Transcription
It feels like every day now I see something in the news about how humanity is going to start colonising Mars within the next five years, and I don't know what to believe. This is one of the most requested videos on the channel, so I knew I had to get it right, and so I called in some help from my friends at the Planetary Society.
I'm Bill Nye, I'm CEO of the Planetary Society. I flew out to LA to chat with Bill Nye with hopes of answering just one question: is colonising Mars even possible? And his answer shocked me. And then, as far as this idea of settling Mars, I just don't think anybody's going to do it.
Let me paint a picture for you. It's the late 1890s, and an American astronomer, Percival Lowell, had become convinced that Mars had an advanced alien civilisation living on the planet. He had seen these surface features and believed that they were irrigation canals built by the little green men. He believed that the Martians were trying to channel water down from the poles to keep their dying planet alive. Now, of course, this turned out to be false, but he did get something correct. Mars does undoubtedly have water. Currently, it's frozen, but in the past Mars likely looked vastly different.
Interest in Mars was gaining popularity. People were dreaming about what life might be like on Mars, and if humanity might step foot there one day. In 1948, Wernher von Braun, the leading rocket engineer in America at the time, wrote a book about how humanity might be able to colonise Mars. He envisioned a number of ships making this vast journey: 70 astronauts landing on the red planet, where they eventually meet Martians that were already living there. And the freaky part: their leader's name was Elon. 19 years after this book was published, Elon Musk was born. People have called you the real Tony Stark. Travelling to Mars might actually be a bit closer than we thought. And he's got a plan to save us. Best case is about five years; worst case, ten years.
From the earliest history of mankind, there's been a bright red speck of light in the night sky called Mars. NASA were able to safely land the Viking 1 and 2 landers on Mars back in 1976, conducting the first ever experiments on the red planet. But the community were nervous. If NASA hadn't cleaned the landers properly, they might have contaminated Mars with microbes from Earth, potentially ruining our search for life on Mars. Carl Sagan even went as far as arguing that if microbes do exist on Mars, humans should back off. Mars then belongs to the Martians. Even if the Martians are only microbes.
Since then, there have been 10 more robots that have landed on Mars, from rovers to helicopters. All of them ultimately trying to solve the same problem: Does life exist on Mars? And we've found hints. NASA's Curiosity and Perseverance rovers have found ancient lake beds filled with organic molecules, suggesting Mars was habitable billions of years ago. They mapped the planet, finding these massive deposits of ice buried beneath the soil, even around the equator. And when I say ice, I mean a lot of it. If you melted all of the liquid water ice on Mars today, it could cover the entire planet in an ocean 35 meters deep. This gave everyone the green light. Mars has water and a CO2 rich atmosphere, unlocking fuel, oxygen, drinking water, and more. But, of course, it's a lot of work to unlock these resources.
I think people have this sense of, well, like as technology advances, eventually we're going to go to all these places. But people, I think, really underestimate how far away we are from that right now. The question is, why even go to Mars anyway? And to be honest with you, it's because it's our only option if we do want to have humans living on another planet.
Mars has no magnetic field and a really thin atmosphere, meaning the Martian astronauts would be constantly exposed to potentially lethal levels of radiation. A Martian astronaut would receive anywhere from 400 to 900 chest x-rays worth of radiation during just one trip. Without proper shielding on all of the habitats and the spacecraft, these astronauts would undoubtedly have their DNA damaged and an increased risk of cancer too. On Earth, our magnetic field protects us from all of this harmful radiation, and it's believed Mars did have one in the past, but for some reason it disappeared, leading to Mars becoming the dry, arid landscape we see today.
Mars's gravity is 38% that of Earth's, and we have literally no studies to truly know how living in that environment would affect our bodies. We do know that on the ISS, astronauts lose significant amounts of muscle and bone density. While Mars's partial gravity might help, it's clear our bodies didn't evolve to exist in such an environment.
