Name: How Living on Mars Would Make Life Better on Earth
Uploaded: 2020-03-30T03:25:42.000Z
Duration: 6 min 33 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Transition words & phrases

Thanks to LEGO City Space for supporting this episode of SciShow.

LEGO wants to inspire the next generation

of space explorers through building and play!

With the way things are looking in space exploration these days,

it's not impossible to believe that in the future,

If we do, I'm sure it will be amazing —

people will feel inspired, and we'll learn

But those aren't the only things we would get out of this.

To live, sleep, eat, and breathe on Mars,

but as a bonus, that tech could actually help us

could also improve our lives here at home.

After all, the Martian atmosphere is mostly carbon dioxide,

which is very different from what we can breathe.

And the cool thing is, the tech they might use to do that

could help us fight climate change here on Earth.

that the best solution isn't to haul gigantic

So instead, they're looking at ways to turn some of

the CO2 in the Martian atmosphere into O2.

is a pretty stable molecule, and generally,

you have to put in energy of some kind to

One way is to use electricity to split CO2

And that method is scheduled to be tested

CO2 molecules are normally shaped like a straight line,

That brought the two oxygens closer together

and made it easier for them to react to form

The yield was pretty poor, with only around

1% of the CO2 molecules producing proper O2.

But hey, this strategy is in its early days.

This kind of science would be game-changing

CO2 is more of a problem than a resource.

We're adding more of it to our atmosphere every day,

So removing excess CO2 from our atmosphere

suggested their method could be applied on Earth

to get some of that extra CO2 out of our atmosphere!

The next thing astronauts will need to live on Mars

is some good, clean soil — both for potentially growing food,

The biggest problem here is that scientists

believe Martian soil is full of a chemical

called perchlorate, which is toxic to humans.

which normally regulates our metabolisms.

So in the short term, it would be necessary

to protect astronauts from direct exposure to Martian dust,

since they could track it into their habitat

And over longer time scales, any crops grown

meaning they'd be at risk of getting people sick.

But perchlorate isn't just a problem on Mars.

Here at home, it can also contaminate our drinking water.

So figuring out how to clean soil on the Red Planet

Right now, there are some ways to chemically

So the solutions proposed for Mars could be really useful.

So far, some research groups have proposed we could

clean Martian soil by growing certain bacteria in it.

These microbes produce enzymes that could

break down perchlorate into less-toxic chlorite.

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How Living on Mars Would Make Life Better on Earth

term

sustainable

priority

climate