NASA Says It Won’t Follow the Prime Directive When Exploring Other Planets – Outer Places

With films likeTheMars Generation hyping up human exploration of the Red Planet and Elon Musk planning the newSpaceX Martian Palace Complex and Hotel (not really), the sci-fi dream of humans colonizing other planets is almost a reality. This panel at Silicon Valley Comic-Con, titled Journey to Mars,brought together a group ofNASA experts, including an astrobiologistand terraforming specialist,to give an idea of what settling Mars will look like.

Life on Mars?

An interesting topic that was brought up during the panel was the fact that instead of engineeringnew microbes or lifeforms (like algae or moss) to help terraform Mars, it might actually be easier to change Mars' atmosphere so that we can transplant extremophile life from Earth, especially the kinds that thrive in mountainous environments. Either way, UV radiation is one of the biggest issues for surface-level life.

The Biggest Challenges for Exploring Mars

Oneof the biggest challenges facing Mars exploration and colonization by humans (rather than Valkyrie robots or Terminators) is just communication. As the panelists explained, the distance between Earth and other planets change as they move through their orbits, meaning that keeping the signal strong is a problem. The other issue with communication is comm delayby the panelists' estimation, there's about a 22-minute delay both ways when transmissions are sent to and from Mars. When humans are on the surface, asking Mission Control to advise, that delay just isn't feasible, leaving NASA with a choice: give their explorers more freedom to act on their own, without direction, or find a faster way to communicate.

What it Would Take to Terraform Mars

With that, discussion moved to Elon Musk, who recently advocated for (potentially) nuking the Martian atmosphere in order to start warming it up and making it more habitable. One panelist admitted that Musk "has moved us closer to Mars psychologically than anything in the past 20 years," but says nuking the Martian atmosphere is a bad idea: according to NASA's estimation, detonating the combined nuclear arsenal of the U.S., former Soviet Union, and (jokingly) North Korea, it would add up to about 4 hours of Martian sunlight.

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NASA Says It Won't Follow the Prime Directive When Exploring Other Planets - Outer Places