Category Archives: Mars Colonization

"I would be lying to you if I say we have never discussed this interesting side-scenario where the drones go into kill-all-humans mode," says Bisser Dyankov, producer at Tropico developer Haemimont Games, in response to a question about the studio's recently announced colony sim Surviving Mars. I'd asked about technology research in Surviving Mars, and whether it would be possible to unlock advanced AI for robots and drones, and if that could lead at some point to a robot revolt in the colony.

"The idea is obviously... it has been floating in the air," Bisser says.

Ivan-Assen Ivanov, Haemimont Games' technical director adds: "So something like a company-wide robot uprising, it's not off the table. It's not on the table as part of what we're showing now. It's definitely making rounds, around the table. We don't promise anything."

It's not unusual that the developers are being a bit cagey: Surviving Mars is in pre-alpha, and there's not even a playable build available for us to get some hands-on impressions. Still, here's everything we've learned about the survival colony-building game from the presentation and an interview at PDXCon in Stockholm last weekand keep in mind, some of this information may change during development.

In the opening moments of Surviving Mars, you pick from a list of sponsors: the corporation or country that will fund your colony and will act as a lifeline and supply chain. They'll send rockets containing supplies and equipment, and as you mine resources on the Red Planet, you'll be able to refuel those reusable rockets, and send them on back to Earth.

Choosing your sponsor will dictate your starting funds, provide you with certain goals and milestones, determine how many rockets you have available to send back and forth, and will influence how fast you can build your colony. Your choice of sponsor may even result in penalties if you don't meet certain mission parameters.

"There is a lot of differences [between sponsors]," says Gabriel Dobrev, creative director. "There is a large difference between the initial supplies that you've got, so probably more rockets, more funding, so you can buy more expensive equipment. Later on, the sponsors reward different behavior. One of them may want you to have as big a colony as possible, bring a lot more people from Earth, the other ones might want you to extract precious metals and send them back to Earth.

"So they all reward different type of behavior. And also, they penalize particular behavior, and even can have an end-game condition, like, if somebody dies, you're out, mission is cancelled, so you lose the game essentially."

After outfitting your initial rocket with equipment (rovers, transport vehicles, and orbital probes to explore the terrain), you'll select a landing site on Mars. You'll be able to examine your landing zone for the resources it contains, as well as identify different hazards such as dust storms (which can block out the sun and cover solar panels with dust) or extreme cold weather temperatures that can raise power requirements and freeze water supplies.

The landing sites are based on NASA's Mars data of the planet's featuresyou'll even able to locate the landing site of NASA's Curiosity Rover using real coordinates. However, the maps you play on will be randomly generated to provide an environment that lies somewhere between reality and fiction.

After landing, you'll dispense a small army of drones and robots to begin preparing for the eventual colonization of humans. Place solar panels to generate power (and store surplus power in batteries for use when the sun goes downthere is a day-night cycle), connect power lines to various modules, build a drone hub to dispense your busy metal workers, and construct a tower to scan the area around your landing zone. Discovering new veins of resources will be paramount to the success of your colony: while you can bring some materials with you on your rocket (like concrete, metals, and polymers) and have more sent from Earth during resupply missions, this will only represent a tiny fraction of what you'll need for construction. Most of what you need will come from your surroundings, not from Earth.

Don't expect your first human colonist to arrive for a while, either. Before you can take one small step for man, your terrain will be well-worn with the tire tracks of your drones.

"The first people will arrive later on when there is habitable space, and all of the things that are required for life and for survival of people," says Dobrev. "And this will actually be a big milestone."

In the meantime, you'll construct machines to process resources on the planet, creating cement for buildings and harvesting water by tapping into ice deep underground and pumping it to the surface. You'll also begin converting the thin Mars atmosphere into breathable oxygen to be stored in tanks. Also important: creating fuel to send your reusable rocket back to Earth.

Once you've got a habitable space for human colonization, you can begin receiving colonists from Earth. It's not instantaneous: as Mars and Earth orbit the sun, they are rarely close enough to each other for a quick rocket trip, so at times the arrival of colonists and other supplies may be delayed.

Once humans have set foot on Mars, they'll begin to extend your colony further across the map, build additional outposts, research new technologies, and of course, have a little bit of fun.

"Once we have a sort of stable and working colony there, a lot of advances will happen immediately, because people will be present there, thinking, exploring, researching, and so on," says Dobrev.

"There is also entertainment, which is, build a space bar," he adds. "Because you can't do without bars. That's a given."

You don't have to allow just any John Q. Earthling into your Mars colony. Each human has traits, like ambitious, tough, frail, workaholic, survivor, and so on. This means you can set standards for who gets to join your effort on Mars.

"You can pre-select, you can filter for that, you can say 'I don't want any frail guys in my colony' but of course that will limit the number of people that will want to come," says Dobrev.

Once you've got humans in your colony, you can also sort them by trait into different areas. For example, you can relocate your workaholics into high-production areas and assign creative types to completing research. This isn't like Cities: Skylines, where your citizens determine their own fates and activities: you'll be able to direct your colonists to work at specific jobs and complete tasks.

There are four important parameters you'll need to manage and monitor in your colonists. The most obvious is physical health: making sure they have enough food, water, and oxygen, plus insuring they live and work in domes with the proper amount of air pressure and temperature levels.

"We also have the mental health, sanity, which is how well this affects your psyche," says Dobrev. "If you don't feel secure in your environment or if you experience too often a crisis where you don't have access to oxygen, or you're going out on a very long and stressful mission, this is all going to have a reflection on you."

