TechStuff Visits Mars

all things tech. And in our last episode, I talked about NASA's Insight Lander, which is taking a lot of measurements on Mars and it's all about helping us unlock the secret of how rocky planets in general are formed and Mars in particular, as well as other details about the Red planets, sort of like a hey, what's what's your core made out of? Man? I see you've been

working on your core. Well, today I want to talk about the various proposed missions to Mars that would see people human beings set foot on the planet and what that would require to make it successful and not a terrible, terrible mistake. And let me tell you it's gonna require a lot, y'all. Mars, as it turns out, wants to kill you. Well, I guess it doesn't really want anything, but conditions on Mars are not particularly suited towards supporting life,

specifically not supporting human life. So let's go down the list of what's going on over at Mars, so we can identify the challenges we have to overcome if we're to ever land there and survive the experience. So the first thing we can get of what out of the way is something I talked about in the last episode, and that's how far away Mars is from us. The Moon is about two nine thousand miles from Earth or about three thousand five kilometers, which is a pretty good job.

But we can get there in a few days. As proven by the Apollo lunar missions. Mars is much much further away, and the distance changes throughout the year between Earth and Mars because both planets are on their own orbits around the Sun, as opposed to the Moon, which obviously orbits the Earth, so the distance you must travel

depends upon the respective orbits of the two planets. There is a launch window that represents the lowest amount of energy required to get from Earth to Mars, and that window comes around every couple of years, so you have time to plan out your mission, and you want to time it just right to minimize the amount of energy

you're going to need to get there. That minimizes the amount of fuel you have to carry two Mars, and once you're on Mars you should pretty much wait around for the next launch window in order to get back using the minimum amount of energy needed, because the more energy you required to make the trip, the harder it's going to be to do. You know, you're gonna have to carry more fuel, it's going to be more expensive, you have to design bigger spacecraft. So these things matter

more on that a little bit. Next, the atmosphere. So Mars has an atmosphere. Ya, that's a good thing, but it's not like Earth's atmosphere. Earth's atmosphere is a cocktail made up of about seventy eight percent nitrogen, twenty one percent oxygen, and then a bunch of other gases in very small amounts, like argone and carbon dioxide. Mars's atmosphere is about nine five three percent carbon dioxide. The atmosphere is only two point seven percent nitrogen and only about

point one three percent oxygen. There's also very little water vapor in Mars's atmosphere. It has a point zero three percent water vapor, whereas on Earth it's closer to one percent. So we're not talking about a breathable atmosphere. Mars also has a much thinner atmosphere than Earth does, and there's not much atmospheric pressure i they're On average, the atmosphere exerts about six point one mill of bars of pressure

on the surface of Mars. On Earth, the average sea level atmospheric pressure is one thousand, thirteen point to five mill of bars six point one compared to one thousand, thirteen point to five. That is a huge difference, though you could argue some of that difference also comes down to Mars's gravitational pull, which is about point three eight times that of Earth's, so you would be lighter on Mars, you know, you'd be more than more than half as light. Also,

air pressure changes on Mars throughout the year. During the Martian summer, the Sun's heat will start to heat up frozen carbon dioxide which is at the polar ice caps on the Martian poles, and the frozen carbon dioxide will begin to sublime. That means it will convert directly from solid form into a gas us and so the atmosphere's carbon dioxide content will increase, which means the atmospheric pressure

will also increase by a whole two milo bars. That's still a tiny amount of pressure, but it is a significant increase when you're looking at an average of just six point one mela bars. In the winter, carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will start to freeze at the polar ice caps, and you will even see carbon dioxide snow, which is kind of wild. The low atmospheric pressure and temperatures means that liquid water does not exist on the

surface of Mars. Liquid water would either freeze because of the temperature or evaporate because of the very low air pressure, and it would just depend upon the local conditions at that time. And since we humans rely heavily on water, that's one of the things we would have to deal with if we were to go to Mars. There is water on Mars, but not really in liquid format, so we would have to extract the water from various Martian environments in some way and process it in order to

make use of it. And we would absolutely have to do that if we wanted to stay there for any real length of time and keep our water supply to a level that can sustain life. You could recycle water, and in fact, we see this done a lot in space missions like the International Space Station. They're really good at recapturing water and reusing it. But even so you're gonna lose some through various means, so it's good to have a way of replenishing that in the Martians spring.

