The plans for the colonization of Mars will require significant sacrifices from the first colonists - a complete refusal of procreation and any intimate relationships. After all, oddly enough, the survival of the entire team will depend on this, according to an article published in the Futures magazine.
“Of course, the existence of autonomous colonies on Mars will be impossible without the very possibility of procreation. However, trying to do this will lead to a host of almost insoluble problems,”write Rafael Márquez of the National Biosciences Laboratory in Campinas, Brazil and his colleagues.
Experts in various space fields are confident that the colonization of the solar system will begin within the next 20 years. The starting point for this will be the Moon and Mars. In 2016, Elon Musk, the head of SpaceX, told the world about his ambitious plans to colonize Mars, in which he plans to create a super-heavy rocket and a fleet of thousands of reusable interplanetary ships that will bring about a million people to Mars by the end of the century.
The main goal of this whole process, in defining the Mask himself, is the creation of an independent from the Earth and an autonomous city with a population of one million on Mars, which will provide itself with everything necessary for life and will be a full-fledged society, not inferior to communities of people on Earth.
Marquez and his colleagues pondered how this is possible in modern realities, considering not only the possible technological obstacles to the colonization of Mars, but also the biological consequences of life on another planet.
High radiation levels are considered to be one of the main obstacles to manned missions to Mars. Five years ago, data from the autonomous Martian laboratory "Curiosity", collected during a flight to the Red Planet, showed that while traveling, a person can receive a dose of radiation comparable to a lethal one. Later it turned out that the level of irradiation of the surface of Mars was almost the same as in space.
The authors of the article agree with the conclusions of previous studies and say that radiation will be the main enemy of the first Martian colonists. Despite the potential protection of the colonies themselves from ionizing radiation, it will prevent the first inhabitants of Mars from extracting resources, studying the planet and carrying out virtually any activity on the Red Planet.
Particularly strong radiation and the lack of the usual gravity on Mars will affect the lives of pregnant women, whose immune system is already in a suppressed state during gestation. This dangerous combination can simultaneously contribute to both the appearance of developmental defects in the baby and increase the chances of getting cancer or dying from infections for the mother.
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This problem will be superimposed on another important aspect of life on the Red Planet - a very large limited resources. Unlike the Earth, the inhabitants of the Martian colony simply cannot afford to be absolutely humane and support the life of terminally ill people or children with birth defects.
“The humanistic idea that human life is the highest value will not work on Mars. Unfavorable living conditions and the small size of the colonists' population will make the interests of the collective more priority than the well-being or the life of individual individuals,”the scientists report.
Life on Mars could force the colony authorities to introduce a system of compulsory genetic tests, with the help of which the ability of certain couples to give healthy offspring will be assessed. It is quite possible that in some cases the collective will completely prohibit carriers of especially unfavorable mutations from continuing their race and entering into relationships with the opposite sex.
This problem, the researchers believe, will be able to be solved only after the issue of the required level of protection against radiation is resolved. This can be achieved both with the help of technology, covering the entire planet with a radiation shield, and modifying the colonists' DNA, making them more resistant to the action of cosmic rays and high-energy photons. After these tasks are solved, humanity will be able to become a completely "interplanetary species", as Elon Musk and the late Stephen Hawking dreamed about, the authors of the article conclude.
Nikolay Khizhnyak
