SPACE travel holds a mystique for humanity that few other areas of exploration do, and, beyond the moon, Mars is seen as the next step.
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The Red Planet has come to signify opportunity in our era of polycrises. In fact, Mars has become a fixation for many, including space entrepreneur and Twitter owner Elon Musk. His vision of the future includes sending SpaceX rockets full of colonisers to Mars by 2050.
But can we really set up a new civilisation on a distant planet? Just how difficult this will be is made all too clear in a new book by Justin Hollander, an urban planner at Tufts University in Massachusetts.
The First City on Mars: An urban planner鈥檚 guide to settling the Red Planet is a bit of an odd proposition: at first it seems like an academic book, but it is very readable and has a cover that looks like it belongs on a 1960s science-fiction novella.
Hollander is a serious planner, however, and over 12 chapters and scores of subsections he sets out what we are up against if we want to live on Mars. Luckily, aliens aren鈥檛 on his list.
Hollander outlines how, in the 1960s, the Mariner 4 mission to Mars sent back 21 images of the planet鈥檚 surface. Unlike sci-fi of the time, which imagined a planet with civilisations and networks of canals, the barren landscapes it showed revealed challenges of an entirely different nature. Now, the James Webb Space Telescope is giving us even more detail.
So, arriving on Mars, there will be lots of work to get done. Hollander鈥檚 planned conurbation, which he calls Aleph (the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet and the early letter from which the Greeks derived their 鈥渁lpha鈥�), is sited at Utopia Planitia. This is a large plain within Utopia, thought to be the largest impact basin on Mars and the site from which the Viking 2 lander began its exploration of the Red Planet in 1976. It can鈥檛 be a coincidence that the flagship craft of several Star Trek series were constructed in shipyards orbiting this location.
Of course, the story will be brutally different for the colonisers. 鈥淭he first city on Mars will be largely underground,鈥� writes Hollander, facing up to the reality of harmful radiation at the planet鈥檚 surface.
Hollander envisions Aleph as having three sunken structures for living and working, each roughly 100 metres across and covered by a dome. This cluster would form a triangle around a communications and life-support hub.
To the north, there would be a dozen more golf ball-like domes to shield vehicle storage, greenhouses, mining hubs and more from the radiation. Aleph鈥檚 citizens could shuttle around the city using rover paths on the surface, though traffic is presumably expected to be light.
Planning pragmatism and scepticism may explain why Hollander keeps highlighting the enormous challenges involved in getting to and then safely inhabiting the Red Planet. He stresses how much the idea remains a dream by comparing it with the effort required to support life on the International Space Station, which orbits 400 kilometres above Earth鈥檚 surface. Around 2500 square metres of solar panels pointed directly at the sun are needed to power the station, on which up to 13 people can live in a space the size of a UK football field.
Compared with the ISS, the idea of inhabiting Mars any time soon seems rather far-fetched. Hollander admits that 鈥渢he first streets may be decades from being laid out鈥�, but this hasn鈥檛 stopped several governments in richer countries from 鈥減reparing for a real, long-term human presence on Mars鈥�.
Such a move would be a giant leap for humankind 鈥� still, in writing this book, Hollander is banking on us having heard that once before.
Chris Stokel-Walker is a technology聽 writer聽based in Newcastle, UK