In summer, the sun heats up the atmosphere of Mars enough to cause convection currents or wind. Sometimes that wind gets pretty gusty despite the very thin atmosphere, and it can blow hard enough to start picking up dust particles and blowing them around. Uh, it does have to be a pretty strong wind. Because there is so little atmosphere, it's tough for the atmosphere to move the dust. So to stir up dust clouds it takes winds traveling at speeds of around six any miles per hour or one

two hundred kilometers per hour. These dust storms can last for months and spread across enormous regions across the surface of Mars. So we would likely be at least partly reliant on solar power for any sort of human presence on Mars. So this is another challenge because if there's a really bad dust storm, you're not going to get very much solar exposure to your solar panels, so you have to have enough energy storage systems there to get you through any long periods where you have limited to

no solar access. You also have to have a way of clearing those solar panels if they get covered in dust. So we may not be able to depend upon the sun as the sole means of generating electricity, and in fact, a lot of the proposals I see suggest bringing along other types of sources for generating electricity, like nuclear power plants for example portable ones. Also that thin air presents

more challenge is than just breathing. For one thing. As I said in the last episode, it really makes it hard to slow your spacecraft down as you're descending to the planet from outer space. The atmosphere is thick enough to present thermal problems as you come in at high speeds, because your spacecraft will compress the air in front of it, and that will cause the temperature of the surface of your craft to climb quickly. So you'll need to get

some good heat shielding on your entry craft. But the atmosphere is so thin that a parachute is not nearly as effective as it would be on Earth. It will slow you down a little bit, but not as much as you would need and not as much as it would in Earth's deliciously soupy atmosphere, so you'll need some sort of other method like retrorockets on your landing craft

to keep things from getting too rough on arrival. The thin atmosphere also means Mars doesn't hold on to heat from the sun very effectively, even though that thin atmosphere is almost entirely made up of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide. The temperature on Mars can vary by as much as a hundred degrees fahrenheit or sixty degrees celsius in a day, So how the heck do you dress for that weather? Yeah? I thought Georgia was bad, and we're not done yet.

The soil itself on Mars is a problem. You may have heard that on Earth where developing soil that's meant to mimic that of Mars. You can actually buy this stuff. I think it's like ten bucks a pound. So this is typically called simulant, and simulant is intended for use and experiments that could lead to developing techniques for growing food crops on Martian soil, for example, or using Martian soil in other ways, like as part of a way

of creating construction material. It's another uh necessity for any mission to Mars with humans is being able to grow stuff once you get to Mars, because if you're gonna be on the planet for a couple of years, chances are you're not going to be able to carry all of the food you're going to need for that time along with you. You just won't have the cargo capacity. It would be better if you could bring stuff that

you could plant and grow at your destination. It would take up less space and you would become sufficient on the planet. Also, plants generate oxygen, so that would be good, So simulants are good for running those kind of experiments. However, simulants tend to leave out the stuff in Martian soil that's really harmful to humans. Makes sense, you don't want to put human lives at risk while you're running these experiments.

But actually on Mars it's a different story. You have stuff like perchlorate chemicals, so in high concentrations such as what you would find in Martian soil, that stuff is

toxic to humans. The good news is it's also a common component of rocket fuel, so maybe you could use stuff on Mars to help manufacture the fuel you would need for a return trip to Earth, but you would also need to figure out a way to thoroughly clean any component that was to pass from the surface of Mars into an inhabited area, as particles of that dust

could be deadly to humans. The percolorates could have other uses, like manufacturing oxygen, but we would have to be very clever in how we manage our interactions with the Martian regulars to avoid the possibility of contaminating any habitats. Uh. The stuff can really mess up thyroids, for example. So even the dirt on Mars is trying to kill you. But wait, there's more. I'll explain in just a moment, But first let's take a quick break to thank our sponsor.

