MagAAFSzine January 2019, Issue 8 | Page 10

I believe that we will colonize Mars one day, sometime in the future. The earliest we could colonize Mars could be in the 2020s. Many have seen various movies about colonizing Mars.

Examples include The Martian, John Carter and Total Recall. In The Martian and Total Recall, Mars is depicted as a harsh, hostile environment for humans. The atmosphere is very thin and apparently can suck your eyeballs out of your sockets and inflate your body, causing a pretty gruesome death. In reality, the atmosphere’s thinness could still cause a lot of damage, but it will probably not suck out your eyeballs.

However, in John Carter, Mars is depicted as a habitable desert with water and living intelligent organisms. John Carter is based on pulp novels in the early 20th Century. Back then, we knew very little about Mars. People thought it was colonized by advanced martian colonies because scientists thought they could make out canals with their telescopes.

It will take many years for humans to colonize Mars, as it is a very big task that is not easy. It will cost a very large amount of money, and getting there and establishing a base is going to be extremely dangerous. People will have to deal with the thin atmosphere and get used to the weak gravity, which is only 38% as strong as Earth’s.

Mars Colony