Colonizing Mars – Impact Lab

NASA Mars recruitment poster NASA/KSC

Look around the space where you are sitting. How many of the things you see were not available to you as a child? Perhaps you note a laptop, smart phone or Wi-Fi connection? Now imagine these things vanished. What would your life be like? Think back to when you were a child. Could you have imagined the items you now can’t live without?

This same dynamic may soon be on the horizon for jobs on Mars—we may one day wonder how we ever confined our human activities to Earth.

Advancing technology continues to create more unique and interesting jobs—for now, all of them based on planet Earth. But change may be upon us.

Continue reading… “Will your next job be on Mars?”

The Red Planet is a freezing, faraway, uninhabitable desert. But protecting the human species from the end of life on Earth could save trillions of lives.

The Earth and Mars are a bit like fraternal twins that slowly grew apart. Four billion years ago, both planets were warm, sheathed by protective atmospheres, and carved with rivers and pools of liquid water. But today, Mars is an irradiated desert enveloped by a thick miasma of carbon dioxide, while its twin is a sensationally fertile orb and, for all we know, the universe’s cosmic jackpot of life.

These divergent stories make scientists immensely curious: Can we discover evidence of a fecund past in the Martian ground? We’re closer than ever to finding out. Ellen Stofan, the former chief scientist of nasa and current head of the National Air and Space Museum, has predicted that we will find evidence of past life on Mars in as little as a decade.

Continue reading… “Is Colonizing Mars the most important project in human history?”