacex, spacex mars colony, elon mars colony, elon mars mission, elon mars, mars colonization, colonizing mars, mars colony, martian colony, life on mars

Id: cH9FlhvZDOk

Length: 12min 43sec (763 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 09 2024