Fancy a holiday on Mars?

by Sarah Jane

It’s named after a chocolate bar, which has got to be a point in its favor. 

But even if it really was a whole world of caramel, chocolate and nougat, I’m not sure I’d want to holiday on Mars.

Why am I even thinking about this? Because it may not be too long before the 136-million-mile trip is possible, according to scientists. In 2001, Daniel Golden, the director of NASA, told the National Geographic: “In our lifetimes, we will extend the reach of the human species onto other planets.” So in 10 years or so, are we all going to be swapping our annual two weeks in Benidorm for a fortnight’s self-catering on the red planet? 

Well, you’d have to have a lot of annual leave owing, for a start. Using the rockets we have today, a trip to Mars would take six months – and would require an enormous amount of fuel, so much that the rocket wouldn’t be able to carry enough for the journey home. Annoying if you realise halfway there that you’ve forgotten your passport. Plasma engines, which use super-heated gas as fuel, would be quicker and safer, but are still being developed.

And making such a long trip – Mars can be up to 500 times further from Earth than the moon, depending on its orbit – would cause huge health problems. We’re not talking getting a bit dehydrated because you don’t want to use the toilet on the train. You’d be weightless for the entire mission, causing your heart, muscles and bones to degenerate. Unless you adopted a punishing exercise regime, your heart would probably be too weak to pump blood when you got back to Earth and its gravity. A holiday to die for – literally. 

You would also be exposed to a huge amount of radiation in space, without the protection of the Earth’s atmosphere. NASA said four years ago that a healthy 40-year-old non-smoking American man had a 20 per cent chance of dying from cancer, but that if he took a trip to Mars, that figure would probably increase to about 23.4 per cent, and could rise to as much as 39 per cent. For a woman, thanks to the fact that she has breasts and ovaries, the risk would be even higher.

As Frank Cucinotta, from NASA’s Space Radiation Health Project, put it: “We can’t yet estimate, reliably, what cosmic rays will do to us when we’re exposed for so long.”

All this and you haven’t even got there yet. And frankly, Mars doesn’t sound like a very welcoming destination. Its atmosphere is 95 per cent carbon dioxide, and less than 0.5 per cent oxygen. There is ice, but water cannot exist in liquid form due to the low atmospheric pressure. The surface temperature varies from a pleasantly warm 20 degrees C to a terrifying -140 degrees C during the polar winters. Mars’ gravity is about 38 per cent as strong as Earth’s. In other words, the question isn’t whether you could survive there without artificial assistance, it’s whether the suffocating atmosphere, the debilitating cold or raging dehydration would kill you first. And even if you did have an oxygen tank, a bodywarmer and a bottle of Evian, Mars’ year is 1.88 times as long as Earth’s, so you’d only get half as many birthdays as you do here.

Despite the insupportable conditions, however, scientists have not ruled out the possibility that life could or did exist on Mars. The Viking probes of the 1970s carried experiments designed to detect microorganisms in Martian soil, and some had apparently positive results. However, these were later disputed, and the debate continues today. Scientists have even considered the possibility of terraforming the planet – altering its climate and surface to make it habitable by humans and other species – a possible solution to the problems of population growth and demand for resources. CFCs, which are greenhouse gases, and special mirrors could be inserted into the atmosphere to make the planet warmer, and algae and plants could be brought in to produce oxygen. 

But for now, if I want a freezing cold holiday destination, I’ll stick to the family home in the north east of England. At least you can buy real chocolate there.

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