All Right, So the atmosphere on Mars cannot support life. There's no liquid water to be found on the planet. The soil itself will kill you. And then there's radiation. So on Earth, our atmosphere and the Earth's magnetic field or the magnetosphere protect us from the most harmful radiation that comes from the Sun and other sources stuff like cosmic rays. But as we've mentioned, the Martian atmosphere is not so thick, and the planet has a very weak

magnetic field, so there isn't much protection against radiation. Also, the trip to Mars would take months, as we mentioned earlier, and during that time you would be on a space ship and potentially exposed to incredible amounts of radiation, like fifteen times more than the annual radiation limit we put in place for people who work at nuclear power plants.

So the Curiosity Rover, when it was traveling from Earth to Mars, monitored how much radiation it was it was subjected to as it went through that trip, and it accumulated the equivalent radiation of twenty four cat scans on the duryation of that trip. Oh, and that long trip could also cause other problems, not just the radiation. The micro gravity, the fact that you are quote unquote weightless in space can lead to stuff like loss of bone

density as well as loss of of muscle tissue. So some proposed plans of sending humans to Mars include a method of generating artificial gravity, typically by spinning the spacecraft so that you have this centripetal force thing going on that you would kind of fake gravity, But that also

has challenges associated with it. A big one being that if your spacecraft is not large enough, then the the radius of rotation it will be so different between your feet and your head that probably messy up big time, Like it would be very difficult to move around and and adapt to that kind of environment. So even creating artificial gravity has its own challenges. Cosmic radiation and solar particles could continue to cause real problems on the surface

of Mars even after you've gotten off the spacecraft. The threat of radiation is such that exobiologists, as to say, scientists who are studying the possibility of life on other celestial bodies, have suggested that if any organics still exist on Mars, assuming they ever did exist on Mars, they would likely be several feet below ground because the radiation would otherwise scour the surface of the planet clean of life, at least any kind of life that we would be

familiar with. So some of those cosmic particles are traveling at such speed that when they hit Mars they actually penetrate the soil itself and bury themselves in by a few feet. So you'd probably have to dig down at least a meter or so if you hope to find evidence of organic material like the kind we have here

on Earth. All right, So any mission to Mars with human beings is going to have to take into account radiation, atmospheric issues, landing challenges, water supply, food supply, some means of cleaning off contaminants to avoid thyroid issues brought on by exposure to percolorance. The Hey, we've been to the Moon.

We can totally do this, right, Well, it's It's certainly a goal that several people and organizations have set for themselves, though not all of those proposals have been met with enthusiasm. Let's take one of the more questionable ones first, because I remember being incredibly skeptical of it when I first heard about it back in two thousand twelve. I'm talking about Mars One now. According to co founder Bas Lansdorp, he and his co founder ar No Wielders created this

organization back in two thousand eleven. Their plan was to create a project with the goal of sending humans to Mars, and it would be a one way trip. Those humans were meant to a stay, publish a permanent colony on Mars, and they also wanted this project to make use of as much existing technology as possible, which would help cut down costs. They wouldn't have to do research and development

on new tech. They wanted to manage this with as much existing tech as they could, and they thought by making it a one way trip and by relying on existing technology, they could cut the cost down significantly. They produced a roadmap back in two thousand twelve with a timeline for various key elements they identified as being necessary to lead up to the point of sending the first crew to Mars. The selection process was to begin in

two thousand and thirteen. Originally, the company's goal was to land a small crew of four people on Mars by twenty three. Well it's twenty eighteen now, so we're getting pretty darned close to that date. But no worries because over time Mars one has pushed that date back more than once. The latest version of the roadmap now estimates a twenty thirty two touchdown for the first crew mission.

