I think there are going to be some very serious mental health issues for people trying to colonize Mars, especially if they're taking a one way trip. First, you have to deal with a different day-night cycle and the reduced gravity. That stuff matters for humans who have gotten used to 24 hour days and 9.807 m/s^2 gravity over the last 200,000 years.<p>Then, you're going to have to deal with boredom and cabin fever. Mars seems cool in the abstract--"explore another world!"--but its just a big, completely dead desert. I'm betting the novelty of it will wear of in an hour (tops) of landing there. There really isn't that much for humans to learn by going there in person. Those people will just have to stay in a tiny space for years on end without a lot to do. Think of what a bust the video game No Man's Sky was. People hated it because it was boring. But I'm sure exploring planets in that game was much more interested than Mars will be.<p>As the years go on, loneliness and despair will set in. Those first colonists will likely spend the rest of their lives pretty much with who they landed with. Their lives won't change much at all over the decades they're there, and they'll have no hope for things to ever be different.<p>Settling to Mars seems so glamorous, but it really will not be a fun affair. It'll be extremely expensive, really depressing, and probably pointless.
I remember a talk by a NASA guy that a first try would be to land some people with limited supplies on the Antarctic and let them live autonomously for a few years. He said before we go to Mars we need the ability to do this easily.
I've thought about a lot of things... think of the massive supply chain that would be needed to build semiconductors, for example. Or even something simple like... cheese. There's a reason Musk estimated that a million people would be needed for a fully self sufficient colony.
The lower gravity than Earth bit sounds like the most debilitating thing about Martian colonization. One of the reasons why I think Venus cloud cities would be a better long-term bet for baseline humanity:<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8985151" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8985151</a>
So basically Mars would be a prison, with robots doing most of the work. Might as well just send the robots and leave the humans on Earth. If people want to live in a cave they can do that here.
Don't forget, that if you're unlucky enough to be an American (like Musk), you will still fall under the interplanetary/intersolar/intergalactic grasp of the IRS.<p>Even an 'offplanet' bank will fall under FATCA and FBAR.<p>Renounce before blast off!
Perfect timing! Isaac Arthur just kicked off Outward Bound with an in depth look at colonizing Mars.<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kmFOBoy2MZ8" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kmFOBoy2MZ8</a>
Having your house covered in a few feet of regolith sounds like roofs and walls to me, not "living underground".<p>Windows will be hard. Maybe you could have them on the side facing away from the sun, but I think general cosmic radiation is also a big problem.<p>More realistically, you'd have "camera windows". A camera on the outside that displays an image on a screen inside of what you <i>would</i> see if there was a window there.
Very cool article! It will certainly be interesting to see how we get around these hurdles. The most interesting one to me was definitely the lack of being able to electrically ground anything, we will definitely have to design newer electrical motors etc to get around that!