It gives me great sadness to have to announce this disappointing news; Mars is dead. The Planet, not the Greek god; I don’t know how he’s doing.
“How did he die?” you ask? It was a slow death. The illness started about 1 billion years ago when Mars lost its magnetic field.
The engine that used to generate Mars’s magnetic field, is the same device that is currently generating the magnetic field of Earth. The mantle of our planet is a liquid of superheated magma, when it moves over the solid iron/nickel core it generates our magnetic field.
Sadly, our brother planet is smaller than the Earth, Mars’s liquid mantle has cooled, its volcanism has stopped. As the liquid mantle solidified, Mars’s magnetic field stopped being generated.
“Why is a magnetic field important,” you ask?
The magnetic field of a planet is what prevents the solar wind from penetrating into the atmosphere. Over the last billion years the solar wind has slowly striped the atmosphere off of Mars. Mars has only 1 percent of its atmosphere left. The cold is coming. The body is entering rigor mortis. Mars is becoming a dead, airless rock in space.
Even if we ever reach a level of technology where we could replace Mars’s atmosphere, the lack of a liquid mantle would just allow it to be striped away again. The new atmosphere would suffer the same fate as the first, it would slowly bleed away.
I’ve spent my life in hope of an eventual colony on Mars that could provide an insurance policy against the extinction of mankind by having two large population centers on two different planets.
A human population on Mars would face a life in atmosphere-sealed domes or caverns; facing all the dangers inherent in surviving in that environment.
Mars may be too far gone to support a large population of human beings. For Mars to be a survival backup location for humanity, it would need to have a large enough population of genetically diverse humans to repopulate the Earth and Mars’s population is not likely to be very diverse. A Mars population isn’t going to be mainly made up of people who have been shipped there, but will instead be mostly bred there. At best we could only send a small crowd of people who would then breed-up into a population.
Nobody is sorrier than I to give up dreams of somehow building an atmosphere back on Mars.
Dreams of maybe vaporizing Mars’s polar ice caps, giving a jump start to any atmosphere reclamation project.
Maybe somehow releasing the gasses trapped in its soil. We can at least visualize possible technology to accomplish this monumental task.
A colony on Mars has little chance of providing us with a viable population base with which to repopulate Earth should a killer-sized asteroid slam into us creating an Extinction Level Event (ELE).
Mars residents will be used to a much lighter gravity. This might make it impossible for people born and raised on Mars to come back to the Earth.
The constant bombardment of the solar winds on the planet means possible exposure of Mars residents to higher levels of radiation; and they may suffer many health problems including sterility.
Any colony on Mars is going to live or die, survive or utterly fail, by maintaining a constant level of high technology. Any catastrophe that damages the domes or caverns or the level of education in technical maintenance could mean the end of the colony. Any loss of technological knowledge would also destroy any possibility for the colonists to be able to return to Earth. It’s a very, very long trip. Any migration-size space program also requires continued high technology.
I still hope mankind will prove me wrong, and I hope we continue to strive for Mars exploration and colonization; but I wouldn’t count on it being a good insurance policy for the protection against our extinction.
A possible solution to the problem
There is another option for that hoped-for insurance policy. My alternative suggestion is much less expensive, using fewer resources, is infinitely less dangerous and has a much higher likelihood of success.
Make an Earth-based insurance policy. Even if we just consider it as a third, back-up insurance policy; fine, but let’s do it for a bit more security.
“What is this Earth-based solution?” you ask?
In a word; drill. We need to make several underground facilities, let’s call them underground arks. We need to sink them deep and make them self-sufficient. They need to grow their own food and maintain a comfortable environment.
The population of these arks can be made up of military personnel that just do a six-month-long, (our however long), tour of duty in the underground facility. That way nobody has to live in it permanently unless some cataclysm takes place on the surface.
These bases should have a high majority of healthy young women as personnel. All the arks should store a large variety of genetic material of all lifeforms, sperm and eggs from each animal species on the planet. All the arks need a comprehensive seed bank. It should also contain a large supply of dried and canned food. Food with long shelf lives.
Each ark should be large. It should be large enough to accommodate a huge population in the event of an evacuation from the surface. The ark’s regular staff, during their tours of duty, should work to expand the capacity of their arks for as long as they live there. It should be the work of the facility.
If a sudden catastrophic event were to strike the planet unexpectedly, the regular staff of these arks could be our insurance policy; our survival back up plan, always ready at all times.
The most likely cause of our extinction is a large asteroid impact. Most of the time we would have advanced warning, but just recently a big one passed close to us without warning. It is possible for us to miss them. But, I think in most cases, we would have some warning in advance. Time enough to evacuate a portion of the population into the arks.
I believe setting up these “arks” would be a better back up plan for the survival of humanity.
They would have a lot of advantages over a Mars colony.
For one thing, they would be here! After a cataclysm, we wouldn’t have to bring survivors back from Mars.
An accident that renders the ark temporarily inhabitable is not a death sentence for the population. They need only return to the surface until the problem can be remedied. A broken air seal would not be a life or death problem.
If the facility needs any help, that help is just above them a few miles up on the surface.
If a Mars colony needed help from the Earth, it would take a long time for help to arrive.
The Earth still has volcanism which we can use to create a geo-thermal power source for the arks.
There are underground sources of water to tap into.
We would also keep our technology safe inside the arks. We don’t have to risk losing it.
The cost of creating the habitats is much cheaper. Imagine the cost of building huge habitats on Mars.
Another very big advantage of an underground Earth ark, is it might save YOU. Not just save humanity, but save a big portion of our Earth-surface-living population.
Having the arks here means a chance for US to survive any terrible calamity that might take place on the surface.
Ideally there would be arks on all of our well populated continents. Then a diverse population of survivors would be guaranteed.
The US military is a good source of diversity. This country is a genetic melting pot of immigrants from all over the world, and so too is our military. Genetic diversity would not be a problem for the US ark.
Each ark should keep at least 500 individuals supported at all times. That number of people with viable stores of sperm and eggs, would be the minimum number of people necessary to bring back a population.
If the project is taking place all around the world, a population of survivors is assured.