Between now and then would be other missions to test various technologies and to establish communication satellites, as well as the infrastructure that will be necessary for the colony moving forward. News of the project spread very quickly in two thousand twelve. Some people thought this was a really interesting idea, some people considered it interesting but really super ambitious, and some

felt that it was just whackadoodle crazy talk. Now wrapped up with this incredibly challenging goal of getting people to Mars safely and then keeping them alive was a reality television element. The organization sent out the equivalent of a casting call for perspective colonists. So to apply, you were so happosed to pay a forty dollar application fee and submit your application. Mars one claims that around two hundred

thousand people submitted applications. I have not found any sources to back that up, but if it's true, that means a cool eight million dollars flooded the organization's coffers. That's probably not true. Though NBC counted up the number of video applications that were on the Mars one website that was part of the application process was submitting a video

that would be hosted by Mars one. That number was two thousand seven two, which is a far cry away from two hundred thousand and then the reality television element was supposed to kick in during the training process and the selection process. There was to be a reality television show program that would document all of this, and the proceeds the money raised by advertising on that program would go towards supporting the project. That program never really materialized.

There were some sort of questionable circumstances around that. I'm not going to go into it, but it just sounds like things just didn't work out properly. And anyway, even if you assume that two hundred thousand people did apply as the company suggests, that would still only mean eight million dollars and no eight million dollars and a lot of money, but it's peanuts when it comes to space travel.

NASA has estimated that it would cost one hundred billion dollars to send people to Mars, although to be fair, NASA's estimate also includes bringing them back to Earth, and those estimates have ranged from one hundred billion dollars to four hundred fifty billion dollars. And keep in mind that does include bringing people back to Earth, so that obviously adds a lot to the expense, right, And that was one of the points that the Mars One folks said,

is that we aren't planning on breaking them back. That's where they're gonna live, so we can cut that out of the the project entirely, but the Mars One estimate is that sending the first four colonists will cost six billion dollars. That's still an astronomical number pun intended, but it's just a drop in the bucket of what other people have estimated it cost to get a colony started on Mars. Mars One's plan is to send up living units as in habitats. These sort of like the space

living rooms. The artists renderings make them look a lot like the space capsules from the Apollo missions. They kind of have that sort of general shape to them. The initial habitat would include two living units, to life support units and a supply unit, plus a couple of rovers.

The first rover would actually arrive before anything else, and it would be in charge of scouting out a good location for the actual colony and then hauling the various units like the habitat and life support units to the

appropriate locations at that destination. The project is pretty vague about a lot of details about stuff that would need to happen for this to all work, but it doesn't make claims that the facilities on Mars would be generating oxygen and water by processing the Martians soil and using plant systems inside habitats. The colony, according to the company, would also make use of inflatable habitats that would provide

one thousand cubic meters of space. Now, if those were on the surface of Mars, you would still have the problem of radiation to deal with. But one proposed solution is to send robots up ahead that would dig out a space and inflate the habitats inside the holes, and that way you would have an underground habitat, and the soil of Mars itself could provide protection against radiation, assuming you dug down deep enough. But that does present lots

and lots of other challenges. Also, Mars One isn't in the business of making this technology. They plan on contracting with other companies to provide spacecraft, launch vehicles rovers that kind of thing. As far as I know, there are no existing contracts to do any of that right now. There were some feasibility studies that were done early on, but as far as I can tell, that's all that's happened.

There's also been no real information about who is developing those habitats or what the spacecraft is going to be like, or how it will even land on Mars. So, in short, there's a whole lot of stuff that's like really super necessary to make sure people don't, you know, die, and a lot of it hasn't been talked about at all. For those and many other reasons, there are plenty of people in the space business who think that Mars one is at best completely out of its element, that it

has been enough way more than it can chew. There are others who worry that it's a total scam and not even a legitimate project. More than a few of the people who had made it through the initial round of the crew selection process have since left the project, many of them disillusioned about the lack of information and preparation.

