Fortunately, the red planet’s natural resources, and their possibility to foster human life, are central to why notions of populating Mars have moved from fantasy to scientific plausibility.įor one thing, Mars has carbon that can be extracted from the atmosphere and used to make plastics, rocket fuel or heating fuel. Instead, the design and civil engineers of the not-too-distant future will turn to Mars’ Indigenous resources to satisfy our needs. Incidentally, that also includes transporting wildlife. To begin with, it’s unlikely that Musk’s envisioned fleet of spaceships will be overloaded with Earth materials, as it won’t be feasible to transport through space all the materials that we’ll need to live, subsist and remain safe on Mars over the long-term.

Given our modern scientific understanding of the red planet, just how feasible is it that humans will live and thrive there during our lifetime? adults believed that sending humans to Mars should be a high priority, ahead only of returning to the moon. On the other hand, in a recent Pew Research Centre survey carried out in June 2018, only 18% of U.S. Here, Samir Jaber, engineering content writer at materials search engine Matmatch, examines how materials testing could make or break humanity’s future on MarsĮlon Musk believes that the first sustainable city on Mars could be a reality in 20 years, with 1,000 starships to handle the logistics of the seven-month journey to the planet. Today, such quaint sci-fi concepts are actual scientific possibilities now that we better understand the resources that are available on the red planet.

Dick’s 1964 science fiction novel, Martian Time-Slip, imagined a human colony on Mars reliant on waterways, allotments and robots. With the right materials, a future for humanity on the Red Planet isn't just science fiction

Space engineers mars ores