COLONISATION OF MARS

The landscape of Mars (top left); the planet as it appears through an excellent telescope (top right); the Mars Orbiter (bottom)




25 August 2005

By: Ali Ismail

E-mail: aliismail_uk@yahoo.co.uk

Telephone: 0778-842 5262 (United Kingdom)





COLONISATION OF MARS IS FEASABLE


The people of the ‘Third World’ are likely to be left out of space colonisation


It was several months ago that our family’s computer guru advised us that there was an excellent website: www.nasa.gov which gave interested parties all sorts of information about Mankind’s ventures into near-space, the International Space Station, the Discovery launches and last but not least the unmanned missions to Mars the red planet.

Now, what becomes clear from the outset of watching what is going on is that only certain sections of humanity are involved in the probing of the huge vacuums that surround our own planet. Basically, the people involved are North American, European and Japanese. The rest of us can only sit, wonder and spectate and perhaps the time is coming when we will no longer be informed about what is going on, on the ground, presumably, that what is happening is not strictly speaking our business.

The argument around which this article is structured is that there is nothing optional about the interest in Mars. My contention is that when this planet becomes uninhabitable then future generations will have to look elsewhere and Mars is the only habitable planet with conditions sufficiently like our own for human colonies to develop and possibly even thrive after a fashion.

While watching a television documentary about eighteen months ago on a commercial channel the customary string of advertisements came on air. One of them was for a firm that manufactured sunglasses. The selling point was that the sunglasses in question protected the fortunate wearers from radiation. The concluding blurb said: “The danger is now. It is present.” Going back in time I think I can remember advertisements for sunglasses in previous decades. During the 1950s the selling points were protection from glare and fashion. During the 1960s and 1970s the virtues of polarised light were stressed. It seems that now solar radiation is the fuel which drives purchases of sunglasses.

Another television experience of relevance to the subject at hand is my watching the celebrations about the 30th anniversary of the Moon landings in 1969 in 1999. I watched a series of programmes through the night and they were all congratulatory except for the very last which was in the early hours of the morning when most viewers would have switched off their television receivers through sheer exhaustion. In my case, I watched through a pre-programmed video recording the next day. Different people sitting around a discussion table opined that the whole Moon landing episode of 1969 was a fraud on the public and that the Moon walks were filmed in recording studios. Part of the evidence for this was photographic and the remainder was to do with the structure of the Earth’s outer atmosphere and the characteristics of solar radiation which streams into the atmosphere during daylight hours.

One woman put it succinctly. She said that ever since the 1950s it had been hypothesised that the prospect of men walking about in spacesuits far outside the atmosphere was a non-starter because levels of radiation beyond the Van Allen belts of the outer atmosphere would “fry” the individuals concerned. Most spacecraft, she said, would need so much lead, the only really suitable material for blocking radiation, that they would be completely inoperable for most purposes. The Moon is far beyond the protection of the Van Allen belts.

The consensus of opinion, though, is that the above is an exaggeration of the situation. It seems that protection against solar radiation beyond the Van Allen belts does not require so much lead and that in any case they are not deteriorating to any extent.

Dr Richard Horne of the British Antarctic Survey said: “The Van Allen belts are energy filled particles. By contrast the energy fields around Mars are negligible. There is no indication that the Earth’s fields are deteriorating. The sun’s magnetic fields connect with the Earth’s magnetic fields There is a deterioration after a magnetic storm by a factor of a thousand but that is temporary.”

It appears that deterioration of the Van Allen belts is not a serious problem, therefore.

