Agriculture for Mars Colonization :: Environment Mars Planet Life Essays Papers

As the world population grows at an astonishing rate, our mother earth is getting very crowded. Our natural resources are being overused and the land available for life is getting smaller and smaller. Farmers have to find ways to make what land they have usable and profitable. Farmers in general are a shrinking population. How does this relate to the general public? Without farmers we would not have food, without food we will all die. The world is realizing this problem and the best way to solve it is to find more land for habitat. We can not tack on a few million acres to earth and start using that, so we have to find somewhere else to go. Mars, the beautiful red planet, is the most similar planet to earth. The terrain in general is very close to what we are used to on earth, minus the vegetation. Earth and Mars both contain polar ice caps. Mars also has water throughout the planet, but it is mostly subsoil. Water is a very important part of agriculture. The water on Mars is a little different than the water here on earth. If we tried using the polar ice caps, we would have to do many things to make it worth out time. The location of the ice caps is in an area with â€Å"permafrost.† This means that the water remains frozen unless we do something to melt it. The bad part is that we don’t know what the water is actually like. When we get the contained water free, we will then have to test it and see what is needed to make the water useful. The water underneath the soil is already free, but there are many unanswered questions about that water also. The water contained under the soil has had some various effects on the Mars terrain. When the robots were on mars collecting samples, they found some rocks that looked like rocks from prehistoric life here on earth. When analyzing these samples, the scientists deemed that the water was very acidic and salty. This is similar to some of the earlier times in the Australian area.