Mars News and Discussions

[caltrek]

Does Mars’s Gravity Prohibit Human Colonization?
By Ethan Siegel
July 17, 2026

Introduction:

(Big Think)

• Ever since Yuri Gagarin became the first human in space, the dream of sending humans to other worlds, planets, and star systems has seemed like an achievable reality, even with current technology.

• However, the closest worlds to our own that are the friendliest for humans to land on, like the Moon and Mars, are different from Earth in many ways, including by virtue of having much less gravity than Earth does.

• With over 700 humans now having been to space, including many that endured low-to-zero gravity for long durations, we’re beginning to understand the effects it has on our body. Can Mars be colonized by humans at all?

For as long as we’ve looked up at the night sky and realized that there were other stars and planets out there beyond our own, they’ve captured our imaginations and made us wonder what was possible. How different or similar are they to Earth? Have any of them ever had life on them, and if so, what is (or was) that life like? Can we travel to those worlds, set foot on them, and engineer a habitat that allows us to survive there? Ideally, it wouldn’t just be for a brief time, but rather could potentially result in the establishment of a long-term human presence on a world other than Earth.

There are many obstacles to a human colony on another world, of course, but some of the biggest problems we’d undoubtedly face arise from the differences between the properties of the planet we evolved on and adapted to, Earth, and any other world. In the case of Mars, it’s smaller, drier, has a thinner atmosphere, and is significantly more distant from the Sun than Earth is. But could the biggest barrier to the whole endeavor of colonizing Mars be its low surface gravity?

Read more here: https://bigthink.com/starts-with-a-ban ... ation/

[Yuli Ban]

Does Mars’s Gravity Prohibit Human Colonization?
By Ethan Siegel
July 17, 2026

Introduction:

(Big Think)

• Ever since Yuri Gagarin became the first human in space, the dream of sending humans to other worlds, planets, and star systems has seemed like an achievable reality, even with current technology.

• However, the closest worlds to our own that are the friendliest for humans to land on, like the Moon and Mars, are different from Earth in many ways, including by virtue of having much less gravity than Earth does.

• With over 700 humans now having been to space, including many that endured low-to-zero gravity for long durations, we’re beginning to understand the effects it has on our body. Can Mars be colonized by humans at all?

For as long as we’ve looked up at the night sky and realized that there were other stars and planets out there beyond our own, they’ve captured our imaginations and made us wonder what was possible. How different or similar are they to Earth? Have any of them ever had life on them, and if so, what is (or was) that life like? Can we travel to those worlds, set foot on them, and engineer a habitat that allows us to survive there? Ideally, it wouldn’t just be for a brief time, but rather could potentially result in the establishment of a long-term human presence on a world other than Earth.

There are many obstacles to a human colony on another world, of course, but some of the biggest problems we’d undoubtedly face arise from the differences between the properties of the planet we evolved on and adapted to, Earth, and any other world. In the case of Mars, it’s smaller, drier, has a thinner atmosphere, and is significantly more distant from the Sun than Earth is. But could the biggest barrier to the whole endeavor of colonizing Mars be its low surface gravity?

Read more here: https://bigthink.com/starts-with-a-ban ... ation/

I don't think gravity is insurmountable, but for many reasons, it makes far more sense to colonize asteroids and build space colonies in interplanetary space.

In that case, we'd have perfect control of gravity, weather, and orbital period. It actually wouldn't even be terribly difficult to try, so long as we sent up machines first. (Also, if we did try to spin asteroids and comets that we colonize, we'd need to make sure we don't cause them to rip themselves apart, but there are known workarounds for that)
Indeed, I was jotting something down for Babylon Today's later arcs where the central AGI outright separates different classes of habitable bodies based on various generalizable metrics that, for the most part, larger planetary bodies fail. Since we can't easily control orbital or axis rotation or gravity, and we CAN brute force magnetic fields but it still requires a good bit more energy than you'd think,

I think it just sounds more daunting to "build" a habitable body in space than it does to land on another planet. There's more romance to the idea of millions or billions living on Mars rather than Mars perpetually being an Antarctica-tier research outpost with mechanized bases while millions/billions instead live in interplanetary/interstellar space colonies

I say that because it IS actually a known psychosocial phenomenon, though I forget the name. That sort of "Pioneer Fantasy" where what we crave is the idea of the 1600s-1800s American westward expansion (or Russian eastward-into-Siberia) but in Outer Space, where you have rugged pioneers surviving off the fat of the land in desolate landscapes, braving desperate odds in literally-alien environments with nothing more than their will-to-power
If that were actually possible in real life, it'd be amazing to see unfold, but space is just SO inhospitable for human life (or more accurately humans are SO suited for Earth habitation) that it's just not going to happen that way. Neil Armstrong-style landings on celestial bodies is always more than possible; it's literally just political will and funding reasons why we haven't at least attempted a Martian landing, or even more daring things like landing on Ceres or traveling to the Jovian system. Hell, if we decided "this is a suicide mission, there's no coming back," there's no reason to not have sent humans as far as Pluto or beyond yet. We just generally are a more empathic species than we give ourselves credit for; we'd REALLY prefer to not kill one of our own off like that (which is shocking to say seeing how violent humans can be).



But then you think about colonizing the moon, fantasizing of seeing Earthlike sights on the moon in a century, and then you think it through and realize "How the hell are plants supposed to grow naturally on the moon without extraordinary technological assistance? Water can't even fall as drops or flow the same way in such low gravity; water would fall like giant undulating bubbles! Would that even affect humans growing up, if the water in our bodies just flowed differently from birth?"
And you start realizing that if we want to reach the stars, we might have to bootstrap ourselves after all rather than being tempted by the allure of large rocky bodies. Heck, maybe that's even a sort of filter in and of itself: species that have habitable worlds around them might trap themselves into focusing purely on planet hopping, while species that live on the only major rocky body in their stellar system set out to colonize in their own habitats from the start and get much further. And we somehow manage to lie at the very edge of that.

Like, if Venus and Mars swapped places, we wouldn't be having these discussions. Venus at that distance is just a colder Earth. But maybe we try to colonize it, and it turns out to be host to lifeforms that burn through the native planet since there are no possible defenses against it.
Who knows!
All comes back around to my recent take that we should research more intensely into asteroid parasitizing, building colonies and habitats inside them, in a sort of gyro-colony.