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Sample Essay: Humans on Mars?

Do you like adventures? Would you like to travel to Mars? A company in the Netherlands
called Mars One may be willing to send you because they have a plan to start a community on
Mars. However, in my opinion, there are huge issues with their plan that should stop anyone
considering the adventure of settling on Mars in the next few years.

Students at MIT, a well-known university for technology, ran a computer simulation of

the Mars One project and found several problems. One involves the plan to have the Mars
colonists grow their own food. According to a 2014 Huffington Post article, Sydney Do, one of
the students, warns of technical difficulties with that process and says that “crop failure could
cause the colonists to starve” (Freeman). Another difficulty with the growing of food would be
that the oxygen given off by the crops would eventually lower the nitrogen supply in the
community. As reported in the 2014 Huffington Post article, “That would make it impossible to
sustain sufficiently high air pressure within the habitat, and the colonists would suffocate”
(Freeman). It seems clear to me that the possibility of starving or suffocating are two problems
that must be solved before people try to live on Mars.

The 2014 Huffington Post article also reports that a finding the MIT students considered
even more important than issues about growing crops was that “the cost of delivering the spare
parts essential to the colony would be prohibitive” (Freeman). I believe that the possibility of not
being able to get needed supplies is another serious reason to delay sending an exploration team
to Mars in the near future.

According to The Guardian, even the Mars One website in 2013 admitted difficulties
with the project. On Mars astronauts would have to adapt to surface conditions that are very
different from those on Earth and this would cause drastic physical changes in their bodies. The
website stated that people who stay a long time on Mars would be “incapable of returning to the
Earth’s much stronger gravity” (McVeigh). People who go on this adventure can never return to
their friends and family on Earth, and life as they knew it on our planet. I consider this an
extremely negative factor of this adventure.

I’m convinced that the potential problems with the Mars One project should stop people
from taking this adventure in the near future. I hope that new developments in technology would
make this mission safer and include the possibility of a return trip to Earth. Maybe some students
who are my age now will have careers in space technology when they grow up and make a trip to
Mars and back one day.
 Works Cited

Freeman, David. “Scary New Simulation Shows Mars One Colonists Could Suffocate, Starve.”
huffingtonpost.com. TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc. 14 Oct. 2014. Web. 18 Feb. 2015.

McVeigh, Karen. “Life on Mars to become a reality in 2023, Dutch firm claims.”
theguardian.com. Guardian News and Media Limited. 21 April 2014. Web. 18 Feb. 2015.

D’Antonio, Michael. “Excerpt: And a Dog Shall Lead Them” from A Ball, a Dog, and a Monkey.
Simon & Schuster. 2007.

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