Questions of Colonization

I've been toying around with the idea of colonization for a while now and I think its high time for me to focus my thoughts and actually write something down. Granted I'm a mere second semester freshmen in a non-science major but someone needs to be thinking of it. The most likely reason, I think, that I'm so curious about space is from all my sci-fi reading. Yeah, yeah I know that many, if not all, of the ideas, designs, theories, and so forth are fantasy but that doesn't mean there's a real way to achieve some of this. Recently I've gotten into an author name Alastair Reynolds who writes something called hard science fiction which stresses scientific accuracy. Though Reynolds world is much more advanced and, like most sci-fi, set in the distant future he has some interesting views of how space is colonized. One of the planets in his books is a recently colonized planet which may shed some ideas on how we may be able to make that jump. One of his ideas is terraforming, which, by definition, is the modification of another celestial body to make it similar to earth. Its still hypothetical, of course, but in my opinion its definitely feasible.

Mainly this post is meant to organize some of my thoughts and help me critically look at the whole concept of colonization. I'm no expert but I know I'm not the only person out there that has questions about this sort of thing so by asking I have a basis to start my search. Obviously wikipedia is one of my favorite things to use but I'd like to expand from there and if I have narrower more specific questions that will help me look at more "credible" sites like NASA and such. Mars is going to be my focus but I realize that the more probable place to start out is our very own moon, seeing as I don't know shit about vacuums or gravity or any of the main problems with the moon I'm just gonna avoid it for now.

How much time and fuel would it take to transport a manned ship to Mars?

Do we have the technology to even make a manned trip to Mars?

Is a closed ecosystem a possibility on Mars?

How many people, if any, would it take to maintain a closed ecosystem on Mars?

How much water would be needed to create a closed ecosystem on Mars?

What kind of engineering problems are associated with creating domes?

How violent are the storms on Mars?

What kind of materials would be needed to create a dome capable of withstanding dust storms on Mars?

What is the soil made up of on Mars?

How much less sunlight does Mars receive than Earth?

What is the temperature on Mars?
Around the equator during the summer Mars can reach 20 degrees Celsius (70 degrees F)

Does Mars have an atmosphere?
"Mars has a very thin atmosphere composed mostly of the tiny amount of remaining carbon dioxide (95.3%) plus nitrogen (2.7%), argon (1.6%) and traces of oxygen (0.15%) and water (0.03%). The average pressure on the surface of Mars is only about 7 millibars (less than 1% of Earth's)..." (NinePlanets.org) 1013 millibars is 1 atmosphere so 7 millibars is roughly 0.006908463 atm. The altitude that one would experience such a low pressure is 159,013 ft. or 30 miles up, if you go that far up you'll enter the Mesosphere (ace).

What does low pressure do to the human body?

Is it possible to depressurize slowly and safely?

Is it possible to increase the pressure of a planet?
Essentially what needs to be done here is injecting large amounts of gases into the atmosphere. This will serve a duel role of both increasing the surface temperature on Mars as well as the pressure. This is one of the many goals of terraforming.

What is the gravity on Mars?
Mars has approximately .38 the gravity of Earth (NASA) Essentially I weighing 130 pounds would be 49.4 pounds there. This is a whole lot less than I thought, and reading the article sited above gave some interesting questions I didn't have before. I'm gonna keep a close eye on the Mars Mice since they'll be able to answer questions I won't even be able to look into myself.

Would a human be able to function normally on Mars?

What is the escape velocity for Oxygen on Mars?

Does Mars even have the gravity to even hold onto Oxygen?

Some of these are very simple to find with google but I just want to put them down on paper, well in writing rather, to organize my thoughts. I'll edit this post as I find answers to some of these, others which are more speculative I'll just write up another post and link to it here. One thing I've learned from my academic career is the more questions you answer the more emerge, I'll most likely add to this list as I learn things but the point is not to find a solid answer but to critically look into such a feat. It will be years before we will even visit Mars but who's to say we can't start working on colonization now? Stephen Hawking recently stated "The human race has existed as a separate species for about two million years, If the human race is to continue for another million years, we will have to boldly go where no one has gone before." He says that its possible to have a base on the moon in the next couple decades and a get to Mars by the middle of century (AIP). It's really great that we're just now trying to fix the climate but the climate isn't the only problem facing the future of humanity. Even if we completely clear up our massive carbon footprint there still remains the fact that we only have so much room, our population is growing exponentially. Nothing short of totalitarian rules on reproduction can we avoid outgrowing Earth in the next couple centuries, and still, eventually we'll grow out of it anyway. Of course, that is, if we don't all end up killing each other off. Nature may even do us that little favor by unleashing even more intense disasters and viruses . There's all sorts of horrible things that can happen that will kill off a couple billion people, but isn't that all the more reason we should spread out and increase our chances that much more? Lets face it, sooner or later some renegade asteroid will come along and not just prune our population but completely annihilate our species. Hop to it people, this is our future at stake.