Okay, say we figure out all of these challenges and we can finally go to Mars. Where do we land? Bill brought up a really important problem. So a concern is the same thing that makes a place on Mars interesting to explore, to get mud rock samples from, and so on, could be the same wide open place where you'd want to try your first landing. So you do not want to contaminate the interesting places with your human stuff. And the example we give you is the Surveyor spacecraft. These are—you can look it up—their spacecraft's a little smaller than this room, and their foot pads were designed to have the same pressure as the lunar excursion module with two people on board. So they could see there was concern that the thing was just going to sink into the dust, but it didn't. But then Apollo 16 astronauts—Apollo 15 astronauts, I should know—drove up to it on one of the rovers on the moon, brought back a piece, and it's a lens, I guess, camera assembly from Surveyor. They got it on Earth and went, "Oh, they're microbes that have survived for two years on the surface." No, they were contaminated in the lab on Earth.
The first colony of Martian astronauts need to find the perfect location that has plenty of resources like water, but also ideally at a low elevation, so the atmosphere is thicker. It would also be great to have the first base somewhere in the middle of the planet to take advantage of the more moderate temperatures and solar power. But they also need to be sure that they aren't landing somewhere where life could exist right now. If they land there, spreading their microbes around, and then scientists test the soil at the landing site, it will be really hard for them to conclusively prove which microbes are Martian and which are from Earth. So how do we be sure? Well, we just need a way to check for life before landing somewhere and ruining it. I guess the ultimate goal is we want to know if there is or was life. Start with that. Start with really either proving that there is nothing anywhere alive on Mars and never was or find something that is alive on Mars.
Solution? The Mars sample return mission. Essentially, the Perseverance rover has been collecting these tubes of Martian soil for the last few years, and they are up there on Mars right now waiting to be collected. During this trip to LA to chat with Bill Nye, I also visited JPL's Mars Yard to specifically discuss this exact mission. So I'll leave the details for that video. But the key takeaway is we need those samples back before anyone goes touching Mars and ruining it.
While I've been here in LA, I was reminded of this story that happened back in 1994. Essentially, there was this citywide power outage, and the emergency lines as well as the Griffith Observatory where I am received countless phone calls from people asking for help. And it's all because they said that they were seeing something weird. They could see this massive, ominous-looking cloud that stretched across the entire night sky. What they were looking at was the Milky Way. Over 80% of the people who live in major cities today have simply never seen it. These city lights block our access to these beautiful stars. They are always up there, just more hidden than ever before. But that exact moment in time, those very stars can be memorialized in a beautiful star map like this. I got this star map from Under Lucky Stars. It was custom made for me, and it shows the exact stars those people in LA would have been looking at back in 1994. And they can do that for any moment that is special to you: a birthday, wedding anniversary, or even a first date. It's an amazing quality gift with museum-standard printing for the astronomy lover in your life. To be honest, it's just one of the best presents you could ever give someone. I have both personally received and given them, and I can't wait for you to do the same. So simply head to underluckystars.com and create your very own star map today.
The real problem with all of this is money. It, of course, all comes back to cost. If you wanted to launch something like a pineapple to the ISS today, that would cost you around $20,000 with our current technology. For Mars, that's more like $200,000. I mean, just to get one astronaut to Mars with all of the gear that they would require, you would need around 10 Saturn V rockets worth of payload. But Elon Musk has said that he has a dream of getting the cost of moving to Mars down to just a few hundred thousand dollars, so anyone could theoretically save up and go. But how do they plan on doing that? Well, if you use just a traditional rocket, moving you and your family to Mars would cost maybe $10 billion today. But if you build a fully reusable rocket, things start to make more sense. The largest, most powerful rocket ever built. Ready to go to Mars.
The key to Elon Musk's plan for Mars has always been Starship. SpaceX believed that a dramatically different rocket design was going to be required if you're going to make Mars commercially viable. This new rocket would need to be able to transport a lot of mass for very cheap. And so they designed Starship with three new key ideas: Fully reusable. The rockets need to go to their destination, landing and dropping off cargo before coming home for a new payload. Refueling in orbit. If you launched a rocket into orbit before loading it up with all of the fuel it needs to go to Mars, you save a ton of money on that initial launch. And third, creating fuel on Mars to power Starship's journey home. They built Starship out of stainless steel because it's much cheaper than carbon fibre or aluminium. And the outcome is this beast of a rocket that is capable of lifting 100 tons worth of cargo to Mars.
