Can We Colonize Mars?

Elon Musk, the founder of SpaceX and Tesla, is calling for humans to colonize Mars – but just how plausible is this concept?

According to Business Insider, NASA currently aspires to send humans to Mars by the 2030s. Before then, however, they stress that additional research still needs to be done. The Mars InSight lander, currently scheduled to land on Mars in November of this year, will examine both the surface and core of the planet to gain a better understanding of the planet. This hasn’t deterred the aeronautic and astronautic community from envisioning what a future on the red planet would look like.

MIT PhD candidate George Lordos was part of two different teams that worked to design structures that he believes would make the colonization of Mars possible. One of these projects is called the Redwood Forest which consists of “domes or tree habitats that can each house up to 50 people. The domes provide open, public spaces containing plants and abundant water, which would be harvested from the northern plains of Mars” MIT reported. The domes are connected by the community’s “roots” – a network of underground tunnels that would make traveling between the domes safe and easy.

“Given that Mars already has a lot of what we would need to survive—water ice, carbon dioxide, and dry ice, which could serve as potable water, oxidizers, and fuel—it’s not such an absurd fantasy,” Allison Eck of PBS wrote.