Vacation home on Mars? Forget about it!

[Onkel Neal]

https://gizmodo.com/humans-will-neve...ars-1836316222

Radiation poisoning, brutal cold temps, deadly perchlorate soil, thin atmosphere that is chiefly comprised of CO2... it'll take technologies that only exist in science fiction.

Mars is the closest thing we have to Earth in the entire solar system, and that’s not saying much.

The Red Planet is a cold, dead place, with an atmosphere about 100 times thinner than Earth’s. The paltry amount of air that does exist on Mars is primarily composed of noxious carbon dioxide, which does little to protect the surface from the Sun’s harmful rays. Air pressure on Mars is very low; at 600 Pascals, it’s only about 0.6 percent that of Earth. You might as well be exposed to the vacuum of space, resulting in a severe form of the bends—including ruptured lungs, dangerously swollen skin and body tissue, and ultimately death.

As Friedman pointed out, this carries some rather heavy existential and philosophical implications. If humans can’t make it to Mars, it means we’re destined to be “a single-planet species,” he said. What’s more, it suggests extraterrestrial civilizations might be in the same boat, and that the potential for “intelligent life to spread throughout the universe is very, very gloomy,” he told Gizmodo.