Pros And Cons Of Living In A Mars Colony Vs. Living Space Station

792 Words2 Pages

Carina Salcedo
1339611
ESS 102 A
Living in a Mars Colony vs Living Space Station My science fiction paper will be set in the not too distant future. Pollution and global warming have made Earth nearly uninhabitable and humanity needs a new home. While many look to Mars as the best hope, others feel it poses too many challenges and that humanity needs more than one chance at a new start. These people are building a large space station in orbit around Earth intended for . A small crew is sent out to set up a colony on another planet. The major topics of research will be space habitability and the effects of long term space flight. There are many challenges to setting up a colony on Mars. Humans are not built to live on a planet where the average temperature is -67 °F and the air is unbreathable (Williams, 2015). It may be possible to build a shelter to protect potential colonists from these dangers, but the technology that would be used to make a self …show more content…

But there is hope that artificial gravity could reduce or even eliminate many of these issues. To keep astronaut’s feet on the floor, a space wheel-shaped station could be spun like a top. This spinning would create centripetal force, pulling anything inside the space station toward the outer edge of the wheel (Hollingham, 2014). With an artificial source of gravity, the human body would function more normally. Muscle loss would be a problem of the past because astronauts would need to use their muscles to move around the same way they do on Earth (Hollingham, 2014). Health issues related to circulation of the blood would also be reduced. Because the human body evolved to function in Earth’s gravity, our circulatory systems expect our blood pressure to be slightly different at various points in the body (Hollingham, 2014). In microgravity, this is not the

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