Robert Kessler
Professor Paul Bellew
Writing 123
June 6, 2016
Creating Life Beyond Earth
Earth; the home to the human race and only known life in the galaxy. Earth is 510 million square kilometers in total area size (Pianka). However not all of this 510 million miles is habitable, much of it is ocean, mountains and desert, only about 24.5 million square miles are habitable (Pianka). While the Earth’s size never changes our human population does. This means that houses, businesses, farms, and anything else we humans require will take up more and more land as we grow. Eventually our 24.5 million square miles of habitable land will seem miniscule as we start to deplete many natural resources. In doing this we set ourselves on a course for disaster. Eventually we will have to make a choice. We either expand our living space and deplete our food and resources, or live in overcrowded and growing areas which would still deplete the food and natural resources at an alarming rate. Our Earth would become an unhealthy barren wasteland. If we don’t starve we will most likely die from sickness or war either way death seems inevitable. This problem can be avoided. We need to start looking beyond our planet and begin thinking about colonizing space. If we can find a way to expand the human race into space then we can stop worrying about the potential disaster looming over us here on Earth. Space colonization is beneficial to our society because it can save the human race. Knowing this, the first place we need to look is Mars.
Mars is the most obvious candidate for space exploration because a mission to the planet would only take about “200 to 350 days”(Strauss) one way making it an ideal place for scientists to start looking into space colonization. NASA had planned on sending humans to Mars in the year 2025 but Daniel Engber says: “Budget cuts and sequestration have slowed the project down if not killed it outright. Even if NASA gets the mission back on track, the agency said it will only send humans to Mars if it could also bring them back.” But we shouldn’t give up hope because a man by the name of Bas Lansdorp has created a company known as Mars One which plans on creating missions to Mars. Lansdorp hopes to have humans on Mars by the year 2026, but has a different approach than NASA. Lansdorp does not plan on bringing the astronauts home. Lansdorp says :“The technology to get you back from mars simply doesn’t exist [...] and it may not exist 20 years from now, we need to do this with the stuff that we have today, and the only way we can do that is by going there to stay” (Engber). Lansdorp is correct that there is no technology to bring astronauts back from Mars at the moment, but Elon Musk and his company SpaceX are making this technology become a reality. Most recently SpaceX sent their Falcon 9 rocket into orbit and successfully brought it back down to Earth landing it on a floating platform (Chang). SpaceX is not the only company trying to successfully land a rocket, Blue Origin another rocket company created by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos also successfully sent a rocket to space and landed it back on Earth this year. This is a huge step towards being able to develop a rocket that can take astronauts to Mars as well as bring them home. It is also promising that NASA is not the only company invested in finding ways to send humans to Mars. With more companies investing time into researching rockets and space exploration we can hope that it won’t be long before the first human sets foot on Mars.
What is amazing though is how our view of landing rockets has changed. In a book written by Willy Ley he says: “Landing back onto earth would be no different than landing on the moon so this maneuver can be postponed until later” (Ley 297). The funny thing about this is that this book was written almost 60 years ago. They thought that the maneuver was simple enough to just put off. But today we still have yet to send a rocket to and from an object or planet in space and land it back on Earth. We are getting closer by having accomplished sending a rocket into orbit and landing it back down on Earth. Even then SpaceX had four unsuccessful attempts at landing their rocket before it was finally a success. So the fact that this maneuver was seen as such a simple task is amusing. By being so arrogant to the complexity of landing rockets we may have set ourselves back. Instead of putting off figuring out how to land a rocket in space then back on Earth we should have been researching how to do it, because if we found out how to do this over that 60 year period we may have already set foot on Mars.