Of more import, perhaps, is the thinning of the ozone layer of the atmosphere which is approximately 15 km above sea level.
Folklore has it that when the first measurements were taken in 1985, the drop in ozone levels in the stratosphere was so dramatic that at first the scientists thought their instruments were faulty. Replacement instruments were built and flown out, and it was not until they confirmed the earlier measurements, several months later, that the ozone depletion observed was accepted as genuine.
Another story goes that the TOMS satellite data didn't show the dramatic loss of ozone because the software processing the raw ozone data from the satellite was programmed to treat very low values of ozone as bad readings! Later analysis of the raw data when the results from the British Antarctic Survey team were published, confirmed their results and showed that the loss was rapid and large-scale over most of the Antarctica continent.
Ozone (O3 : three oxygen atoms) occurs naturally in the atmosphere.
The Earth’s atmosphere is composed of several layers. We live in the troposphere where most of the weather occurs such as rain, snow and clouds. Above the troposphere is the stratosphere, an important region in which effects such as the ozone hole and global warming originate. Supersonic jet airliners such as Concorde fly in the lower stratosphere whereas subsonic commercial airliners are usually in the troposphere. The narrow region between these two parts of the atmosphere is called the tropopause.
Ozone forms a layer in the stratosphere, thinnest in the tropics (near the equator) and denser towards the poles. The amount of ozone above a point on the earth's surface is measured in Dobson Units - typically ~260 DU near the tropics and higher elsewhere though there are large seasonal fluctuations. It is created when ultraviolet radiation (sunlight) strikes the stratosphere, dissociating (or ‘splitting’) oxygen molecules (O2) to atomic oxygen (O). The atomic oxygen quickly combines with further oxygen molecules to form ozone.
It is ironic that at ground level ozone is a health hazard - it is a major constituent of photochemical smog. However, in the stratosphere we could not survive without it. Up in the stratosphere it absorbs some of the potentially harmful ultra-violet (UV) radiation from the sun (at wavelengths between 240 and 320 nm), which can cause skin cancer and damage vegetation, among other things.
Another factor to be taken into account is that the Earth’s natural resources, most especially fossil fuels, are being used up at a fairly tremendous rate. Most coal reserves can be expected to last for a few centuries at the most. The oil fields of the Middle East and the new World are being eaten away by huge demand. The daily petroleum requirement of the USA alone is approximately 19,000,000 barrels each and every day.
My contention is that as the lower atmosphere deteriorates slowly and steadily from pollution and as the Earth’s natural resources deplete and as the human population continues to increase, Mankind will have to look elsewhere for a new home and the most likely candidate is Mars.
Carl Sagan the eminent writer said: "I remember being transfixed by the first lander image to show the horizon of Mars. This was not an alien world, I thought. I knew places like it in Colorado and Arizona and Nevada. There were rocks and a distant eminence, as natural and unselfconscious as any landscape on Earth. Mars was a place."
Many arguments have been cobbled together as to why humanity should not go to Mars. Before considering exactly how we can make the dream of manned missions to Mars possible, it is worth looking at the main arguments against the case for Mars and considering their true value.
It's too dangerous: Most claims for this centre around the problems of long exposure to zero gravity, or radiation. The trip to Mars would take on the order of six months, but with Mir and Skylab, we have learnt a great about the effects of zero gravity and how to counter them. But, with a mission profile such as Mars Direct we do not necessarily require sending crews to Mars in zero gravity. There are obstacles to overcome but the potential medical benefits that may result could be astounding.
Radiation is slightly more problematic, and the astronauts will receive more radiation than they would on Earth. But to put this risk is context: the risk of cancers developing in an astronaut as a result of travelling to and from Mars is less than the risk of cancer faced by a moderate smoker who remains here on Earth.
Besides any exploration has an element of risk, and history shows that there are those willing to take those risks. Many people died in the attempt to climb Mount Everest before Edmund Hilary and Sherpa Tenzing reached the summit and the Apollo missions were certainly not risk free. A well-designed Mars mission can be much safer than this.
It is too expensive: Going to Mars is expensive. Figures exceeding US $450 billion have in the past been submitted. While the Mars Society, and more particularly the proposal known as Mars Direct, first formulated by MS President Robert Zubrin, demonstrate the cost of opening Mars to human exploration and colonisation is perhaps a hundred times less than that, going to Mars is expensive.
But to put it in perspective, plans being drawn up today put the real cost of going to Mars at between US $40 and US $80 billion - to be spent over a period of between 10 and 15 years. Compare that with the USA’s annual defence spending of $400 billion. Furthermore, the money spent on getting humans to Mars is not wasted. It is invested in the scientists, engineers, mathematicians, doctors, support personnel, and others who enable others to build the rockets, design the computers and train the people who will go to Mars. It is money kept on Earth.
A space colony on the Moon would not be a remotely self-sustaining place. There are no raw materials worth mentioning there and the surface is constantly blasted by solar winds and subject to tremendous temperature variations according to light conditions.
By contrast, Mars can be terra-formed and its atmosphere can be altered to provide a breathable habitat with technology in the pipeline. It is believed that water can be drilled in order to provide for crops which would need to be grown under strictly controlled conditions.
Which brings us to the point I made at the beginning, which is that only some societies are involved in this leading edge of research and development. South Asia is left out. Even India and Malaysia have little input in any way.
My contention is that we cannot even think of putting our oar into this debate until our domestic problems are remedied and they are mostly social. Once our societies stabilise we will be able to attend to matters farther away on the Earth and beyond.


THE END