Martian Dawn

Part 2, Chapter 11: Ask A Martian--The Population Bomb

First aired in December 2052:

Scene: Dawn's quarters, with the laptop sitting open on top of her otherwise pristine desk. Dawn, now fourteen years old, strides purposefully into the room and sits down at the desk, radiating a sense of purpose.

DAWN: Hello friends from Earth! Today our entire segment is going to be dedicated to a single letter. Maria Cervantes-Mendoza from La Escuela Publica de Yoro, Yoro, Honduras writes, "How many people could move to Mars? Do you think maybe enough people could move to Mars that Earth wouldn't be so crowded any more?"

Maria, I am so glad you asked this question, because it's been on my mind a lot, recently. You may have heard about the construction of the Aguila, the ship being built by Roberto Serrano-Aguilar that is supposed to carry one hundred people to Mars in 2055. That's actually almost three times as many people as there are on Mars now, so it's a big deal to us, and we are scrambling to get ready for their arrival.

Would you believe me if I told you that Mars has way more of a population problem than Earth does? Let's look at the facts.

(Dawn reaches under her desk and puts two globes side by side on her desk, one of Earth and one of Mars. She indicates the globe of Earth.)

Let's look at Earth first.

(Scenes of different Earthly biomes flash across the screen, including farm fields, rain forests, and lake shores.)

Earth has air, water, a perfect temperature balance (global warming notwithstanding), a planetary radiation shield, and millions of species of living things. Earth has a population of 9.7 billion humans, which is a heck of lot of people. I can't even visualize that many people. On the other hand, the population of Earth is not growing that fast anymore. Current population growth projections estimate that it would take four hundred years for the population of the Earth to double again. And that's the high estimates. The low estimates say Earth will never double again, and may even level off before 2100.

Compare that to Mars, which has already doubled in population in my lifetime.

But Dawn, you say, look at the big picture: Even if Earth's population never doubles again, we may already be beyond our carrying capacity. Meanwhile, Mars has the same land surface as Earth, and there are only 35 people there. Surely there's room on Mars for a few billion people!

Well, what is true, is, we do have a lot of open space, here on Mars. I know that's part of why my mom and dad came here. They dreamed of exploring all that empty land, always seeing new things, being the first to ever see them and never, in my mom's words: "having to come home and go through all the old mail."

The problem is, Mars has no air, no surface water, winter time temperatures a hundred below zero C, and is completely unprotected from space radiation.

(Images of the barren, rusty surface of Mars flash across the screen, dust flying in the wind, contrasting sharply with the earlier lush images of Earth.)

Imagine how disappointed my mom and dad were to realize that they'd spend most of the next ten years of their lives in a cave, staring at computer screen that show them all that empty space they thought they'd be roaming! Sure, we have solar buggies here, but they can only carry supplies for about two hundred kilometers, and then you have to return to base. So, I hate to burst anybody's bubble here, but the Mars colonists are the most stay-at-home people you will ever meet.

Now, of course, we have the Terra Aurora Experimental Ecology dome, so that's 180 hectares of breathable air, warm temperatures, surface water running in a creek down the middle of the canyon, and an expanding ecology similar to the Arctic biome on Earth.

(Images of lichen-covered rocks, bunch grasses, dwarf willow near the water.)

The lower half of the canyon even has protection from the Solar Wind, in the form of an electromagnetic field arching over the dome.

(Camera pans out. Animation makes the EM field visible over the clear, inflated tunnel covering the Terra Aurora canyon.)

How many people could live there, you ask? Well, we're going to find out, because Terra Aurora is the initial destination of the one hundred immigrants aboard the Aguila. We're pretty busy putting up housing.

(Scene shows robotic rovers digging a pit into the canyon walls, and then cut to a scene of colonists in shirt sleeves and inflating an expandable activity module--high tech canvas with plastic windows, and an inflatable airlock for a front door.)

Twelve people will live in each of these inflatable habitats. Each of these habitats is in the lower half of the canyon, under the EM radiation shield, so it's the safest place we could put them. Almost Earthlike, right?

Now I guess your next question is, how many of these expandable modules can we fit in Terra Aurora, but that's the wrong question to ask, because space is not limiting. Food and water are!

(Cut to a scene of one of the greenhouse domes, showing row upon row of crops on tables, with mist lines overhead. Cut to a second scene of a hydroponics dome, where unidentified green something grows in horizontal and vertical tubes throughout the space.)

These are where all the food eaten by the Mars Colonists is grown. Currently, we have the capacity to grow enough food for fifty-five people, which, if our population had continued to grow by four astronauts every twenty six months would have put us about twelve years ahead of the curve. Instead, we have a hundred people scheduled to arrive in three years, so we are scrambling to build up this capacity before they arrive. We need to build two times more farm capacity than we already have.

(Cut to a scene of a large area being cleared by rover-bulldozer in preparation for a new building.)

Water is our eventual limitation. The Terra Aurora well is in the upper canyon. We feel fairly safe pumping at three times the rate we are now, because we're tapping a large aquifer under the tableland above us. However, that water is absolutely unrenewable. It was deposited there over 3.8 billion years ago, when Mars had a heavier atmosphere and warmer temperatures than it does now.

Let me say that again, because it blows my mind: all the groundwater on Mars is 3.8 billion years ago. That's as old as life on Earth.

There is virtually no water cycle on Mars anymore, so we recover, recycle and reuse 98% of the water we draw out. The 2% we currently lose is a precious resource that may eventually doom Terra Aurora if we can't figure out a way to get it back. That means wastewater recovery facilities also need to be expanded to fit the new people.

What about beyond the dome? Could we build new Terra Aurora style domes? The answer is yes, and we fully intend to. In fact, a major objective of the Aguila crew's mission will be to establish a series travel stations that allow humans to travel safely more than a hundred klicks from Terra Aurora. They'll be looking to put up new domes, prospect for new resources, and make way for the Aguila to cycle back around again for years later in 2059 with another hundred passengers. The thing we learned from building Terra Aurora, though, is that it takes about fourteen years to establish a breathable atmosphere inside an ecological dome like ours. The soil is still, to this day, off-gassing chlorine from the addition of liquid water, and is expected to continue doing so for about one more year.

So, to get back to the original question: how many people could live on Mars? Eventually, maybe a lot. We just don't know. All of us here dream of a warm, fertile Mars with plenty of happy, friendly, healthy people. In the short term, however, the population of Mars is quite limited and is already growing just as fast as it possibly can. We're going to quadruple in population three years from now, and after that, we just don't know. There are rumors that other private aerospace companies are building their own century ships, but compared to the population of the Earth, well... Maria, I am sorry to tell you that immigration to Mars will have basically no effect on the population of the Earth in your's or my lifetimes.

So, I'll end my show the same way I usually do: Take care of your planet. It looks really nice.

(Dawn gets up and walks off camera.)