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EVERYTHINGSPACE

First Steps · Beginner

Could I Live on Another Planet?

2 min read · original Everything Space lesson · figures are standard reference values

The rust-colored hills of Mars from the Curiosity rover. Photo: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS, Curiosity panorama · via Wikimedia Commons

Not yet — but you asked the exact question the world's space agencies are working on. Here's an honest tour of the two best options, and what we'd have to pack.

The Moon: the near one

The Moon is three days away — close enough that people have already walked there. But it's a harsh campsite: no air at all, two weeks of daylight followed by two weeks of freezing night, and gravity only one-sixth of Earth's, so you could jump six times higher (in a very stiff suit). The exciting news is real: the Artemis program is aiming for the Moon's south pole, where craters that never see sunlight hold frozen water. Water you don't have to bring is the whole game — you can drink it, breathe the oxygen from it, even turn it into rocket fuel.

Mars: the far one

Mars is the best planet we know besides Earth, and it's still very tough. A Mars day is almost exactly like ours — 24 hours and 37 minutes, a nice touch — and there's ground to build on and ice underground. But the air is so thin it's nearly none, and it's the wrong kind to breathe; a warm summer afternoon can still be colder than a freezer, and getting there takes about seven months of flying. Anyone living there would stay inside sealed habitats and suits, growing food under lights, recycling every drop of water — like a submarine crew, on red sand, under a butterscotch sky.

An honest answer, and a real one

So: could you live on another planet? Today, nobody can — no one has a house on the Moon or Mars yet. But 'not yet' is doing a lot of work in that sentence. Robots are on Mars right now scouting for us; rockets big enough for the trip are being tested; the Moon plan is funded and underway. Someone is going to be the first person to live on another world, and nobody knows yet who it is. It will be somebody who is a kid right now — somebody who kept asking exactly the question you just asked.

Visit Mars in the atlas