Our thinking

Life on Mars

24 February, 2020

Despite being the second most hospitable planet for life in the solar system, Mars is not a particularly appealing prospect for a second home – what with its low air pressure, lack of water and planetary storms of toxic dust.

But that doesn’t mean that attempts to look at how humans could live there aren’t fruitful. Last week, an exhibition opened at the London Design Museum that showcases some of the smart solutions that could make the red planet habitable in the future. With contributions from NASA, the European Space Agency and Space X, it explores how we would have to cope with limited resources. From repurposing food packaging to be used as the raw material for 3-D printing, gardening underground and creating building materials from plant matter, there are a lot of lessons to be learned from life on Mars about how we can use resources better here on planet Earth. And with only 9% of the 92 billion tonnes of material we use annually being put back into service, there certainly is a lot to learn.

We’ve previously written about other surprising and creative ways of using resources more effectively, such as using fridges and the London underground, and, this week, we came across a great way to use otherwise disused mines. As well as harnessing the creativity to spot opportunities like these, thinking about how to live on Mars shows us the value of new ways of thinking. This is the case not only for coming up with new ideas, but for appreciating what we have – as one researcher put it, “One would hope that getting people to think about Mars… brings home to us that actually our planet is very precious.”