Elon Musk, the visionary CEO of SpaceX, has a dream: to build a city on Mars with one million people by 2050. Sounds like a science fiction movie fantasy, but according to some experts, like Serkan Saydam, deputy director of the Australian Center for Space Research and professor at the University of New South Wales, colonizing Mars is possible within a few decades.
Colonize Mars, the roadmap
The first step is water. The water that could be extracted from the ice and minerals will allow us to establish a colony on Mars. Saydam says the water would enable agriculture and food production on the planet, while hydrogen derived from ice could be used as an energy source for rocket propellant.
However, not all scientists agree with this optimistic view. Louis Friedman, astronautical engineer and co-founder of the Planetary Society, e Rachel Seidler, a neuroscientist at the University of Florida, believe that the idea of colonizing Mars is somewhat unrealistic, and will be for quite some time. Who's right?
We'll get there
Whatever the various experts think, there is every chance that humanity could colonize Mars within a few decades. China plans to send human crews to the red planet starting from 2033, while NASA aims to do so between the late 30s and early 40s of the XNUMXst century.
Of course, it would be better to colonize planets with more hospitable conditions than the Martian ones: unfortunately these exoplanets are too far from us. Frederic Marin, an astrophysicist at the Strasbourg Astronomical Observatory, believes that with our current technology it would take tens of thousands of years to reach them.
We won't always have the same technology though. Right? As the speed of propulsion means increases over time, travel time to exoplanets could shorten by thousands to hundreds of years. How many exactly?
Let's do 500
Marin hypothesizes a scenario in which we could reach a habitable exoplanet within 500 years. Of course, a journey of this duration would require a spaceship inhabited by multiple generations of humans, most of whom would never see the exoplanet to be colonized. His simulations suggest that an initial crew of about 500 would be adequate for a multigenerational colony ship.
But how would human beings deal with the prospect of spending the rest of their lives on a spaceship, with no prospect of seeing anything else? And how would their descendants adjust to being born and living in a context of interstellar travel?
These questions raise gigantic ethical questions. Provided that humanity actually manages to colonize other planets without destroying its own, and in any case without becoming extinct.
Colonizing the Cosmos: At a Glance
We will do it. We will get to Mars. The feeling, however, is that colonizing Mars by the end of this century will be nothing more than an "embryonic" taste of an incredibly difficult path.
The road to turning these dreams into reality is still long and full of obstacles. Only time will tell whether humanity will be able to overcome the challenges and transform science fiction imagery into a chapter in our history.
