You’ve heard of generating oxygen on Mars, now get ready for a sustainable city on the Martian planet! Plans for the first ‘Martian sustainable city’ have been unveiled, and construction is estimated to begin by 2054 and finished by 2100. While that is still a long time to come, the designs for the city are already finished, as Euronews details:
The new design overall contains five cities - the capital is called Nüwa. The vertical city has homes, offices and green spaces, all built into the side of a cliff to protect inhabitants from atmospheric pressure and radiation.
The oxygen is largely produced by plants, food is 90 per cent plant-based and the energy comes from solar panels.
However, the circumstances on the Red Planet are far from friendly. The atmospheric pressure is not suitable for humans and the radiation is lethal on the surface without any shelter.
"We had to do a lot of analysis based on computing and working with the scientists to try to understand what are the circumstances that we will face," says founder of architecture studio ABIBOO, Alfredo Muñoz, adding "we have to face challenges that are very specific to the conditions of Mars, one of them is gravity, which is only one-third of the gravity on Earth."
On the other hand, CO2 and water can be obtained on the surface.
"Water is one of the great advantages that Mars offers, it helps to be able to get the proper materials for the construction. Basically, with the water and the Co2, we can generate carbon and with the carbon, we can generate steel," says Muñoz. The architecture company plans to use exclusively Martian materials for the construction.
Image via Euronews
There are plenty of people on Earth who want a sustainable city for inhospitable climates. Why not start there? Argentina pays a lot of money to keep their Antarctic colony going, for example. There's plenty of cheap land in our cold deserts, shipping is a lot cheaper, and survivability is rather higher, so I would expect sustainable cities here first, But of course, this is link is more marketecture than anything else. Sigh, I'm getting old and blasé.
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What about the reduced gravity on Mars though? Once you go to Mars, can you really go back to Earth? One way ticket.
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