Could we survive without our planet?

The equipment list
Creating a new base on another planet would be similar to going on a camping trip, with one addition. You need water, shelter, a power source, food and, unlike on Earth, you need oxygen.

In terms of shelter, a basic structure could be made out of martian regolith, which can be used to create bricks. But any home on another planet would need added protection against harmful space radiation. On Earth, our magnetic field does the job of deflecting cosmic rays, but on places like Mars this is not the case. A paper published earlier this year in Advances in Space Research showed that clay from carbonaceous asteroids could act as a more effective shield from radiation than aluminum.

Water is another vital resource. “Water is abundant in space,” says Dr Philip Metzger, from the University of Central Florida. “It exists as ice in the Moon's dark polar craters, it is stored in the clay minerals in many asteroids, and it is found in a variety of forms on Mars.” On Mars there are many candidates from which water could be extracted, including the regolith (soil), hydrated minerals, and old glaciers buried under the surface.

In order to breathe, oxygen is quite crucial. Oxygen can also be combined with water to create useful things like methane, from which rocket fuel can be created. If water is abundant, oxygen can be produced through electrolysis, using a current to separate the positively charged hydrogen ions from the negatively charged oxygen.

Another way to create oxygen is atmospheric capture. First, carbon dioxide is captured from the atmosphere. NASA has created a system called MOXIE for the next Mars rover that will attempt to do exactly this. Oxygen can then be extracted from the carbon dioxide using gravity-based separation processes. These processes would take longer, since Mars’ gravity is lower, but there is no reason why they would not work.

For food, off-world farming techniques are tricky, but not impossible. Experiments on Earth using simulated martian soil, like Food for Mars and Moon, based in the Netherlands, have managed to grow tomatoes. It is thought the martian equator would be warm enough for inflatable greenhouses to grow plants, but these would also need a power source.

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