While this sounds amazing, the realities of Starship today are, well, just take a look. Eight Starships have launched so far: four successes and four failures. In the most recent launch, they were able to catch the booster, the stage that's taking the rocket into orbit. The upper stage was then lost due to engine failures. But to be honest, this is what they're expecting to happen. They are still developing this rocket, trying to learn more and more from every single launch and perfect its design. It does, however, put a big question mark on Elon's claims for when he's going to put the first person on Mars. Best case, 10 years. Worst case, 15 to 20 years.
The important thing to remember here is Mars is in orbit around the sun too, meaning the planets only align in a way that allows for us to easily fly to Mars once every 26 months. And it takes a full six to eight months to actually travel there. Elon routinely talks about how he wants 1 million people on Mars by 2050 and how he wants to die on Mars. But if that's going to happen, the timeline needs to stop slipping. He initially predicted a landing in the 2020s, and that's looking increasingly unlikely.
A big challenge for those first crewed missions to Mars will be how long they actually have to go for. There is a launch window in August 2033. So if we launch then, they would arrive in March of 2034. And then we won't be able to send more resources or people until late 2035. They need to be able to survive for a long time with no support from Earth. And then, as far as this idea of settling Mars, I just don't think anybody's going to do it. Nobody settles Antarctica. Yeah. It's cold, inhospitable, nothing to eat really. And you can breathe, which is key. If you go to Mars, you will find very quickly that you can't breathe. That's a real drawback.
Getting to Mars and setting up a base is one thing, but completely terraforming it is a whole different beast. Terraforming is essentially turning Mars into Earth 2.0. You need the atmosphere to be much thicker and the temperatures to be warmer. Today, Mars's surface pressure is about 6 millibar. We need it to be over 100 for human life. Similarly, the average temperature on the planet today is around negative 63 degrees Celsius. We need to bump that up to be above zero degrees Celsius, so water can be stable in liquid form. If we could do that, humans could simply walk around with an oxygen mask and a jacket on. So how do we actually do that? Oh, it's simple. If you just add more atmosphere, the problems fix themselves. But we can't exactly just bottle up Earth's atmosphere and fly it over to Mars. The solution is releasing all of the CO2 in the frozen ice caps and in the soil. The polar ice caps on Mars are made of dry ice. So if we just turn them into a gas and get all of that CO2 out of the ground, you end up only halfway towards your pressure goal: 50 millibar. There just simply isn't enough CO2 in Mars's storage to warm the planet up enough. And this is all not to mention it would take literally 80,000 times more than all of Earth's electricity consumption to melt these CO2 ice caps.
There are other ideas like adding trillions of tons of dust to the atmosphere, or redirecting nitrogen-rich comets to smash into Mars. But all of these are highly theoretical technologies that would likely take centuries to develop. So, to be honest, I don't think we will be terraforming Mars anytime soon.
To be clear, we probably will create a small colony on Mars within our lifetime, but the idea that it will become this thriving civilization on Earth 2.0 anytime in the near future is just not going to happen. I personally just hope in our efforts to explore the universe and expand humanity's reach, we don't overstep, ruining our chances of finding life on Mars.
I guess the real big picture final question is, should we even be doing this? I mean, what's the point? On one hand, people see extending humanity to Mars as this pointless waste of resources, running away from Earth when we really should just be using that time, money, and effort to save the planet. And on the other hand, as Elon Musk says, maybe putting humans on Mars is important to mitigate the existential risk of our Earth being destroyed by some sort of catastrophe. To be honest, just personally, I think we will land somewhere in the middle. There is something to be said about exploration and the way it inspires humanity. How we view space as this final frontier waiting to be conquered. If anything, I think the most valuable thing this exploration of the red planet can bring will be the confirmation that we might not be alone in this universe. But that's only possible if we don't rush there too quick and mess things up in search of profit. Either way, let me know what you think in the comments down below. Should we go to Mars or not? There's a few people I wouldn't mind sending, am I right?