There's also colonist morale. "This is how much individuals' desires are aligned with the colony. If this gets too low, the individual becomes a renegade and he starts thinking about himself and doing his own thing instead of following the goals of the colony, and this is how you get crime."

How do you deal with crime? Form a Mars police force.

"At some point you will need to have some form of law enforcement. When a group of people becomes larger, potentially going to thousands, then you definitely need some form of structure in the society and making sure that everybody's not stepping on the toes of anybody else, more or less."

The fourth parameter is comfort level: how confident your colonists feel that they are in a suitable living environment. If the comfort level is too low, colonists can decide they'd rather go back to Earth, and will hop on the next available rocket home (provided, of course, there's enough fuel for the rocket to take off).

If a colonist's comfort level is high enough, they may decide to start having children, providing you with a new supply of colonists without having to call for more from home. This is especially important because while you may be dealing with problems in your colony, there might be even bigger problems brewing on another planet: Earth.

Earth represents your supply chain for certain resources, such as food (until you begin growing your own) and especially for additional colonists (until you begin creating your own), so if your corporate sponsor runs into problems, or if the planet itself experiences a calamity, it could severely impact your colony. And that may just happen.

"It could be, for example, if you are sent by a corporation," Dobrev says, "it could go bankrupt. Or, there could be World War III, or there could be something making a disease that is essentially threatening Earth, so you can't really get colonists from there.

"Again, a lot of things that can eventually happen and we want to keep this element a little bit randomized, so that you don't always know what's going to happen to Earth and there is no ultimate security that Earth will always be there for you to help you out."

Back to the robot uprising I mentioned earlierand remember, it hasn't been confirmed, it's just one of many ideas that have been discussed by the developers. If there is an AI revolt, though, it would be part of special events the developers are calling 'mysteries.' While Surviving Mars is mostly based on real science and technology, the developers also want to allow for more wild, far-fetched situations.

"With the mysteries, we allow ourselves to go haywire, nodding to classic sci-fi and weird ideas," says Dyankov. "And the way the mystery is structured, it's a different story for each playthrough inviting the player to go and interact with it, having an effect on the gameplay. It could be something like an object materializing from [another] dimension, you know?"

Mars, after all, represents a new frontier. "Who knows what's there? Maybe aliens, maybe kill-all-humans."

Not interested in fantastical events involving aliens, other dimensions, or robot uprisings? Want to stick to science instead of science-fiction? No problem. Players don't need to get involved with Surviving Mars' mysteries if they choose not to.

"The important thing with those mysteries is to understand that the player will be also able to, in the initial stages, say that 'I don't want to experience any mystery.' So the sandbox experience is there but the mystery is something on top that we invite the player to engage in with different playthroughs."

"The idea is not that there is any fixed goal," Dobrev says. "That you have to achieve this and then you're done. There is practically no victory screen. You play and you can set up your own goals. You can try to follow the mystery and get to its end. You can try to get the first colonist to Mars sooner or you can try to reach a self-sustaining level of your colony sooner but that's not a set goal.

"These are all goals that we'll be tracking for you and it will be easy if you want to follow them to see how well you're doing, but that's not something that we're putting in front of you and saying, like, you have to do this or you have to do that. It's a sandbox."

There's no release date yet, but Surviving Mars is expected to arrive sometime in 2018.

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Everything we know about Surviving Mars, the colony-builder from the makers of Tropico - PC Gamer

MELBOURNE, FLA. With the focus so often on the rockets and technology required to reach Mars, less attention has been paid to another component critical to the success of future missions: the crewmember.

That changes later this month when researchers from across North America gather at Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex on Floridas Atlantic coast for the Mars Mission Social Sciences Workshop.

Co-hosted by Florida Institute of Technologys Buzz Aldrin Space Institute and its Institute for Cross Cultural Management, the two-day event May 30-31 will bring together leading scholars from a variety of social science disciplines to develop common characterizations of the psychological, sociological and human performance challenges associated with permanent Mars colonization, and to consider the approaches and research needed to cope with these challenges.

The workshop opens with a welcome from Andrew Aldrin, director of the Buzz Aldrin Space Institute, and then shifts into sessions based on overarching topics: psychiatric health and disorders; group and team dynamics; international and cultural issues; human factors and human-centered design; and historical, sociological, and anthropological perspectives on colonization.

Within each session will be short presentations and panel discussions. Those are scheduled to include:

The trailblazing men and women who will one day travel to Mars face a long, arduous journey, Wildman said. We are hopeful that our research and shared scholarship will allow us to develop ways to improve the probability of making those journeys successful and safe.

The second day will be centered around forming small, multidisciplinary working groups focused on developing clear research agendas within the various sub-topics identified as critical during the first day. The second day will begin with a thorough pre-brief providing instructions and clear criteria for the outcomes of the working groups, and will conclude with formal brief-backs from each of the working groups, which should facilitate a productive wrap-up discussion and next steps.

The Mars mission will undoubtedly be an international one. Like many large scale challenges, the Mars mission is too complex for any one organization, or any one nation, to accomplish alone, said ICCM Executive Director Richard Griffith. Cultural competence of the crew and support team will be a key variable in mission success.

Wildman added, The intended final product of the workshop is a research agenda report that is truly integrative and interdisciplinary.

For more information, visit https://buzzaldrinspaceinstitute.com/event/mars-mission-social-sciences-workshop/.

To arrange for media coverage, please contact Adam Lowenstein (adam@fit.edu) or Shelley Preston (spreston@fit.edu) in the University News Bureau.

