Author: Katharine Lackey / Source: USA TODAY
NASA has released several new images of Mars captured by the InSight lander’s robotic arm. The agency share the photos on Twitter. Buzz60
Mountains of garbage, plastics that take thousands of years to disintegrate, oil spills in pristine environments from drilling into the soil or underneath the ocean: When we go to Mars, is it inevitable we’ll repeat the same mistakes on Earth?
Resources will be so limited that creating a waste stream will be nearly impossible – at least at first. That’s because humans will only take what we absolutely need due to the limited space on rockets and spaceships and the time it takes to get to the planet – nine to 11 months, one-way.
“Everything that you use and you create on Mars is so valuable. You simply can’t afford a pollution stream, you can’t afford a waste stream at all. Everything will absolutely be recycled … at least in the beginning,” said Stephen Petranek, author of “How We’ll Live on Mars.”
As part of the efforts to eventually get humans to Mars, we’ve already put our mark on the planet through rovers and the latest NASA mission, InSight, which recently snapped a selfie as it begins getting to work mapping the inside of the planet in 3D to better understand it’s evolutionary origins.
But we will have a far greater impact on the planet when humans get there, especially if terraforming – making the planet more Earth-like by modifying its atmosphere – occurs.
“It will probably become a problem when Mars does seem a lot more like Earth and resources just aren’t as hard to come by,” Petranek said. “But people on Mars can choose, once they figure out to have a non-waste environment and a non-pollution environment, there’s no reason for them not to keep that.
”That doesn’t mean it will be easy, said Leland Melvin, a former NASA astronaut.
“That balance of not polluting and terraforming versus understanding how we can live in this ecosystem in a way that’s not going to damage it for our own use: That’s a really tough balance to strike,” he said. “We need to learn from our mistakes…
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