Sir Edmund Hillary, Jacques Cousteau, Neil Armstrong: all explorers of new worlds.

Exploration appears to be in the human blood stream. We, as a species, do not completely explore one world before setting our sights on yet another. As our ancestors sailed across oceans, they wondered what lied beneath the waves.

They navigated using the stars, once again wondering if we would ever reach them. And it seems as humans, we set our sights higher and higher. We have begun exploring the deepest oceans, scaled the peaks of Mount Everest, and even set foot on the moon.

Though we have not even begun to understand what these new worlds hold for us; we continue to set our sights even higher. This time it is planet Mars colonizing.

However, in the case of Mars, simply getting there will not be enough. Those who wish to explore the “Red Planet” will have to live there; a monumental task.

What will it take to explore a planet that is 33,864,730 miles (1) away from Earth at its closest distance? Well for one thing, it will take money; and lots of it. According to the Mars Society, a non-profit organization whose purpose is to explore and settle the planet, it will take about $30 billion to send one person to Mars.

This is a conservative number, because it does not include the actual planet Mars colonizing, just the travel costs.









How Planet Mars Colonizing Will Work

Also, this figure is based on their Mars Direct Program. The Mars Society describes the program as:

“A sustained humans-to-Mars plan developed by Dr. Robert Zubrin that advocates a minimalist, live-off-the-land approach to exploring the planet Mars, allowing for maximum results with minimum investment.”

Just as the American pioneers travelled west in their covered wagons, living off the land; the Mars Direct program proposes that the first Martian explorers will live in a series of habitat modules that could be linked together. Other modules will be sent to produce fuel, extract water, and produce ores.

You can read the full Mars Direct Scenario Report yourself.

However, living a Martian life in tiny modules is not ideal for many Mars enthusiasts. They believe long term exploration and colonizing can only be achieved through terraforming. A clear supporter of Martian terraforming is the Academy for Future Science (AFFS), an organization that focuses on “building a new scientific civilization with a positive future in the Twenty-First Century.”

An AFFS article written by D. M. Hurtak, contends that terraforming is a practical solution towards colonization. The first step to terraforming Mars is to warm the planet by introducing CO2; something that it seems that we have done fairly well on this planet.

However the AFFS contends that: