Mars colonist
As a Mars colonist you would live on a planet where stepping outside without a suit would kill you in minutes – and where a phone call home would take up to 20 minutes just to arrive.
The planet itself
Mars has about 38 per cent of Earth’s gravity and an atmosphere roughly 1 per cent as dense, made mostly of carbon dioxide. Average surface temperatures sit around −60 °C. With no global magnetic field and thin air, the surface receives far more radiation than Earth’s; measurements by the Curiosity rover’s RAD instrument help estimate the dose a crew would absorb. A Martian day, a sol, lasts about 24 hours 40 minutes, which at least is easy on body clocks.
Getting there takes roughly six to nine months with today’s propulsion, and launch windows open only about every 26 months, when Earth and Mars line up favourably.
Daily routine (speculation)
No one has lived on Mars yet, so this is grounded guesswork. Settlers would likely live in pressurised modules partly buried under regolith, the loose soil, for radiation shielding. Every resource would be recycled: water reclaimed from air humidity and urine, as on the International Space Station; oxygen possibly produced from the CO2 atmosphere – NASA’s MOXIE experiment on Perseverance demonstrated this on a small scale between 2021 and 2023. Food would come mostly from indoor greenhouses.
Martian dust is fine, electrostatic and contains perchlorates, salts that are toxic to humans, so keeping it out of habitats would be a constant chore.
Isolation and health
Communication delays of about 4 to 24 minutes one way would make real-time conversation with Earth impossible. Analogue missions such as HI-SEAS in Hawaii and NASA’s CHAPEA habitat in Houston study how small crews cope with confinement. Long-term effects of low gravity on bones, muscles, eyes and pregnancy remain largely unknown – which means early colonists would also be the subjects of the experiment.