And it may very well be that the founders of Mars one are completely sincere in their desire to send people to Mars, but it doesn't sound like the work that was needed to make that happen and to keep people alive has been done, and I seriously doubt it will get done. There's also lots of reports about various financial problems that the company has encountered over recent times, so I would be truly shocked if even within the next twenty years, this company is able to capitalize on

on even of the plans they've made. My guess is that it will limp around for a bit longer and then eventually just sort of fade away and no one will have heard of it afterward. Uh. But that's a guess. They could prove me totally wrong, and I kind of hope they do, because it would be incredible, but the odds are stacked against them. I have other Mars Colony projects to talk about, but before I get into that, let's take another quick break to thank our sponsor. Next,

I want to talk about Mars Direct. This is a plan that was developed by Dr Robert Zubrin, and Zubran's plan would allow humans to not just travel to Mars, but to come back from Mars, so this is not a one way trip situation. To do so, we would have to develop methods to manufacture rocket fuel from materials on Mars, particularly materials that are found in Mars' atmosphere, and he advocates using Martians soil and minerals in it for a construction materials, which could be problematic with the

percolorate issue. And like the Mars One plan, he feels that would be important to extract water from the Martians soil to support life. But unlike the Mars One Plan, he goes into a lot more detail about his ideas and has a lot more scholarship to back him up on many of his plans. So in the Mars Direct Plan, the initial plan, the first step was to send an unmanned spacecraft called the Earth Return Vehicle to Mars. So essentially you're putting the the return ship onto Mars's surface.

That's your first step. And not only would it be the spacecraft, it would also the payload would also include a rover that would be able to travel on the surface of Mars and do mission parameters or fulfillment and parameters, i should say. And then the nuclear reactors that the Mars Colony would use to process materials to generate rocket fuel.

And the idea would be that between the rover, these nuclear reactors, and the return vehicle, you would be able to process enough material to fully fuel the return vehicle and have it ready to go, so that day one, when you land on Mars, you've already got your return ticket ready. So that was the first part of the plan. Then you would have a second trip where you would

send two payloads. Uh. One would be a second Earth Return vehicle or e r V, and another would be a habitat module that would be a place where people would actually live and a few astronauts along the way as well. The initial plan was to send four and that way you would never have a situation where anyone

would be alone. People can travel in pairs. The astronauts would spend about a year and a half on Mars before jumping into one of the r v's and returning home or maybe you know, both if necessary, But that would give them plenty of time to work on Mars, to start setting up the colony and to uh get things,

you know, really prepared for future trips. And while they would be returning home, a new crew and new e r v s and new habitat units could be traveling back toward Mars, because it's taking advantage of that same launch window way he talked about earlier, and so you would be adding more and more habitat units and Earth

Return vehicles to the surface of Mars. This would keep up a cycle that would allow astronauts to explore more and more of the planet and eventually start linking those hab units together to create a larger colony that could be sustainable. And his plan really depends upon us making the most out of the materials that are available on

Mars as aaron. As Mars is, there are a lot of ways that we could potentially exploit the material there to create a colony, and including things like extracting that water from the soil. So it's a lot of living off the land kind of mentality as much as we possibly could now. Unlike Mars One, the Mars Direct plan is just a proposal. It's not a project that's being run by a nonprofit that has a for profit element that's supposed to handle all the money. That's what Mars

one is doing. Mars Direct isn't. It's more of an idea, a strategy that's advocated by Zubrin and the Mars Society. It is not an active organization that's taking investments in the supposed effort to send people to Mars. Zubrian has proposed it to NASA, and after some initial criticisms about the plan, he went back and made some changes to