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Human Side of Mars Missions the Focus of Florida Tech Workshop - Florida Tech Now

Wed, May 17, 2017 10:02am

If youve ever read1,001 RidiculousWays to Die, then you already know every sorry and often bizarre ending you could possibly encounteron Earth. Planetary scientist Pascal Lee of NASAs Ames Research Center and the SETI Institute believes that Mars is crawling with much worse fates than having a piano fall on your head.

Mars colonization, or at least putting boots on the Red Planet, has lately been a topic as burning as the planets extreme radiation, but it seems one thing no one wants to discuss (at least on the internet) is how potential Martian citizens could perish. And this is in addition to the looming specter of health risks for even seasoned astronauts. Glaze-eyed space cowboys may want to believe in a Jetsons future, but Lee is skeptical. If your equipment glitches without a viable solution 33.9 million miles away home, you could end up buried in six feet of red dust with a scrap of space junk as a grave marker.

"If you are unprotected on Mars your blood would boil, even at ambient temperature," said Lee, referring to the low pressure of the planets dangerously thin atmosphere. Try a hundred times thinner in comparison to Earth. Meaning any Martian gases that got into your bloodstream would dissolve into bubbles not unlike soda fizz. Except, like some twisted science fair experiment, you would turn into something of a human soda can and actually fizz to death.

Radiation is the the most obvious lethal force on Mars, so much so that there was actually a study done to determine whether The Martians fictional NASA astronaut would actually survive given he touched down on a mission in the year 2035. Most of the Martian atmosphere has been brutally stripped away by solar winds. Unlike Earth, Mars is missing a strong magnetic field, which leaves it vulnerable to solar storms. No magnetic field and almost no atmosphere mean the surface is being showered with solar particles and cosmic rays. The intense radiation that gets through will kill you in months. Cause of death: radiation poisoning or cancer.

Mars is also freezing. At its equator, a summer day that registers at 70 degrees Fahrenheit is actually considered a temperature high. Even in the middle of July, what seems like a warm, breezy weather (those breezes are probably deadly solar winds) will plunge to negative 80 degrees Fahrenheit. Youll end up as a human popsicle if your space suit doesnt have the right insulation. Cause of death: hypothermia.

The perils of the Red Planet dont stop there. What is left of the atmosphere is almost completely carbon dioxide. Compare the 78 percent nitrogen and 21 percent oxygen we breathe in on Earth to a lethal 95 percent carbon dioxide. If your oxygen supply ran out, it would be like inhaling exhaust fumes. Cause of death: hypoxia.

Speaking of things you shouldnt ever be breathing, youd better keep your helmet screwed on at all times because dust is floating around positively everywhere. Breathe it in and your lungs will eventually fail from all the abrasive and fine-grained particles that will scrape relentlessly at the insides of your lungs. Not to mention this dust is highly toxic. Cause of death: poisoning and pulmonary hemorrhage.

NASA aims to make sure the Red Planet wont turn into the Red Death. While it has its sights set on blasting off to Mars approximately by the time The Martians Mark Watney landed, and while the whole world (and the whole internet) is impatient to see a Mars mission happen, the space agencys priority is developing over three dozen new technologies to send astronauts back to Earth as healthy as they were before takeoff.

(via Space.com)

Link:
How to die on Mars, according to one scientist - Blastr

Elon Musk produces electric cars and solar roof panels for the mass market, makes rockets to launch satellites and re-supply the International Space Station, and seeks to build a machine that can read human thoughts. So is he spread too thin as chief of several groundbreaking companies?

That question comes up periodically about Musk, a serial entrepreneur and polymath, especially when his empire achieves yet another high-water mark. Just recently, his electric automaker, Tesla (TSLA), becamethe largest U.S. car companyby stock market valuation, surpassing General Motors (GM). Now valued at almost $53 billion, Tesla has seen its stock surge more than 50 percent over the past 12 months, despite torrents of red ink: a projected loss of $950 million this year, versus GM's expected profit of $6.3 billion.

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"How can he head three companies?" asked Chicago securities attorney Andrew Stoltmann, a stockholder rights advocate who follows Musk's activities. "Tesla's stock has done well, but what happens when it drops? Shareholders will say he's spread too thin."

The 45-year-old billionaire is also back in the news lately due to his privately held Space Exploration Technologies, or SpaceX. On Monday night, it launched a re-usable Falcon 9 rocket carrying a communications satellite into orbit. SpaceX, which suffered two launchpad explosion in 2015 and 2016, has an ambitious schedule for 2017, aiming to prove it has recovered. Not only that: Musk wants SpaceX some day to lead the colonization of Mars.

Meanwhile, he formed Neuralink, a company that seeks to implant tiny electrodes into people's brains that will transmit their thoughts to computers. In April, he predicted that this endeavor would eventually allow humans to communicate via telepathy.

Musk is always a dervish of activity. Last year, he merged SolarCity, a solar panel maker that also loses money, into Tesla, a controversial move that critics called a bailout. He also is pursuing ideas like the Hyperloop, an ultra-fast, long-distance transportation scheme, propelling passengers through a tube in capsules. Another potential project is to ferry cars around traffic-congested Los Angeles in high-speed underground tunnels. What's more, he runs an active charity.

Musk's businesses are churning out new products at a rapid pace. Later this year, Tesla plans to deliver its newest sedans and SUVs, and Musk says reservations for them are huge. This summer, SolarCity will begin selling solar roof tiles, which could mark a breakthrough for the sunshine-to-electricity industry, replacing ugly roof panels..

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No wonder that skeptics question how he can keep all the plates spinning. Lawyer Stoltmann points to Jack Dorsey, the CEO of both social media website Twitter (TWTR) and mobile payments services provider Square (SQ), which have had rough spells. Their uninspiring performances prompted some analysts to call on Dorsey to choose one or the other. "Like Dorsey, Musk has too much" to keep track of, Stoltmann said.

