If you’re like me, whenever you read or watch sci-fi, you tend to have a healthy cynicism for off-world settings. Sure, artistic license is allowed. Otherwise, it would be a documentary. And I love being taken to incredible new places through the author’s brilliant imagination. But the intuitive leap I’m expected to take from modern science to their fictional setting can’t be an impassable chasm.

Ultimately, the setting in good science-fiction writing must be believable.

Writing an Off-World Setting

As an author, I know this takes weeks – if not months – of research on climate, geography, vegetation, animals, atmosphere, cosmic radiation, precipitation, and more. Not only that, I have to strike the right balance between painting a vivid picture versus drowning the reader in details. Not only is it boring, but I’ve got my word count to think of. Reducing pages of text to a few paragraphs is brutal but necessary to keep the plot flowing.

So let me do you sci-fi authors a solid and pass on what I recently learned about Mars.

My daughter is a fourth-grader with ADHD. This means two things: 1) She had to do a science fair project this year; and 2) Her attention span is about twenty minutes. That would be sufficient if she were interested in researching how to make slime, or how to make a battery from a lemon. But ever since she was a toddler, my daughter has been interested in outer space. And she’s an honor-roll student in GT.

So, what was her science fair topic? How to make a 3-D printed ice house on Mars. Sigh…

Which meant I spent far more time than was strictly necessary reading articles by NASA, SpaceX, and SEArch (Space Exploration Architecture) and printing them out for her. I wanted her to spend her twenty minutes every day learning rather than getting sucked down the internet rabbit hole of research. So now I’m officially as smart as a fourth-grader. And I’m passing some of that knowledge to you.

What’s the Problem with Living on Mars?

1. The biggest problem with living on Mars is cosmic radiation. The atmosphere on Mars is very thin, so it gets up to 20 rads per year. (People on Earth are exposed to an average of less than 1 rad per year.) Being exposed to Martian radiation for a sustained amount of time can cause cancer, acute radiation sickness, or death.

2. That’s the bad news. The good news is, ice is an effective barrier to cosmic radiation. Water is a hydrogen-rich material that’s excellent at shielding galactic cosmic rays.

(Here’s NASA’s article that explains these two points more fully.)

3. And Yes – Mars does have water! Settlers can harvest water from underground aquifers and lava tubes stemming from Martian volcanoes. They can also get water from hydrated minerals with water chemically bonded to them.

4. Mars is cold enough to sustain ice. The average temperature on Mars is -81 degrees Fahrenheit, and it can get as cold as -220 degrees. Mars currently has a slab of ice that’s as big as Texas and California combined.

This means that living on Mars is not always going to be science-fiction! And with NASA and SpaceX already working toward putting humans on Mars, we might need those ice houses sooner than you think.

We Can Live on Mars

Now, get to work and write an amazing story that takes place on Mars! You’re welcome.