Companies like SpaceX, Blue Origin, and Mars One are providing us with hope, but could it be false hope? In a peer reviewed journal written by Sydney Do and her colleagues they discuss Lansdorp’s company Mars One. They first start by discussing the in-situ resource utilization or ISRU system. This is a system that lets the astronauts use materials of the planet they are on rather than bringing those materials from Earth (Do 1). It could save not only money but fuel and space within the spaceship. This seems like an ideal idea so why haven’t we heard more about it? We haven’t heard about because it is false information. According to Do: “Several technologies including ISRU, life support, and entry, descent, and landing (EDL) are not currently “existing, validated and available” as claimed by Mars One” (Do 1). ISRU is a real system but has only been used with robots so far with the use of solar power. ISRU systems for the use of humans is being researched but at the moment it does not exist. The ISRU is not the only thing that Mars One has made a mistake with. Mars One also had a plan to grow crops on Mars that would be able to feed their crew. But once again there were problems. Do says: “The crop growth area described by Mars One is insufficient to feed their crew” (Do 1). Along with this Do goes on to say: “Increasing the crop growth area to provide sufficient food for the crew leads to atmospheric imbalances that requires a prohibitively large ISRU atmospheric processor or a notably different system architecture to manage” (Do 1). It doesn’t seem as though Mars One is as prepared as they made themselves appear to be. This is especially noticeable when Do talks about the equipment needed to be sent to Mars for a Mars One mission, she says: “At least 13 Falcon Heavy launches are needed to deliver a portion of the required equipment to the Martian surface, a value that is at least double that planned by Mars One for the same mission phase.” (Do 1) Mars One seems to too eager to get into space. They have overlooked very critical parts of their mission and even lied. If I was someone planning on supporting Mars One, or if i were one of the candidates trying to get a spot on the Mars One exploration team I would be worried that maybe the company has more concern about being the first ones on Mars than they do the safety of their crew. All the private space companies are helping to speed up the process of getting humans to Mars but they might be being too hasty. Unfortunately these companies also seem less educated than a company such as NASA which can lead to serious things being overlooked as we can see with Mars One. While we do need to hurry to try to get humans on Mars we need to do it in such a way where we can be both quick as well as accurate and precise with our research and advancements towards colonizing Mars making it a well planned safe mission.
Getting humans on Mars is a priority but there are some setbacks. Mars has a harsh landscape unlike Earth’s. It lacks an atmosphere due to it being stripped away by solar winds (Chang). Even if we do get humans to Mars it won’t be habitable for them, they would have to come back to Earth or Die on the planet. NASA and Margarita Marinova an undergraduate from MIT have a plan to cause global warming on Mars to terraform the planet by using perfluorocarbons (PFCs). Terraforming is the act of altering the environment of (a celestial body) in order to make capable of supporting terrestrial life forms. PFCs are “Super-greenhouse gasses” (Marinova) which means just a few of them could cause a lot of warming. PFCs also have a very long lifespan which means if they were deployed on Mars they wouldn’t have to be continuously put there. By using PFCs it would raise the temperature of mars as well as help create a new atmosphere which Mars is currently lacking. By creating a new atmosphere carbon dioxide would be trapped on the planet thus warming it eventually to a point where the ice could melt (Marinova). Marinova says that this would still “take up to eight centuries”. But by starting now we can make the planet’s conditions more human friendly. While Mars was being heated over 800 years we could spend time and resources on Earth to help advance our technology so that when the time comes we will be able to successfully colonize Mars.
The main argument for not being able to colonize outer space is that our society simply doesn’t have the budget, technology, or the time. Governments especially the U.S. government are no longer willing to fund space exploration what they once did. NASA gets an annual budget of about 17.5 billion dollars a year “which is $1.75 billion dollars less than what congress had promised a couple years ago” (Chang). Now that may seem like a lot of money compared to the average American’s salary of about about 75 thousand dollars a year, but to NASA it isn’t. Just to build the Mars Rover it cost almost 2.5 billion dollars (Chang). That was a fairly small robot compared to a lot of modern day space technology. Sending people together would require a larger ship than the one the rover used to get to Mars because the astronauts would need tools, food, fuel, water and oxygen. This would require a bigger shuttle which would cost more to research and build. Oxygen and rocket fuel two must have resources would be quite expensive and they would have to have enough to store a year long total journey assuming the astronauts plan on coming home. These resources would cost copious amount of money improbable with the current budget.
