alt Hacker NewsMars has toxic levels of perchlorates in the regolith. That will require that humans never come in contact with the regolith or things that touched it. Those space suits that dock to vehicles seem like a necessity.
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Calcium perchlorate is only slightly toxic. Not good for you, but living in an environment with background radiation levels 50x higher than on Earth may be your bigger worry...
Still, I'm pretty sure we have plenty of people who wouldn't mind giving it a try.
If we redefine our community to include tardigrades the outlook improves considerably.
Example: a blog critiquing Mars colonization pointed out that humans cannot even live at the summit of Everest, and there is no "non-native microbial life" there. Notice the caveat: "non-native?" Guess who else did:
Tardigrade in Hawaiian shirt, wearing pixelated sunglasses
Honestly, which achievement would be considered more impressive-- Neil Armstrong setting foot on the Moon, or me getting there first because I was stuck to the bottom of his boot?
Well, guess who is now watching you navigate to the Wikipedia tardigrade article[1]:
Tardigrade lowers its pixelated glasses
Hell, in the five minutes that I've imagined them joining the team we've gone from
"never come into contact with the regolith"
to
"if you happen to come into contact with the regolith, remember: stop, drop, and roll."[2]
1: Ok, a tardigrade was probably not on his boot for the first Moon walk. But suppose we gently placed some the surface of the Moon, and observed their reaction...
two tardigrades pointing at you navigating back to Wikipedia
I'm not a Mars colonisation advocate, but sounds like exposure to that may be manageable:
"Perchlorate is toxic to people only in the sense that it can disrupt the production of thyroid hormone, an important growth hormone needed by babies in the womb for normal development." (from https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/perchlorate-life-...)
Lots of people have this condition without perchlorate after all and it's just simple meds to fix it.
> That will require that humans never come in contact with the regolith or things that touched it.
It’s really only a concern if you ingest it.
If this fact piques your interest, the book Delta-v by Daniel Suarez glances off this fact and uses it to justify exploring asteroid mining instead of a colony on Mars.
Can we decompose the perchlorates for oxygen and energy?
Or effective decontamination performed in the airlock. There was a recent demonstration of an electrostatic repulsion device reducing dust on suit fabric which might help with sticking. And an air shower like used for clean rooms does not seem too far out.
Personally, I suspect all anoxic environments will turn out to be unhealthy for humans. You'll have a bunch of reactive stuff about that on Earth would have been neutralized long ago.
there's a great PBS Space Time for that (of course)
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TIL
Yeah, the ground on mars is literally toxic. Makes the concept of a Martian colony less appealing. Almost equal to a floating station on Venus. At least there you’d have the correct pressure. I seem to recall that the temperature on Venus at an altitude of one atmospheric pressure is manageable. It’s just also acidic. Possibility easier to deal with than perchlorates.