I meant to wrap up my special Mission to Mars series a few weeks ago, but then some stuff happened, and then I got sick, and my whole blogging schedule got messed up.

Anyway, better late then never.

When I launched this mission, I felt like I didn’t know as much about Mars as a space enthusiast/science fiction writer like me should.  I wanted to fix that.  I wanted to immerse myself in everything Martian, and so I did.  For a lot longer than I expected, too.

During that time, I got a much clearer sense of Mars’s history, as told by the geological and chemical evidence.  Without a doubt, Mars was a wet and water world in the distant past, but that does not necessarily mean it was an Earth-like planet. Rather, Mars’s history with water seems to have been brief and violent, with lots of flash flooding caused, perhaps, by the rapid thawing and refreezing of glaciers.

Even so, life could maybe possibly have started to evolve on ancient Mars, and even as the planet dried up, there’s a slim (very slim) chance life could have survived and endured all the way up to the present day. Scientists take this possibility seriously (a lot more seriously than I expected, to be honest), and there’s an active and passionate debate going on about how to explore Mars without contaminating any hypothetical Martian ecosystems with our Earth germs. Two of my favorite posts for this series, “Let a Mars Rover Rove” and “Mars Rovers Must Rove Responsibly,” compared and contrasted the two sides of that debate.

But of course a huge portion of this series was devoted to the future human colonization of Mars.  I wrote several posts about how to get to Mars, reviewing proposals made by Buzz Aldrin (of Moon landing fame), Robert Zubrin (author of The Case for Mars), and Elon Musk (the guy who runs SpaceX).  I also wrote about how future colonists might adapt the calendar to suit the slightly longer Martian day and the significantly longer Martian year. And of course there were all those posts about what kinds of food might be practical on Mars, starting with potatoes and working up to goat cheese.

I’m still no Mars expert.  Mars is the second most thoroughly explored planet in the Solar System, after Earth, and there’s just so much information to sort through.  On top of that, new discoveries are being made all the time.  The already enormous pile of Mars-related knowledge just keeps growing!

But I do at least feel more familiar with the Red Planet, and I hope you do to.  Thank you to everyone who followed along with this series, either for the whole long slog of it or just bits and pieces of it.  If you had any favorite posts from this Mars series, I hope you’ll let me know in the comments.  Also, I’m planning to do “Mars month” again next March, so if you have suggestions about other Mars-related things I should research, let me know!

Over the last few months, I’ve been on a mission to learn as much as I can about Mars.  As part of that mission, I wanted to know what sorts of foods might one day be part of a Mars colonist’s diet.

We’ve already talked about potatoes and sweet potatoes. We’ve talked about lettuce and other common vegetables, and we’ve talked about entomophagy, the practice of eating bugs.  Some might balk at that idea, but insects are a highly efficient source of animal protein, and on Mars food production must be as hyper-efficient as possible.

We’ve also talked about seafood, specifically tilapia, another efficient source of animal protein.  I sort of think of tilapia as a Martian “luxury food,” though, because I feel like only a large and prosperous Mars colony could spare the room and resources needed for fish tanks.

But hey, if the human colonization of Mars is a success, more and more luxuries will be introduced.  The people of Mars may well demand it as their colonies start to feel less like research outposts more like a true civilization.  So with that in mind, let’s talk about goats.

In his book The Case for Mars, aerospace engineer Robert Zubrin has this to say about sending goats to Mars:

Some years ago a science writer wrote several books in which he popularized the idea of goats as the key to future animal husbandry in space.  They are of convenient size, omnivorous, fast breeding, milkable, and so on.  Be that as it may, I’m city born, but have lived in the more recent portion of my life in a rural area.  I’ve seen what goats can do.

I’ve tried very hard to figure out which science writer Zubrin was referring to here, but I’ve never found the original source.  Over the past few decades, the only person talking about sending goats to Mars seems to be Zubrin himself, and he only brings up the subject in order to tell us what a terrible idea it is.

