Mars colony: Humanity's greatest quest | Michio Kaku, Bill Nye, & more | Big Think

Mars colony: Humanity's greatest quest

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We are closer than ever to actually putting human beings on Mars, but exactly how close is very much still up for debate. Getting there is one thing, and we eventually may not have a choice, but there are a number of problems that need to be solved before our species can call the Red Planet home.

In this video, former NASA astronaut Leland Melvin, educator Bill Nye, science journalist Stephen Petranek, astronomer Michelle Thaller, and theoretical physicist Michio Kaku consider mankind's fascination with Mars and explain why the planet may be the most viable option for colonization. They also share difficult truths about what it will take for this expensive dream to become a reality.

From finding a way to protect against radiation and adjusting to the difference in atmospheric pressure, to mining for ice and transporting food, to significantly lowering the cost of space travel, it certainly won't be easy. But that doesn't mean that it's not worth doing. As Leland Melvin says, the spirit of exploration and curiosity is in our DNA.

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TRANSCRIPT:

LELAND MELVIN: We as a race, the human race, are intrinsically curious and we are wired in our DNA is that we are explorers. We look up at the night sky, we wonder what's up there, especially as children. And so this journey of exploring the things around us, whether they're close or far, that's what we do. That's what we do as humans.

BILL NYE: I meet a lot of people who want to go to Mars and make it like Earth. And I think people don't, first of all, don't grasp the scale of it. It's a planet. It's a whole planet. It's not, it's not a wetland that you can reclaim and build a parking garage on top of. It's a whole planet. Furthermore, this planet where you and I are from, is perfectly suited to us. We, our ancestors, and their ancestors and so on, grew up here tuned to these environments, to these climates that we have here on Earth.

And so people want to go to Mars in the spirit of adventure. It's a whole other thing to go to Mars, I tell people this all the time. There is nothing, there's hardly any water. There's a little bit. There is nothing to eat. There is no air! There's no air. 'Then we can build a bubble and you cook the Martian rocks and the oxygen out of them.' Okay. It's just not so easy and I say to everybody who thinks that they, well everybody, he or she who thinks he or she wants to colonize Mars: Go colonize Antarctica and see what you think. And don't, no no no, none of this going to the seashore where the penguins are swimming, and the orca are eating the seals, and there's krill for the very large whales. No, go to the dry valleys where it barely gets close to the freezing point of water. When there is water. It hasn't snowed or rained in a century. There's nothing to eat, and see what you think, really. See if that appeals to you.

STEPHEN PETRANEK: So the Martian soil can be anywhere from as little as 1% in some very dry desert-like areas to as much as 60% water. One strategy for getting water when you're on Mars is to break up the regolith, which would take something like a jackhammer because it's very cold. It's very frozen. If you can imagine making a frozen brick or a chunk of ice that's mostly soil and maybe half water and half soil, that's what you would be dealing with. So you would need to break this up, put it in an oven. As it heats up, it turns to steam, you run it through a distillation tube, and you have pure drinking water comes out the other end. There is a much easier way to get water on Mars. In this country, we have developed industrial dehumidifiers. And there's very simple machines that simply blow the air in a room or a building across a mineral called zeolite. Zeolite is very common on Earth, it's very common on Mars. And zeolite is kind of like a sponge. It absorbs water like crazy, takes the humidity right out of the air. Then you squeeze it and out comes the water. In many craters on Mars, there apparently are sheets of frozen water. So water is not nearly as significant a problem as it appears to be.

MELVIN: The food aspects. Eating food that not only tastes good, but it also has a nutritional value that you're going to get all the nutrients that you need to function and live for this extended period of time. The Martian environment is very harsh with the thin atmosphere, three-eighths G, solar radiation, all these things—building suits that can handle that when you're doing these excursions and going...

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