Vsauce I’m Jake and… Hey Jake. National Geographic called and they were wondering
if you, me and Kevin could each make a video about Mars. But Michael...Why Mars? Throughout our lives there has been a fascination,
an expectation, to physically go to Mars. And it isn't specific to one culture
or one era, it permeates through us. This idea of visiting the Red Planet, given
that name because of the iron oxide on its surface. It has been a part of culture for a very long time. In literature all the way back to the 1600s,
in film in 1910 with the Thomas Edison produced A Trip to Mars - one of the first Science
Fiction movies ever made, and more recently in video games like Doom, Red Faction and
Destiny, and of course on television in the series Mars on National Geographic. In reality, we’ve been coming up with plans
to go to that bright spot in the sky, that at it’s closest is 33.9 million miles away,
and at it’s farthest 249 million miles away, for over 65 years. The first being The Mars Project written by
physicist and engineer Wernher Von Braun in 1948. It detailed and outlined how to get a manned
mission to Mars. His hope was that it could be done by 1965,
4 years before the moon landing. Since the publication of The Mars Project
there have been over 60 other plans by government organizations and scientists to get human
beings on the surface of the planet. During all those years we have sent landers
and rovers to Mars, first the Soviet Union sent Mars 2 and 3. Neither were successful, with Mars 2 holding
the title of being the first man made object on the surface of Mars and simultaneously
the first manmade object to crash into the surface of Mars. Then there was the Viking 1 lander in 1976
which was not only the first spacecraft to actually land on Mars and complete it’s
mission but also gave us this: the first photograph ever from the surface of Mars. Skip ahead 21 years to Sojourner, the first
successful rover mission. Then there was Spirit and Opportunity. And quick side note on Spirit, it’s mission
was for 90 Martian Solar Days, about 90 Earth days, functioned for over 6 years thanks to
cleaning events: winds blowing the martian dust off of the rover’s solar panels. And then Spirit got stuck, but we’ll get
to that in a minute. The most recent rover is Curiosity, which
instead of being solar powered like Spirit and Opportunity, is powered by a nuclear generator
and has more twitter followers than most humans. Now back to Opportunity. Its been in operation for almost 13 years,
about 50 times longer than originally designed, but during that time, the rover has only travelled
a distance of 26 miles. It’s been said that what a rover could do
in 6 months, a human could do in 2 hours. What took Opportunity 13 years to accomplish
in distance, a human could do in a day. And that’s not to discredit what the rovers
have been able to accomplish. They’ve discovered some key ingredients
to life on the planet, like oxygen, nitrogen, hydrogen, carbon and sulfur. And they’ve measured the radiation on Mars
so when we do send humans, we have a better understanding of the environment we will be
entering. But the rovers have just scratched the surface...literally. Spirit got stuck in some soft soil during
its mission. In order to get it free, engineers from NASA’s
Jet Propulsion Laboratory took an identical rover and put it in as close to the same situation
as they could, going so far as to recreate the effects of reduced gravity. All this in an attempt to try and solve how
to get Spirit unstuck. They weren’t able to figure out a way but
this highlights an advantage of human vs machine. A human would be able to get itself out of
that situation. Not to mention a human wouldn’t have to
wait 26 minutes to get its next command. Well, it would range between 8 minutes and
48 minutes depending on Mars’s distance from Earth. It takes anywhere from 4 minutes to 24 minutes
to send a message to Earth and the same amount of time back. And that’s the thing, the Rovers move by
command, they extend their arm by command, every action is dictated by a person on Earth. So not only is there the time delay between
sending and receiving, but also the time to decide the best course of action. You don’t have to give a human a command
to walk forward 100cm. Humans can be much better robots than a robot. But Jake, you still haven’t answered the
question of Why Mars? Good point, so let’s break it down, starting
with why not another planet...why not Venus? Venus is closer than Mars at 26 million miles
from Earth at its closest point and 160 million at its furthest. It is also 80% the mass of Earth and has 90%
the gravity vs Mars which is 10 times smaller and has 38% the gravity. Venus is often considered to be Earth’s
twin. But it also has a surface temperature of 864
degrees F, hot enough to melt lead, and the surface pressure is 92 bar. To put that into perspective, on Earth the
average is 1 bar. 92 would be about the same pressure as going
1000ft deep into the Ocean. It would be crushing. Every lander or probe sent to the surface
had a fairly short life, with the longest one lasting only 2 hours before being destroyed
by the environment. Now, if you go 31 miles above the surface
it isn’t as bad with similar pressure, gravity and radiation protection which is why NASA
has HAVOC, the High Altitude Venus Operational Concept, a kind of floating city science lab. But the general consensus is that the other
planets are unhabitable do to temperature, distance, or a lack of a surface to stand
on. So, in terms of planets in our solar system,
Mars becomes the obvious destination. Ok, we send humans to Mars to conduct experiments
much more rapidly and much more impactfully than a rover could. A human could drill into the polar ice caps
and find out what the atmosphere was like back when Mars did have liquid water on its
surface. We could find out if there was still liquid
water under the surface and in doing so, discover life even on the smallest level. Then this brings up the obvious next question,
how do we live there? Since Mars has much less gravity than Earth
your bones would atrophy and muscles would decay away at a significant rate. So we terraform the planet. Cool terraforming fact, it was generally called
Planetary Engineering up until 1982 when the term terraforming was popularized. There are a few different proposed methods
for terraforming Mars, some involve giant orbital mirrors to warm the surface of the
planet, other ideas include melting the ice caps, directing small asteroids to impact
Mars, basically we would create global warming on Mars. And it would take a long time. In Senior NASA scientist Christopher McKay’s
paper Planetary Ecosynthesis on Mars, he suggests that producing an oxygen rich atmosphere would
take more than 100,000 years. Using current technology. Other researchers have suggested only 500
to 1,000 years. Not to mention that terraforming a planet
would most likely kill anything currently alive on it. But as astrophysicist Matt O’Dowd told me,
“Who needs to build a sky if you can build roof.” Vast extended covered habitats and recently
NASA selected six companies to create prototypes. Or maybe the first explorers of Mars could
live underground. Let me try and answer the question that i
first asked, Why Mars? I think it is a bit of a trick question because,
yes, it is about furthering our understanding of Life in our solar system. Is there, has there been other life besides
our own? The significance that that would have and
the other mysteries we would uncover would be revolutionary, would be world changing. But when asking ourselves why go to Mars,
I think about what Benjamin Franklin said on one of the first manned flights, a hot
air balloon ride, when he was asked why? He said, “What use is a newborn baby?” It is a beginning, it is the first step that
turns into something greater. To go to Mars, it takes all of us. From all different countries, from all different
backgrounds. It is called the International Space Station,
not the American Space Station, or the Japanese Space Station. When we come together for a common goal, we
can achieve anything, we really can. Even if it is planting the seed of human life
on Mars, no matter how seemingly small, it will grow into something that we could have
never imagined. And those branches will extend into the rest
of our solar system and into our galaxy and so on and so forth. Going to the Moon pumped blood and new enthusiasm
for science and engineering and our own world. Think about what stepping foot on another
planet would do. As the famous polar explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton
said, “Optimism is true moral courage. Difficulties are just things to overcome.” And, as always, thanks for watching.
As far as Vsauce videos go, I didn't find this one very good honestly.
So he mentions HAVOC and the proposition of aerial colonization of Venus, then dismisses it without saying why. "But the consensus is..."
Damn.
Good video though.
This is such an awesome video