(02-08-2023, 11:32 AM)homebiscuit Wrote:

(02-08-2023, 11:01 AM)NewJagsCity Wrote: It's fun to see all this effort to 'prove' that at some point there was organic life on Mars.  It will be a huge help in establishing a working atmosphere and biological infrastructure that will one day support organic life as we know it.  I'd set the over/under as maybe 50,000 years.  Or, we could just work to fix Earth as designed with whatever means we have in our power.

And of course, there's always the problem of gravity, or lack thereof.  Spend too much time getting to and on Mars, and your body will have lost so much muscle mass and bone that it becomes a one-way trip.

Daily exercise mostly mitigates bone and muscle loss. Long term exposure to cosmic radiation is the largest factor limiting deep space travel and living on a planet without a strong magnetic field. 

Water is one of the best shielding materials from cosmic radiation, but heavy. In order to conserve volume and weight, the crew’s water supply is used for this purpose. However, as that is depleted, waste matter is recycled as shielding. Urine can be recycled for drinking water and shielding while fecal matter (high in water content) is encapsulated and added to the spacecraft’s structure. 

They’ll be zooming through space in a sewer pipe.