Last year, software developer Mark Hibben, writing on theSeeking Alphainvestor site, called for Musk to step down from Tesla management. On a quarterly earnings call with analysts, Hibben wrote, Musk "sounded exhausted." Hibben added that he often "wondered how he could possibly serve as CEO of SpaceX, and Tesla and be chairman of SolarCity. Combined with his various avocations such as Mars colonization and Hyperloop, it all seems too much."

In the most recentTesla earnings call, in early May, Brad Erickson of Pacific Crest Securities asked Musk how, given his plethora of activities, he could manage "staying actively in place at Tesla longer into the future"

Musk replied: "I intend to be actively involved with Tesla for the rest of my life. Hopefully stopping before I get senile."

Often likened to Steve Jobs, and sometimes to Thomas Edison or Henry Ford, Musk is a self-made man who has prospered as an inventor. Actor Robert Downey Jr. turned to him for inspiration when the actor was playing the billionaire Tony Stark, a fictionalized icon of technological innovation, in the "Iron Man" movies.

So how does Musk intend to do it all and keep at it year after year? Musk and his staff would not comment publicly. But he does have an eye for talent, which helps get things done. A person who knows him well said he is ably served by competent lieutenants, particularly J.B. Straubel, co-founder and chief technology officer of Tesla, and Gwynne Shotwell, president of SpaceX.

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To be sure, a large part of Musk's success is his seemingly boundless energy, aided by ample dollops of pluck, intelligence and creativity. After all, he taught himself computing at 10 and sold a video game he created at 12 to a computer magazine for $500. South African-born Musk immigrated to Canada at 17 and then came to the U.S. to attend the University of Pennsylvania, where he earned two bachelors degrees, in physics and economics.

He made his first fortune by selling an online city guide company called Zip2 to Compaq in 1999, and his second as a co-founder of PayPal, cashing out when eBay (EBAY) bought it in 2002. He ranksNo. 80 on the Forbes World's Billionaires list, with an estimated wealth of $15.3 billion.

Of course, it helps that Musk has assistance from Washington and state and local governments in the form of tax breaks, grants and rebates for his technologically oriented companies, which are dedicated to fighting global warming or pushing America into the cosmos. ALos Angeles Timesarticle contended that Tesla, SolarCity and SpaceX will benefit from an estimated $4.9 billion in government support.

By most accounts, Musk thus far has been able to turn in an epic display of multi-tasking because of his:

Non-stop work ethic. This is a man who believes relaxing promotes vulnerability. He once told Business Insider that when "I took a week off, my rocket exploded. The lesson here is don't take a week off." In a TV appearance on Denmark's 21 Sondag program, Musk admitted he's only taken time off twice in 12 years. He typically puts in 90-hour work weeks.

Always intent on keeping a tight schedule, he seems to order his day more by instinct than by regimentation. "I've actually not read any books on time management," Musk told Mashable. At Tesla, he often will inspect vehicles personally as they come off the production line. He has a sleeping bag so he can stay close to the factory floor around the clock.

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"My desk has frequently been in the factory," Musk told Business Insider. "I move my desk around to wherever the most important place is in the company at that time."

Attention to detail. Musk doesn't just inspect a sampling of Teslas. He reportedly eyeballs each of them. He also is a one-man guinea pig, requiring his engineers to install every proposed change on his own Tesla before he okays them for customers.

One story about Musk is that he once discovered the wrong kind of screw was used in Tesla sun visors and said, "they felt like daggers in my eyes." Another pictures him obsessing over the design of a key fob, spending weeks over its dimensions and appearance.

Relentless reading gives him many of his ideas. Dolly Singh, a former SpaceX executive, told Quora that "Elon reads voraciously; he taught himself how to design and build the world's most advanced rockets and spacecraft by reading books."

Nevertheless, despite his hard-driving focus, Musk's career has had its share of glitches. After a succession of successful launches, there were the SpaceX rockets that blew up on the pad over the past two years. And last May, a self-driving Tesla car crashed into a tractor trailer on the highway, killing the Tesla driver and pulling Musk into a public argument over how safe the vehicles are (federal auto-safety regulators later found no defects in its autopilot system).

Riding his subordinates.Author Ashlee Vance, in a book about Musk, writes that his employees both revere and fear him, and try to please him by copying his marathon work habits. Vance writes, "They give up their lives for Musk."

Life with Elon is not always orderly or predictable. In an analysis of Musk's management style, theBoothconsulting firm found: "An engineer might spend nine months working 100 hours a week on something because Musk has pushed him to, and then out of nowhere, Musk will change his mind and scrap the project."

"I have OCD on product-related issues,"he told the Wall Street Journal, meaning obsessive-compulsive disorder. "I always see what's wrong ... I never see what's right. It's not a recipe for happiness."

A self-described SpaceX engineer, writing on Quora, noted: "You can always tell when someone's left an Elon meeting. They're defeated." Over the past year, amid rising pressure from the pending rollout of the next car model, high-level executive departures have rocked Tesla. The chief financial officer, the director of hardware engineering and the human resources head have left.

And in what is now Tesla's energy division, SolarCity co-founder Lyndon Rive announced on Monday that he would be leaving in June to start another company and to spend more time with his family. Rive also is Musk's cousin.

Ability to inspire. A devout science fiction enthusiast, Musk has an ability to instill his vision in employees, customers and investors. What he is selling, as he is fond of saying, is the future.