Another big factor that keeps us from colonizing space is the cost of technology. Like Lansdorp said, “The technology to get you back from mars simply doesn’t exist.” We would have to send separate shuttles every time we went to mars because we wouldn’t be able to bring the shuttles back. This means more money for shuttles that we will have to abandon on Mars which seems wasteful. To research new technologies like bigger shuttles, food and water preservation, shelter and space suits would require an astronomical amount of money, and if all of these things are going to be left on Mars then why should we spend the money in the first place.
A largely debated topic that has to do with saving money in space travel is using nuclear energy rather than the rocket fuel that consists of liquid oxygen and hydrogen that spaceships use today. Nuclear energy used to propel a spacecraft could benefit us a great deal by cutting down the time it takes to travel through space. In the book Nuclear Energy in Space the author Erik S. Pedersen says, “Higher levels of propulsion and auxiliary systems will reach levels where only nuclear devices will be practical” (Pedersen 15). Right now the estimated time for a one way trip to Mars is around a year, with nuclear fission powering the rocket Pedersen says it would only take about 30 days. This is a major time difference and would be very beneficial saving lots of money as well as speeding up the research and colonization of Mars. But a lot of risks come with the use of nuclear energy in a rocket. After the nuclear disasters in Chernobyl, Three Mile Island and Fukushima our society is very wary about the use of anything nuclear because we have seen the effects caused by nuclear disasters and radiation. SpaceX was unable to land their rocket the first four times they sent it into space, each time it tipped over and exploded. With a nuclear rocket this would be a major issue. The explosion would be much larger than that of a rocket with rocket fuel. If a nuclear rocket exploded it would release radiation which would be a health concern for not only the people near the rocket but civilians and nature everywhere. For example, the rocket landings for SpaceX have been done on barges out in the ocean. If a nuclear rocket exploded or somehow released radiation into the ocean it would be harmful to the environment killing plants and animals while also contaminating them making it dangerous to harvest any type of seafood that may have been in the contaminated area. The workers who work on the rocket as well as the astronauts who would potentially fly it would need protection from the radiation which could mean more advanced suits or design to the spaceship which means extra cost. While nuclear power could benefit us greatly the cons seem to outweigh the pros in this scenario. But when it comes to saving humanity decisions like this may have to be made. For the time being nuclear powered spaceships look like a last resort.
While technology and money are some of the biggest problems surrounding space colonization there is one less obvious factor keeping us from expanding beyond Earth and this factor is time. Time is not our friend when it comes to space travel. The amount of time it takes to develop new technologies is unknown. We could figure out how to get people to and from Mars tomorrow or not for another hundred years. In order to create and research new technologies space corporations need money. These companies get limited budgets and can only do so much with what they have. Over time they will accumulate more money helping them make advancements. When it comes to terraforming Mars time seems to be the biggest enemy. Like Marinova said before heating up Mars to a temperature that could melt ice would take up to “Eight centuries”(Marinova). That means if we started today and if the project worked how Marinova says Mars wouldn’t be able to melt ice until 2816. Events such as war, plague and natural disasters can happen over the next 800 years which just shows that action needs to be taken. We need to get more funding to space programs, we need to start researching and developing technologies that can help us colonize space, and we must use our time wisely because the clock is ticking.
Space colonization is beneficial to our society because it can save the human race. Funding, researching and building the technologies to colonize space along with managing projects like terraforming Mars will be a difficult and time consuming feat, but they are crucial to the survival of humanity. If we don’t look into expanding beyond our planet we will eventually overpopulate the Earth resulting in the depletion of all its natural resources causing the human race to ultimately become extinct. We are in a do or die situation. If we are able to expand we can save humanity and create a new never before seen culture, but the fate and future of humanity lies in our own hands. Do we have what it takes to save ourselves?
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