Name: Building a Marsbase is a Horrible Idea
Uploaded: 2019-02-06T07:20:06.000Z
Duration: 9 min 22 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...

From hostile deserts, to lonely islands and the highest mountains,

wherever there is space to expand into humans do so.

Adverbs of degree

So, it's hardly surprising that we're already making preparations

and to create the first permanent colony outside of Earth --

maybe even terraform another planet and turn it into a second blue home.

before we can get to the nice future stuff,

we first have to complete the second phase of colonization;

to prepare the ground for a larger human presence.

Even for an expansionist species like us, Mars is extreme.

Unfortunately, Mars is actually a cold, radioactive desert

where the ground is poisonous and breathing is impossible.

You almost certainly don't want to go there.

The pioneers doing the hard work on Mars will have an intensely stressful life,

filled with incredibly challenging problems

But there are plenty of people willing to do that work

and we have the technology to enable them to do it.

For this video, we will assume there have been prior missions to Mars

to scout out a good place for an outpost,

The first major challenge for our outpost,

is the fact that Mars is very energy poor.

solar power is only 40% as effective as on Earth.

But even this weakened sunlight is often obscured for days

Solar power alone will probably not be enough.

Alternatives, such as wind power, and geothermal energy are also unfeasible

as there's hardly any atmosphere and Mars' interior is much too cold.

Initially, nuclear technology might be the only option.

Since Mars doesn't have easily accessible radioactive elements,

the nuclear fuel needs to come from Earth along with the reactor.

If we do set it up, it could power our small outpost for the first few years.

Unfortunately, all that energy won't be very useful if we can't breathe.

Mars' atmosphere is only 1% as dense as Earth's,

So, now habitats need to be pressurized and filled with an artificial atmosphere

so the habitats will have rounded and smooth shapes

to handle the stress of great pressure differences between the interior and exterior.

The airlocks need to be very airtight and work perfectly every time.

Without an extensive magnetosphere, or a dense atmosphere,

half of all radiation coming from space reaches the ground.

A person on the surface would be subjected to 50 times the radiation that they would be on Earth.

Three years on the surface of Mars exceeds the radiation dose limits

imposed on NASA astronauts for their entire career.

This increases cancer risks significantly.

To prevent that, we could shield our habitats with a thick layer of frozen CO2,

that can be harvested directly from the atmosphere.

Covering the dry ice with a meter of dirt, would further increase the level of protection.

From the inside, most living spaces will be windowless tunnels.

From the outside, they'll look like burial mounds.

All of this would still not hold back all the radiation,

but reduce it just enough to be survivable for long periods of time.

It won't, however, protect anyone who ventures outside.

So, remote-controlled robots will be used for routine work on the surface,

Staying inside is a good idea for another reason:

so it could find its way into the gears or electronics of our machines.

Because it's also very dry, it's electro-statically charged;

It will be impossible to avoid carrying lots of Mars dust into our habitat,

To make this even worse, Mars' soil is filled with very toxic perchlorate salts.

This problem can still be overcome though.

Space suits, for example, could be made in a way that they never truly enter the base,

but stay attached to the outside of the habitats.

Now we've safely isolated humans in terms of energy and air,

and protected them from cancer, we just need to feed them.

Water is easy to come by if a settlement is positioned near the Martian poles

Growing food is a different kind of challenge though.

and lack the vital nitrogen compounds that plants need to grow.

Before we can grow anything, we will have to decontaminate the soil

Then, the soil can be fertilized using recycled biological waste.

All of this will take a lot of time, and is very energy-intensive.

So, we might use aquaponics to raise fish and plants together --

Making the astronauts' diets more varied and tasty at the same time.

This will be an important psychological boost for our overworked crew.

Subtitles ListPlay Video

Building a Marsbase is a Horrible Idea

stuff

constant

permanent

infrastructure