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Whether it will come to pass as he predicts, or with him in the forefront, remains to be seen. Wall Street treats Tesla like a technology stock, viewing it as the best bet to dominate electric cars and battery storage.

"Tesla engenders optimism, freedom, defiance and a host of other emotions that, in our view, other companies cannot replicate," analyst Alexander Potter of Piper Jaffray told Bloomberg News.

On paper, GM (10 million vehicles delivered in 2016) should have the advantage over Tesla (80,000). Tesla lags behind GM in bringing out the next-generation electric car: theChevrolet Bolt, introduced in February with a price and range similar to Musk's next entry, the Model 3 sedan, debuting later this year. Trouble is, GM can't match the enthusiasm surrounding Tesla.

It's fair to ask if Musk can wear so many hats. But Jobs was the head of both Apple (AAPL) and Pixar Animation Studios. And Edison led businesses in electricity generation, movies and batteries. Like them, Musk is a dreamer, and maybe his can all come true.

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Tesla, SpaceX, AI, Mars and more: Is Elon Musk spread too thin? - CBS News

Y oure on a luxury cruise, sipping an ice-cold beer at one of the half-dozen bars scattered throughout the ship and winding down with friends before dinner. You booked a table for the second seating of the evening at the onboard steakhouse, which is rumored to be superb. You hope to meet the captain.

This cruise-ship scenario may seem mundane, but actually isn't -- because you're in space. And this isn't just any old space cruise; this one's taking you and hundreds of other well-heeled passengers on a six-month journey from a dying Earth to Mars, which you'll call home for the rest of your life.

Roll your eyes, but it's not entirely science fiction. Sure, a high-end space cruise to a colonized Mars is still decades, if not centuries, away. The soonest that NASA projects itll be ready to send its best-trained astronauts to the Red Planet is the 2030s, and even that timeline is ambitious, given the enormous engineering challenges involved with safely transporting people in a vehicle capable of traveling nearly 34 million miles away from Earth.

But fans of the possibilities of deep-space travel should be bullish, especially as NASA outlines concrete plans for its Journey to Mars, and space-tourism companies -- namely Elon Musk's Space X and Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin -- publicly compete to be the first to send paying customers into space.

We're totally going to get there someday soon... if our brains don't betray us first.

Theres no telling exactly how a human brain might glitch out in deep space since no ones been there yet, but something as simple as a prolonged disrupted sleep pattern could trigger a complete mental breakdown. There's also Earth-out-of-view Phenomenon, a term used to describe the human response to watching our Pale Blue Dot grow so small in the distance that it disappears -- a sight that could set off any number of disturbing behavioral responses, from suicidal thoughts to hallucinations or delusions. (To this day, no astronaut has ever lost complete visual contact with Earth.) More likely, good old-fashioned stir craziness would be the culprit.

The Orion spacecraft, which will take the first NASA crew to Mars, allots astronauts only 300 cubic feet of living space. This means that, for up to two years, the four-to-six people aboard will be eating, sleeping, working, and relieving themselves inside a room roughly the size of a large dumpster. Theyll be literally millions of miles away from the rest of humanity, with the threat of imminent disaster and violent death constantly looming -- no fun. That's why NASA provides its astronauts with the comforts of home. What better way to do that than with familiar food and drink?

According to retired US astronaut Clay Anderson -- who's done two separate stints on the International Space Station, totaling more than 150 days -- a home-cooked meal or another emotional crutch during a particularly vulnerable stretch could be the difference between sanity and hysteria in space. "During all those hours, all those days, with crewmates and activities going on around the clock," he said during a panel at SXSW this year, "I could have used a beer every once in awhile."

For a crew headed to Mars to be able to survive, Anderson suggested, theyd need to have access to a variety of food options. "You have to create, in my mind, that home environment, that planetary environment from Earth," he said. "[That sense of] how do I see my family, how do I have the food that has the smells that remind me of home?" In other words, anything but the aroma-less, flavorless meal-replacement granola bars engineered to deliver the necessary calories and nutrients in the smallest possible package that Anderson and other astronauts know all too well.

I ts no secret that most space food is pretty nasty, that oddly delicious freeze-dried astronaut ice cream you bought on field trips to the science museum notwithstanding. Its undoubtedly come a long way since early astronauts were getting by on tubes of goo, but just one look at the space version of a cheeseburger -- essentially a flour tortilla smeared with Cheez Whiz and haphazardly arranged chunks of mystery meat -- is enough to ruin your appetite. Beyond having a years-long shelf life, the food thats engineered on Earth and schlepped into space has to be incredibly light and compact so as not to dramatically interfere with the weight and spatial requirements for launch, hence the reason nearly every meal and beverage in space comes from a flat pouch.

Finding a way to bring enough food to last a crew literally years is a whole different beast than the average space jaunt, which is why NASA is currently developing a variety of nutrient-dense 700-calorie food bars with multi-year shelf lives for the first Mars mission. To their credit, researchers are also considering how a steady diet of dull food bars would affect morale. Yet, if the ultimate goal is to build a habitat on Mars (and keep people sane and comfortable en route), the goal must not be to develop better, more efficient ways to bring pre-prepared food with us, but to find ways to safely and easily cultivate fresh food and drink inside a spacecraft and, ultimately, on the surface of an alien planet.

Growing food on Mars won't be that tough, right? According to Matt Damon's character Mark Watney in the The Martian, all youve got to do is fertilize some Martian soil with your own poop, wait a few weeks, and poof: potatoes! Thanks Hollywood, but its a hell of a lot more complicated than that.