his approach. One of those changes became uh the Mars Semidirect approach, which would put the Earth returned vehicle not on the surface of Mars, but rather insert it into the orbit around Mars. So the Earth return vehicle, the return ticket home would be in orbit around Mars. And on Mars you would put a different vehicle called the Mars Ascent Vehicle, and it's only job would be to launch a crew off the surface of Mars into Martian orbit, where then it could rendezvous with the e r V

that was already out in orbit. Astronauts would transfer over to the e r V and then they could head home. So this way the e r V itself would uh would not have to do all the work of liftoff and then travel all the way to Earth. It would already be in orbit. It would mean that you would have to already fuel the e r V, most likely because it would never be on the surface of Mars, so you couldn't build out that fuel depot approach for the r V. You could do it for the Mars

A sent vehicle. However, now it's possible we might see a mission similar to what Mars direct or Mars Semidirect proposes, and there are other suggestions out there as well. So NASA looked at this and said, there are some elements to here that we think are really interesting, and they kind of incorporated that into their own proposed long term plan for Mars. But there are others who have argued for more ambitious plans that would happen sooner than that.

One guy was Dennis Tito, who founded a nonprofit organization in ten called Inspiration Mars Foundation, and the plan was to fly a crude mission, as in a mission with people on it, not not crude as in, hey get a load of that mission anyway. This plan was to send this spacecraft around Mars and then back to Earth, so fly by essentially. Initially, the hope was to do that by this year and by this year I mean

eighteen when I'm recording this episode. However, that did not work out, and the next opportunity to do so at the lowest energy expenditure would be in one Tito's organization estimated that the cost of this mission would be somewhere between one and two billion dollars, and Tito said that he had secured about three hundred million dollars in potential investments, but that he would need an additional seven hundred million, and he was hoping that the US government would give

it to him, but Congress said, no, Dice, We're happy to give you expertise, but no Mullah, And as far as I can tell, the project pretty much died out after that. Then there's Elon Musk and SpaceX. Elon Musk has been incredibly bullish on Mars, to say the least. In an interview on HBO that happened very recently, Musk said he gave himself a seventy percent chance of moving to Mars, and in that same interview he said, quote, we think you can come back, but we're not sure

end quote. So in other words, it would be perhaps a life sentence to Mars that you're going to move there knowing that you will die there, and also that conditions are so harsh that you might die there much earlier than you would have otherwise. He's very forward about the whole thing and says, yeah, Mars is dangerous, and your risk of death on route to Mars, as well as just day to day living on Mars is much

higher than it would be on Earth. But he still thinks he's he's got se chance of ending up there. So Musk projects that such a trip might be possible in less than a decade and might cost around a couple hundred thousand dollars once it's turned into a space tourism kind of thing. SpaceX in general has some big Mars plans as well as general plans for a craziness in space. In September two eighteen, SpaceX announced a deal with Yusaku Mazawa, who had secured a pretty darn exclusive ticket.

Mazawa is going to become the first private passenger to fly around the Moon right now. The projection for that trip is to happen sometime in twenty three. No telling how much that ticket cost, but I bet it was way more than a couple of hundred thousand dollars. The hope is that private space flight will initiate a whole trend and that will help fund the development of the b f R that's the successor to space X's Falcon Heavy and Dragon systems. So the Falcon Heavy is a

launch vehicle and the Dragon is a spacecraft capsule. The BFR would be a two stage spacecraft. It would consist of a booster and then the spacecraft itself, and it's on a b f R that Musk says he would travel to Mars, assuming that they're able to complete the design and testing phase and build out the stuff. Now, according to the SpaceX site, the BFR is designed to quote ultimately carry as many as one people on long

duration interplanetary flights end quote. So this is a beast of a spacecraft, much much, much larger than anything we've ever seen up to this point. SpaceX wants to send unmanned missions to Mars in twenty twenty two to deliver components that would be critical. They would they would begin various processes like mining, life support, and power production on