You see many of the habitat structures we’ll need to build on Mars will be made of fabric or fabric-like materials, the kind of materials goats are prone to nibble on.  Goats are also known to chew on wires and cables.  Also, given Mars’s reduced gravity, these Mars goats will be able to jump really, really high, as pictured above.

Even so, I like this idea.  Goats don’t require a lot of grazing land, and they can eat much of the food waste we humans can’t digest.  They may not be as nutritionally efficient as mealworms or crickets or tipalia, but they’re still a reasonably efficient food source.

Efficient enough, I think, for the needs and desires of a truly prosperous, truly “civilized” Mars.  Finally, our Mars colonists will have meat and milk and, perhaps most luxurious of all, cheese—because few things say “civilization” better than a well-cultured cheese.

Now if we can just get grapes to grow on Mars, so we can have wine….

The first colonists on Mars will have to be, out of necessity, vegans. Growing plants on Mars will be challenging enough; raising livestock would be utterly impractical. If we must include animal protein in a Martian diet, the only realistic option would be bugs like crickets or mealworms.

However, as a Mars colony grows, a few “luxury foods” might be added to the menu, including heartier sources of protein like seafood. That may not make a lot of sense at first. Mars is a barren, desert planet. How could we bring fish to a place like that?

But research has already done about how fish fare in space. The Japanese Aeropace Exploration Agency (JAXA) built a fish tank aboard the International Space Station.

Building large, underground aquariums on Mars wouldn’t be too difficult, compared to all the other aboveground and belowground structures a Mars colony would need. And if your colony settled in a region like Utopia Planitia, you should have more than enough water to fill your fish tanks (as we’ll see in Friday’s post).

In Robert Zubrin’s book The Case for Mars, he casually mentions that tilapia would be a good choice for Martian fish farming, because they’re herbivores and they could eat a lot of the plant matter that we can’t digest. I’ve found some research that seems to back Zubrin’s suggestion up; however, there’s some concern about whether or not Martian tilapia would be as nutritious as the Earthling kind. A lot will depend on the sorts of plant matter available for us to feed our Mars-born fish.

Personally, I love seafood. Also, I’m a big fan of aquariums, so living on Mars is starting to sound even more appealing to me. And there is still one more food source that I want to tell you about that might (might!) be a viable option for a self-sustaining Mars colony. Stay tuned!

P.S.: And if you want to try the Mars colony diet out yourself, check out Kate Rauner’s blog to get some recipes!

Thus far in my on-again/off-again mission to Mars, I’ve learned that while ancient Mars may have been a wet and watery place, that does not necessarily mean it was anything like Earth. The evidence I’ve seen from Mars’s Tharsis region and the surrounding area suggests that Mars has had a rather violent history with water. But I’ve heard that other regions—most notably the Utopia Planitia region—may have a different story to tell about Mars’s watery past… and its watery present.

I’ve only just started learning about Utopia Planitia, and right away I was in for a surprise. On September 13, 1977, the Viking-2 Lander took a photograph of what appeared to be a light dusting of snow on the ground. Then on May 18, 1979, approximately one Martian year later, it happened again. This is the 1979 photo:

We can’t be 100% sure what happened, specifically. Did it really snow at the Viking-2 landing site, or does it just look like snow? Could it instead be a layer of frost, like how back on Earth morning dew turns to frost during the winter? Is this snow/frost made of frozen H₂O, frozen CO₂, or a mixture of both?

Personally I’d like to believe that it snowed, and that it was genuine H₂O snow. I love snow. I love how quiet and pretty and restful snow is, and somehow the idea of snow drifting even more slowly to the ground (because of Mars’s reduced gravity) appeals to me. I wish I’d started studying something other than the Tharsis Bulge and Valles Marineris canyon earlier, because clearly I’ve been missing out!

P.S.: I think there should be something like the Lunar X-Prize for whoever builds the first snowman on Mars.