According to Dr. Ray Wheeler, a lead researcher for the Advanced Life Support Research team at NASA whos spent much of his career exploring how to grow crops in deep-space, the best setup for growing fresh food on a spaceship (or elsewhere outside Earths atmosphere) is a hydroponic vertical farm -- essentially a mini-greenhouse decked out with a system of LED lights and tubes circulating nutrient-enriched water. While it's incredibly resource-efficient, it's also limiting in the types of vegetation you can easily grow (you better really like lettuce).

Farming on the surface of Mars would require a protected greenhouse-like environment that optimizes Mars' limited sunlight (it only gets 43% of what we do on Earth). Youll also be growing things there hydroponically, but that begs the question: Where the hell would one get enough water to sustain crops for an entire colony? In theory, we could just bring a bunch of H20 with us and perpetually recycle it, but tacking on heavy tanks of water to a ship for that kind of journey would be incredibly inefficient and remarkably expensive.

A couple of years ago, however, NASA confirmed evidence of water flows on the Martian surface; evidently, the planet's underground ice deposits hold as much water as Lake Superior. Wheelers team considers these discoveries a promising development, but acknowledges that the water will need to be heavily filtered in order to safely hydrate and nourish the plants we bring along. Depending on the eventual scale of the operation, it may be possible to graduate to growing things in actual Martian soil, but only if we figure out a system to remove a certain variety of salts it's known to contain that are highly toxic to humans.

While Wheelers team vetted the plant-growing system that astronauts utilized to successfully harvest lettuce on the International Space Station, which orbits relatively closely at 250 miles above Earths surface, its still unknown how the conditions of deep space might affect botanic life. To that end, these deep-space growing scenarios would only be tenable provided the intergalactic radiation hitting the spaceship and Mars surface doesnt kill or mutate crops in ways that would make everyone sick.

T hough NASA is meal-planning Mars trips and investigating deep-space food solutions, it's understandably less focused on providing a Mars-bound crew with great food than it is with, well, getting them there in the first place. Its ever-slimming budget will soon be going to actually building the rockets, landers, and technology that will bring humans to the Red Planet. And even the future of the International Space Station -- where critical food and crop research is done -- is uncertain beyond 2024, when NASA plans to quit funding it and fully dedicate its resources to its Journey to Mars. Mostly made up of proving ground missions (orbiting the moon and an attempt to redirect an asteroid, among others), this project is meant to test the viability of a longer-duration mission while still remaining in relative proximity to Earth, where a crew could more easily be rescued should equipment or other issues arise. However, the defunding of the ISS may ultimately not lead to the demise of the quest for decent food in space: The government is banking on the commercial sector stepping in to finance the ISS going forward, and companies like Space X and Blue Origin will exploit the existing infrastructure to test their various vehicles and projects.

The hope is that once a handful of companies realize the value in being futurist pioneers, the opportunity will attract others -- including food and drink brands -- to develop better-tasting food that's equipped for space travel, thus pouring money into game-changing research. This proposal is looking more and more promising in light of the recent news that Jeff Bezos will be investing $1 billion into Blue Origin every year with the ultimate goal of making spaceflight inexpensive enough to unleash a new age of entrepreneurship outside Earths atmosphere.

The agency thats been set up to facilitate the ISS transition -- the Center for the Advancement of Science in Space (CASIS) -- has already provided station access for a wide variety of academic and commercial research (think medical trials and hardware tests for the tech industry), and has signaled that it's interested in getting food and drink brands on board, too. In fact, it's recently partnered with Budweiser, which announced an ambitious plan to be the first beer on Mars during this year's SXSW. Its not the first commercial food or drink brand thats teamed up with a space organization to get its product up there (for instance, astronauts tested a Coca-Cola Space Can on the Space Shuttle Challenger in 1985, and Heinz products have long been a part of the standard condiment kit stocked by the ISS), but Budweisers seemingly unconventional partnership marks a first for a major food or drink brand in that the intent is to better understand how its product can be made in space.

Obviously, brewing beer on Mars isnt a high priority in the scheme of things, but the project embodies the opportunities and challenges involved in figuring out how we can integrate the creature comforts that astronaut Anderson considers supremely important on future missions. For one, its a major consumer brand -- one with an annual revenue of $15 billion -- indicating to other major consumer brands that investing in space food and drink research is worthwhile, despite Martian colonization seeming an intangible feat to most of us at this moment. As Val Toothman, Budweisers VP of Marketing Innovation put it: "When we colonize Mars as a human race, we know that people arent just going to be living the bare-bones existence. Theyll want to be able to come home, watch TV, and drink an ice-cold Bud at the end of the day.

Its also entirely plausible that Budweiser's in-space testing -- or any other big brand that partners with CASIS going forward -- leads to improvement of the product down here on Earth. Coca-Cola figured out how to better its consumer packaging by testing a special system for dispensing carbonated beverages in space. If sending the specific barley malt and yeast used in Budweisers recipe into space -- an experiment that's actively being planned -- helps the company develop more hearty or disease-resistant strains of the stuff to grow here, that would likely set off a trend where the Krafts, Campbells, and General Mills of the world start seeing concrete value in testing their products there, and, way down the line, developing space versions of their most popular items to be enjoyed by astronauts and interplanetary tourists alike.

Ensuring a food item or beverage tastes the same in space as it does on Earth actually poses quite a challenge because the body encounters something known as a fluid shift once it leaves the atmosphere and enters microgravity. This not only affects how ones blood flows and causes things like face puffiness, it also messes with sinuses and changes how and what a person can taste. That can mean heightening flavors so they pop as they would on Earth. As Anderson explained, Sometimes astronauts like to have very spicy food, like shrimp cocktail in red sauce. Or they add Tabasco or spicy things like horseradish to their food to make them more presentable to their palate.

