Let’s consider the idea of humanity heading to and creating a habitat on Mars.

To do so, one needs, obviously, some kind of shelter. A place where humans can both breathe and not freeze. Oh, and not get bombarded by pesky radiation. They’ll also need food.

The fact is that we can’t send these things on a consistent basis from Earth to Mars. In other words, we would need to figure out how to produce a safe living environment along with food to sustain our Mars inhabitants.

Curious about how this is done?

I found a couple of interesting articles regarding this very subject.

First up, Erika K. Carlson offers this intriguing article over at astronomy.com which posits:

We could feed one million people living in colonies on Mars

I don’t want to give the article completely away, but suffice to say this would involve some planting (I suspect many out there already know about some of this via the movie and book The Martian) along with edible insects, algae, etc. It’s an ambitious plan and -again, giving away some of the points of the article- it is theorized we could get this amount of food available in a matter of 100 years.

Sounds like a long time, but I find that an incredibly optimistic timeline!

Fascinating stuff!

Now, how about the habitation itself and the radiation exposure? The folks over at marsone.com offer the following guide to dealing with these issues:

How much radiation will the Mars settlers be exposed to?

There are a bunch of other links on this site and its a fascinating read.

As bad as the internet can be, there’s gold in them thar hills, too!