• Question: do you think within the next fifty years someone would travel beyond mars?

    Asked by harrison c to Scott on 14 Nov 2017.
    • Photo: Scott Melville

      Scott Melville answered on 14 Nov 2017:

      I think in the next fifty years someone will travel to Mars (hopefully). We actually have all of the technology – it could be done tomorrow! There’s a project called Mars One,
      https://www.mars-one.com/
      which is super exciting – they hope to soon establish the first human colony on Mars. There’s only one real catch that’s holding them back: there’s no fuel on Mars, so there’s no way to ever return to Earth. If you flew to Mars on a rocket, it would take about 8 months, but then you’d be stuck there forever. For some people that’s not a problem (wouldn’t it be pretty cool to live as one of the first people on Mars?!), but generally society and politicians feel that this is unethical (boo).
      Will we go beyond Mars? Probably not in the next 50 years. It’ll take at least 100 years to set up the Martian colony. Once humans are living comfortably on Mars, then we’ll probably start exploring further away – but that’s probably not in our lifetimes.

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