{"id":14276,"date":"2025-09-26T08:00:00","date_gmt":"2025-09-26T06:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/haimagazine.com\/uncategorized\/mars-is-a-paradise-but-only-for-robots\/"},"modified":"2025-09-29T13:02:16","modified_gmt":"2025-09-29T11:02:16","slug":"mars-is-a-paradise-but-only-for-robots","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/haimagazine.com\/en\/ai-lifestyle-2\/mars-is-a-paradise-but-only-for-robots\/","title":{"rendered":"\ud83d\udd12 Mars is a paradise, but only for robots"},"content":{"rendered":"

This material was created in collaboration with Nowa Fantastyka.<\/em><\/p>

But let’s not sweat the details \u2014 after all, Mars is only 140 million miles away.<\/p>

Let’s start with the fun stuff. The average temperature on Mars is minus 63 degrees Celsius. In Gale Crater, where the Curiosity rover has been recording data since 2012, temperatures range from -90\u00b0C at night to a full 16\u00b0C at noon \u2014 at the surface, because just a yard higher it’s only zero. It’s like living in a freezer with brief breaks to catch your breath in a fridge. According to NASA studies from 2021, just maintaining a habitat for four people would require a nuclear reactor with a power of 40 kilowatts. For comparison, the average household uses about 2.5 kilowatts.<\/p>

There’s an atmosphere on Mars, but it’s mostly for show. The pressure is only 0.6% of Earth’s, and what’s worse, Mars is losing 100 grams of atmosphere per second. At such low pressure, water boils at just above freezing, so your blood would literally boil in your veins (more precisely, it would lead to ebullism \u2014 you don’t want to know). Even if we somehow created an atmosphere, it would keep escaping just as fast, like from a punctured balloon.<\/p>

A spacesuit? Sure, but each time you go out, there’s a risk, say a critical suit failure. Radiation is a joy all its own. Without a magnetic field and with an atmosphere as thin as dreams of affordable housing, you’d receive a daily radiation dose on Mars that’s 100 times greater than on Earth. After a year on Mars, you’d absorb a dose that, according to NASA, increases your cancer risk by 5%. Of course, you could sit at the bottom of a mine to minimize it, but in that case it would be easier to wait until we stop subsidizing unprofitable coal and turn the mines into escape rooms.<\/p>

Oh, the soil! It contains perchlorates at a concentration of 0.5-1%. These compounds are so toxic that, according to 2022 experiments by the University of Edinburgh, they kill bacteria in 60 seconds. Want to grow potatoes like the main character in “The Martian”? You’ll first need to rinse out all the soil. That’s if you can find enough water, which is hardly available there in liquid form.<\/p>

Transport? According to SpaceX, a one-way trip will cost a few hundred thousand dollars. Pretty optimistic, since that’s about the price of a small apartment in Warsaw. Realistically, according to a NASA analysis from 2023, the cost of sending one person today is several orders of magnitude higher, though it’s expected to decrease with scale. Nevertheless, for the price of a settlement for a thousand people on Mars, we could save the entire Amazon ten times over, and the cost of just the first mission to Mars is estimated at half a TRILLION dollars.<\/p>

Terraforming? According to a 2018 Nature Astronomy study, even if we released all the CO2 from the poles of Mars, the pressure would only rise to… 1.2% of Earth’s. Some dream of melting the poles with nuclear bombs, but we’d need about 3500 a day for a good few weeks.<\/p>

Mars is fascinating and we should explore it. Science bases? Absolutely. Helium-3 mines? Maybe someday. But a “backup Earth”? We’ll learn to live at the bottom of the ocean or in Antarctica sooner \u2014 at least there’s oxygen there, normal gravity, and no deadly radiation. Instead of spending trillions to help a handful of millionaires escape to a dead planet, shouldn\u2019t we take better care of the only one that actually keeps us alive? After all, as environmentalists say, “There’s no Planet B.” And Mars? At best, it’s a Planet F minus.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Elon Musk promises a million people on Mars by 2050. Meanwhile, NASA is struggling to keep seven people on the International Space Station, which is just 250 miles above our heads.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":247,"featured_media":14208,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"rank_math_lock_modified_date":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[799],"tags":[],"popular":[],"difficulty-level":[36],"ppma_author":[614],"class_list":["post-14276","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-ai-lifestyle-2","difficulty-level-easy"],"acf":[],"authors":[{"term_id":614,"user_id":247,"is_guest":0,"slug":"prof-dr-hab-dariusz-jemielniak","display_name":"prof. dr hab. Dariusz Jemielniak","avatar_url":{"url":"https:\/\/haimagazine.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/03\/maxresdefault-1-e1742292469999.jpg","url2x":"https:\/\/haimagazine.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/03\/maxresdefault-1-e1742292469999.jpg"},"first_name":"Dariusz","last_name":"Jemielniak","user_url":"","job_title":"","description":"Profesor zarz\u0105dzania Akademii Leona Ko\u017ami\u0144skiego, gdzie kieruje katedr\u0105 MINDS (Management in Networked and Digital Societies). Pracuje te\u017c jako faculty associate w Berkman-Klein Center for Internet and Society na Harvardzie. Wiceprezes Polskiej Akademii Nauk. Cz\u0142onek Rady Programowej CampusAI."}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/haimagazine.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14276","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/haimagazine.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/haimagazine.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/haimagazine.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/247"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/haimagazine.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14276"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/haimagazine.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14276\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14277,"href":"https:\/\/haimagazine.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14276\/revisions\/14277"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/haimagazine.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/14208"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/haimagazine.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14276"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/haimagazine.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14276"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/haimagazine.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14276"},{"taxonomy":"popular","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/haimagazine.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/popular?post=14276"},{"taxonomy":"difficulty-level","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/haimagazine.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/difficulty-level?post=14276"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/haimagazine.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/ppma_author?post=14276"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}