Mars. It’s a pretty unforgiving place. On this dry, dessicated world, the average surface temperature is -55 °C. And at the poles, temperatures can reach as low as -153 °C. Much of that has to do with its thin atmosphere, which is too thin to retain heat. So why then is the idea of colonizing Mars so intriguing to us? Well, there are a number of reasons, which include the similarities between our two planets, the availability of water, the prospects for generating food, oxygen, and building materials on-site. And there’s even the long-term benefits of using Mars as a source of raw materials and terraforming it into a liveable environment. Let’s go over them one by one…
The idea of exploring and settling Mars has been explored in fiction for over a century. Most of the earliest depiction of Mars in fiction involved a planet with canals, vegetation and indigenous life – owing to the observations of the astronomers like Giovanni Schiaparelli and Percival Lowell. However, by the latter half of the 20th century (thanks in large part to the Mariner 4 missions and scientists
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A series of short stories that take place predominantly on Mars, the collection begins with stories about a Martian civilization which begins to encounter human explorers. During the 1950s, many classical science fiction authors wrote about colonizing Mars. These included Arthur C. Clarke and his 1951 story The Sands of Mars, which is told from the point of view of a human reporter who travels to Mars to write about human colonists. While attempting to make a life for themselves on a desert planet, they discover that Mars has native life forms. In 1952, Isaac Asimov released The Martian Way, a story which deals with the conflict between Earth and Mars colonists. The latter survive by salvaging space junk, and are forced to travel to Saturn to harvest ice when Earth enforces an embargo on their