This means brands are tasked with figuring out how to make a Bud taste like a Bud or Campbells Tomato Soup taste like Campbells Tomato Soup, and not a diluted or entirely different version.

These may seem like trivial issues to be considering when we're still in a place where public perception of colonizing a new planet seems outlandish, but why not start now when it's a bridge we'll have to cross eventually? These potential partnerships with the ISS will usher in the next phase in the long slog to get humans on Mars. As Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, our own government (the current White House aside), and many other thought leaders of futurism agree, were at the dawn of a new era, where the hot new entrepreneurial trend will be conducting the R&D for the technology necessary to make those jam-packed space cruises -- filled with men, women, and children sent to colonize our next planet -- feel like home.

Sign up here for our daily Thrillist email and subscribe here for our YouTube channelto get your fix of the best in food/drink/fun.

Joe McGauley is a senior writer for Thrillist whos skeptical space jam could ever be as good as Space Jam.

Originally posted here:
Why Colonizing Mars Depends on Making Food Taste Better in Space - Thrillist

What will the first president of Mars look like? It may not be an alien who wins the inaugural Martian democratic election, but it still could be a person who looks nothing like the humans on Earth.

Although we are still quite a bit away from a full-blown space colony on Mars, not to mention one that becomes an independent nation, space exploration is moving in the colonizationdirection. There are plenty of viable options for a space habitat, including Earths moon and temperate planets in other solar systems, but Mars is usually the main focus of such discussions. And once we are there, its possible the colonists will evolve into a new race of humans, no matter the skin color or other physical characteristics of the pioneers who first settle the Red Planet, scientists say.

Read: Stephen Hawking Says If We Dont Leave Earth Now, Were All Gonna Die

It could take hundreds of thousands or even millions of years for a new species of human to descend from the modern humans we know and love today. But smaller and sometimes superficial changes within the same species, like in the size of a nose, may not take as long to emerge and become dominant. In an interview with International Business Times, John Hawks, an anthropologist and professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said our species has adapted quickly to the diverse environments throughout the world where we live, and he noted that human skin pigmentations have emerged in the last 20,000 years or so.

On Mars, or in another space colony, with an isolated human society, physical characteristics might change randomly as the settlers procreate. But if they can mate with whom they want, it could be that a cultural preference emerges, Hawks said from South Africa, where he is investigating the fossils of a recently discovered extinct human relative, Homo naledi.

A future human space colony, like one on Mars, would live in such a drastically different environment from what can be found on Earth that the settlers evolve into a new race of people. Photo: NASA

Cultural preferences probably played a role in a lot of the different physical features, like varying face shapes, we see in people today, Hawks said. Given enough generations to make babies, the space colonists could end up looking weird and whether theyre weird [to us] or not is a cultural standard for us.

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk is leading the way when it comes to humans touching down on Mars and eventually establishing a colony. The company made history and a huge stride toward sustainable space travel when it successfully landed its Falcon 9 rocket vertically, allowing it to be reusedon future missions. But space agencies around the world are also doing work toward that goal. NASA, for example, has done experiments on farming in microgravityaboard the International Space Station.

Apart from Mars colonists developing their own culture and standards of physical beauty, the different environment could also play a role in the physical features that become dominant in a colony and possibly lead to a new race of humans. Evolutionary biologist Scott Solomon, a professor at Rice University, told IBT that in theory, any trait giving Mars explorers an edge over their compatriots would spread in such an alien environment.

Evolution would proceed more quickly because natural selection will really favor any advantages that some individuals might have, he said.

Read: China Starts Fake Lunar Space Colony

Skin color is just one example of a trait that could prove beneficial.

Mars has a thin atmosphere, meaning radiation from the sun hits harder than it would on Earth, which is protected by its atmospheric cocoon. Without that first line of defense, the skin pigment that helps us on Earth could be even more important on Mars. Solomon, who has written a book called Future Humans about how Earthlings might evolve, said it'sconceivable that on Mars there would be even stronger selection for darker pigmentation and skin color, or for humans to evolve to use different kinds of pigmentation in their skin for more protection from the suns rays.

The speed with which a new skin color emerges would vary depending on just how advantageous it is to have that pigmentation in a Martian environment. If the difference is huge, Solomon said, in relatively few generations, thats going to become a really common trait.

Evolution could occur quickly because the radiation from the sun on the unprotected Mars surface could exponentially increase the number of genetic mutations of each new generation. Stay tuned for more on the Mars mutants we can expect to create.

Link:
Colonies On Mars: How Human Faces Will Evolve On The Red Planet - International Business Times

Mars is proving to be both a mystery and an inspiration for mankind, and recent satellite imagery of the Red Planet and Earth shows the two celestial bodies may have more in common than previously thought.

Any human colonization of Mars would center around the discovery or creation of water sources. Humans need great quantities of H2O to survive, and studying the geology of Mars may unlock clues to long-standing mysteries surrounding the Red Planet.

This image, captured by NASAs Operational Land Imager (OLI) on Landsat 8, shows Shiprock in New Mexico on April 12, 2017. It is a 30 million-year-old volcanic formation that reaches almost 500 meters (1,620ft) into the sky.

Researchers believe it originally formed between 750 and 1,000 meters below the surface before violent hydrovolcanic activity blasted it forth like a huge ship cresting a wave in a stormy sea of molten rock.

Hydrovolcanic activity occurs when molten hot magma encounters large bodies of groundwater. The water vaporizes upon contact with the magma creating immense pressure that eventually creates stunning natural skyscrapers such as Shiprock.

