There's A Reason We're So Obsessed About Going To Mars, But It's Not Going To Be Easy

With all this talk of going to Mars, sometimes you have to wonder why we're so focused on leaving Earth - so much so, that we're ignoring the problems right here. We ignore the climate change we're causing because we see places like Mars as a second chance anyway.

But that's not wholly true. While there are plenty of people who subscribe to this school of thought, scientists have bigger concerns.

According to Stephan Petranek, author of the book 'How we'll live on Mars', we may be destroying the planet ourselves, but there's no guarantee Earth will survive forever. In fact, scientists expect it not to.

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For one, our Sun is more than halfway through its lifespan. As it's dying, it'll eventually swell up to orders of magnitude its size, either throwing Earth out of orbit in the process or irradiating all life on the planet.

Then there are asteroid strikes. A meteor about 11 km across, struck the Earth approximately 65 million years ago and ended up killing four out of every five living creatures on the planet. It kicked up so much dust and debris into the atmosphere that the Sun was blacked out for years. According to scientists, we're so overdue for a strike that they say we have a 100 percent chance of getting hit. It's just a question of when.

"If we establish an outpost on Mars, we can be reasonably certain that at least the human species will continue to exist," Petranek says, "And that is one great motivation for going to Mars."

"But the real truth is that we have to become an interplanetary species anyway."

Take SpaceX for instance - it plans to send the first of many cargo ships to Mars in 2024 to prepare for humans. If that succeeds, Petranek posits, they'll send another one in 2026 and then 2028. And in 2030, humans will emerge from the spacecraft to colonise Mars. But they'll have their work cut out for them.

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The biggest problem, Petranek points out, is the radiation on the red planet. "You'd need to have something between you and the sun and something between you and cosmic rays," he explains. The atmosphere is too thin to protect us from it, so we'd need to find old volcanic lava tubes or crevasses in the side of a crater. Living underground is our best bet until we can find a way to effectively shield ourselves from solar and cosmic radiation on the surface.

Of course, we also wouldn't be able to breathe on Mars, as the air is 96 percent carbon dioxide. Instead, we'd have to take machinery with us from Earth that will make oxygen by taking in Martian air and splitting up the carbon atom from that molecule. Even with that though, we'd have to live in pressurized environments and wear special suits to protect us when outdoors.

"You'd have the same problems on Mars that you'd have on Earth," Petranek says, "that of food, water and shelter. Your food for the first 50-100 years will come freeze-dried from Earth, at least until we start terraforming Mars."

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And yet, if we manage to solve each of these problems, at least temporarily, he estimates that we'd have a city of 80,000 people on Mars within just a century. If we have powerful enough telescopes to see the surface by then, we could wave hello.

Editor's Note: Stephen Petranek is MARS¡¯ co-executive producer, scientific advisor and award-winning author of 'How We'll Live on Mars'. Your every question will take you further on Starstruck, National Geographic¡¯s weekend 9 pm slot is dedicated to the best space exploration content.