April 11, 2025

Andrew Georgy

9th Grade

Fountain Valley High School

Redness. Harsh winds. Little to no water in almost every region. Unconfirmed life forms. Extreme dust winds. No infrastructure. All signs point to disaster, yet human curiosity (paired with the Earth heating up two degrees every 50 years) has always set its eyes on the barren prize: Mars. 

Now, don’t get me wrong: Mars is extraordinarily unique for a planet and the closest choice we have if things ever went wrong with Earth (which is happening right now). But it’s not the best. Planets such as Kepler 452-B (a highly-prospect Earth-like planet) have luscious forests, are within the habitable zone, and have similar orbital times. The only problem? They live over 18 light years away, which would take us 360,000 years using today’s current technology.

Unless we find a way to hop galaxies like in Interstellar, Mars is the highest priority to colonize due to its rich iron resources and hints of water formations millions of years ago. But what are the problems most likely to arise if we were to attempt such an audacious journey?

The first, of course, is actually arriving on Mars. Do we have the technology to travel millions of miles through space, traversing obstacles while also having the fuel to continue? Absolutely. Solar-powered aircraft such as the rovers have proved that we are indeed capable of entering Mars’ atmosphere. But these vehicles are not sustainable enough for any astronauts to travel for nine months, or the amount of time it’s expected to land on Mars’ surface. Even if we were to find copious amounts of fuel and water to store in the spacecraft, it’d be difficult to move with large amounts of storage at such high speeds, and we risk the possibility of cracks or leaks, a devastating possibility for the life-beings (such as plants, seeds, animals, etc.) living aboard. 

Even if we were to successfully journey to Mars, how would we get 8 billion people to move on the planet? Not only would it be painstakingly long, but Earth’s resources would run out before we could even get half of the people there with the spacecraft we use now. 

The next major item on the list is H2O, the necessary molecules consumed by every human every day but found in little quantities on Mars. A quick Google search will tell you that there’s plenty of water on Mars, enough to handle small populations of humans, but this water is found at the ice caps on Mars’ surface, which are much harsher than Earth and even the rest of Mars. This is due to Mars’ atmosphere (which we’ll get into later), which causes the ice to go straight from air to solid or from solid to air. Even if we were to live near these caps, we’d have to endure -220 degrees F temperatures, weather almost no space suit could ever handle. 

Our final item on the list is, of course, the most important: oxygen. Without a few minutes of it, we’d die painfully, yet it’s not found in abundance in Mars’ atmosphere. In fact, the oxygen density is 1/10000th of Earth’s, and most of the gas found there is carbon dioxide rather than the two most common here: nitrogen and oxygen. Not only is this a constraint almost impossible to solve (until now, there aren’t any technologies that can insert or stimulate the growth of oxygen in Mars’ atmosphere), but even if we were to wear the extremely unrealistic suits that movies show us, we’d still need to supply them with oxygen. The only oxygen-extractor on Mars has been MOXIE, a rover that separates carbon dioxide and oxygen atoms to create oxygen, yet we would need much more rovers (and consistency as it’s unknown if such a rover could keep working to extract oxygen over a long period of time) to supply our small or large population on the Martian planet. Even if it was more efficient, we run the risk of oxygen shortages if these systems fail, ultimately causing mass death.

So, is it possible? Yes. Our machines and innovations have rapidly improved over the past decade, especially when it comes to space exploration and colonization. But it’s too early to determine this now. With plans by private companies and even NASA to launch astronauts to Mars by 2030, we pressure ourselves into an unneeded uncertainty that will most likely end up with tragic deaths. Until this planet completely capitulates, we need to experiment more with robots, rovers, oxygen technologies, transportation, water extracting machines, and food farms, to name a few. Even if we master the necessities, the trip to Mars should establish that we’re able to live on the planet, not just for a few months. Infrastructure would be difficult to build there if we don’t build it beforehand, among the other difficulties of using the minerals available on the planets’ surface. Remember, this article just scratches the surface of the problems we might face. I haven’t even talked about entertainment, housing, transportation on the actual planet, or how the planet would sustain a population larger than Earth when it’s much smaller and contains fewer resources. For now, let’s focus on healing our own planet before we think of fixing others.