When lava seeped down from the initial rock formation onto older rock below, it created what are known as radial dikes, the large vertical walls seen spreading out from the central volcanic neck.

The intricate polygon structures observed on the surface of Mars are believed to have formed in much the same way.

The features on Mars could be intrusive dikes like Shiprock, said Laszlo Kestay, director of the Astrogeology Science Center for the US Geological Survey, as cited by NASAs Earth Observatory blog.

The region has plenty of volcanism and the Medusae Fossae Formation is easily eroded, making it a good host-rock for such features, he added.

Scientists are divided on what the trigger mechanism for the Medusae Fossae may have been, however. Some have suggested that a meteorite may have hit an aquifer below the surface, while others believe a pyroclastic flow from a nearby volcanic eruption could have been responsible for the intricate polygon walls.

This image of the Gordii Dorsum section of the Medusae Fossae was captured by the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera on NASAs Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter on April 9, 2010.

For Shiprock, it is the classic location to show what is going on under the vents for a volcano, Kestay said.

To date, there have been no major studies conducted specifically to compare and contrast the two formations, but such a study could yield more answers about Mars past and, particularly, shed light on what could have happened to water that may have existed both on and below the surface.

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Mars or New Mexico? Razor-like vertical rock formations are eerily ... - RT

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'Surviving Mars' is a city-building sim for science-fiction enthusiasts - Digital Trends

Astronaut Buzz Aldrin said in a speech that NASA should retire the International Space Station or privatize it in order to focus on attempts to put humans on Mars.

We must retire the ISS as soon as possible, said Aldrin, who traveled with Apollo 11 and walked on the moon, Space.com reported. We simply cannot afford $3.5 billion a year of that cost. Aldrin spoke on Tuesday at the 2017 Humans to Mars conference in Washington, D.C.

Low Earth orbit stations like the ISS should be built, staffed, and administered by local companies like Bigelow Aerospace or Axiom Space, Aldrin continued, Space.com reported. NASA has already used companies like SpaceX, Orbital ATK, and Boeing to move equipment and passengers to and from the ISS.

Its a matter of cost to Aldrin, who would rather see NASA spend its limited funding on human colonization of Mars than on low Earth orbit activities, PC Magazine reported.

Aldrins vision for Mars colonization involves first setting up a lunar outpost where technologies can be tested and developed before sending the first crew to Mars in the 2030s.

According to PC Magazine, however, the ISS is funded by NASA through 2024 and provides a place for astronauts to perform experiments, test equipment, and find out what happens to humans who spend extended time in space.

Those Twitter users who had an opinion tended to agree with Aldrin.

2017 Newsmax. All rights reserved.

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Buzz Aldrin to NASA: Dump International Space Station; Focus on Mars - Newsmax

NASA and its partner agencies should retire the International Space Station and focus on getting astronauts to Mars instead, Apollo 11 moonwalker Buzz Aldrin said.

If NASA and its partner agencies are serious about putting boots on Mars in the near future, they should pull the plug on the International Space Station (ISS) at the earliest opportunity, Buzz Aldrin said.

"We must retire the ISS as soon as possible," the former Apollo 11 moonwalker said Tuesday (May 9) during a presentation at the 2017 Humans to Mars conference in Washington, D.C. "We simply cannot afford $3.5 billion a year of that cost."

Instead, Aldrin said, NASA should continue to hand over activities in low Earth orbit (LEO) to private industry partners. Indeed, the space agency has been encouraging that move by awarding contracts to companies such as SpaceX, Orbital ATK and Boeing to ferry cargo and crew to and from the ISS. [Buzz Aldrin's Visions for Mars (Video)]

Bigelow Aerospace,Axiom Spaceor other companies should build and operate LEO space stations that are independent of the ISS, he added. Ideally, the first of these commercial outposts would share key orbital parameters with the station that China plans to have up and running by the early 2020s, to encourage cooperation with the Chinese, Aldrin said.

Establishing private outposts in LEO is just the first step in Aldrin's plan for Mars colonization, which depends heavily on "cyclers" spacecraft that move continuously between two cosmic destinations, efficiently delivering people and cargo back and forth.

"The foundation of human transportation is the cycler," the 87-year-old former astronaut said. "Very rugged, so it'll last 30 years or so; no external moving parts."

Step two involves the international spaceflight community coming together to build cyclers that ply cislunar space, taking people on trips to the moon and back. Such spacecraft, and the activities they enable, would allow the construction of a crewed lunar base, where humanity could learn and test the techniques required for Mars colonization, such as how to manufacture propellant from local resources, Aldrin said.

Then would come Earth-Mars cyclers, which Aldrin described as "an evolutionary development" of the prior cyclers.

Aldrin foresees these various cycler iterations enabling a crewed mission to a near-Earth asteroid by 2020 and a Venus flyby by 2024. If all goes well, the first future Mars settlers could launch in the early 2030s, he said.

And they will be settlers, not just visitors, if Aldrin's vision comes to pass.

"Let's be certain that we've developed a sustainable plan to stay on Mars," he said. "No flags and footprints this time."

The ISS is currently funded through 2024, and officials of NASA, the Russian federal space agency and other partners have floated the possibility of extending the $100 billion outpost's life through 2028. NASA officials have repeatedly said that the ISS is a key part of the agency's "Journey to Mars" vision, which aims to get astronauts to the vicinity of the Red Planet sometime in the 2030s.

Follow Mike Wall on Twitter@michaeldwallandGoogle+.Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebookor Google+. Originally published onSpace.com.

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Buzz Aldrin to NASA: Retire the International Space Station ASAP to Reach Mars - Space.com