Mars way ahead of any humans getting there. Then in four they would follow that up with a mission with actual human beings on it, and that would have the goal of building out a propellant deep oh and the basic colony site, which would grow with subsequent missions. Now, while all of this sounds pretty incredible, not everyone is sold on the idea. Bill Knight, the Science Guy, a

science communicator extraordinaire, has expressed hearty skepticism about colonizing Mars. Now, I have not touched on the concept of terraforming in this episode. Terraforming is when we try to transform a planet's environment to make it habitable. Uh so it would require an enormous amount of energy. We've never done it. We've never terraformed a planet before. We have certainly affected

our own planet, but we haven't terraformed another planet. So we don't even really know how much energy and money and resources it would take, but we're guessing it would be a lot. Bill Knight kind of dismisses this idea pretty quickly points out, we're not even able to take care of the planet we live on now, so if we can't take care of Earth, what's to suggest we would make some other inhospitable planet habitable. In addition, nine points out how life on Mars wouldn't just be difficult

and dangerous and potentially deadly. It would be relentlessly difficult, but it would also be monotonous. You would always be indoors, whether you're inside the habitat or inside a space suit. You would never be outside outside because you would die if you were to ever leave a space suit. You would have to be in a space suit if you were out on the surface of Mars. So your day to day life would be very monotonous. It would also get kind of smelly, you know, you don't have a

whole of opportunity to use various systems to clean. You'd be using a lot of a breeze. He says he actually specifically called that out, which I thought was kind of funny. You would always be in cramped quarters with the same people. You would always be worried about the next potential disaster because stuff does wear out or its stuff becomes less efficient over time and you have to

replace it. Sometimes that might mean that you need to do it, you know, in an emergency situation, because it could be two years before you get more stuff from Earth, depending upon where Earth and Mars are in their respective orbits and how long ago it was that you got your last shipment. So it be super duper hard to do. And and Bill and I thinks it's just not a practical long term endeavor. He does think that humans exploring Mars on a temporary basis could be really cool, but

setting up a colony doesn't make much sense personally. I'm of two minds honestly about Mars colonies. On the one hand, I do think it would be incredibly hard to do and to make safe and to ensure the survivability of the colony and the people you send there. I think it might be too big of a risk to really

merit going after it. However, that being said, if you take the challenge of creating a effective colony on Mars as your goal, then that drives a lot of innovation because you have to come up with ways to solve these problems I've been talking about. And so I almost want to say that taking on the goal of building out a colony on Mars is a good idea simply to drive that innovation and the research and development that

would be necessary to make it happen. But then to say, just kidding, We're not going to do it, but we are gonna totally take advantage of all this innovation that has come up as a result. You look at the space race between the United States and the Soviet Union that led to the development of lots of technologies that have had applications well beyond space exploration, and we have

benefited from that those those uh in the chins. So can you even imagine the sort of stuff that might come out as part of a very focused effort to make possible a Mars colony. Even if we never establish a colony on Mars. It could be incredibly beneficial in many different ways, ways we can't even anticipate right now, So I think ultimately I'm in favor of pursuing the goal, but also maintaining a healthy dose of skepticism and critical thinking about whether or not it ultimately makes sense to

actually pull the trigger and go there. Um. It's fascinating stuff though. I'm sure that Mars is going to play an important role in space exploration for the future of humanity, but whether or not it will be in colony form, I don't know. What do you guys think. I'm curious to hear your thoughts about colonizing Mars. Do you think it's worthwhile? Do you think it would be a waste of time and resources? Do you think there's some other place out in our Solar system or beyond that we

should really be focusing on. Keeping in mind that if we want to go outside of our solar system, that's an even longer trip, which means even more problems with radiation. But still it's good to think about. Send me a message telling me your thoughts. The email address for the show is tech Stuff at how stuff works dot com. You can go on over to tech Stuff Podcast dot com. That's the website for the show. You can find other ways to contact me. You also see a link over

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