Recently I was listening to a podcast with Scott Kelly on Tim Ferris’s show, and Scott said something along the lines of “if you want to see what it’s like to live on Mars, try living on Antarctica – it’s relatively temperate compared to where you want to go”. But this misses the key reason people don’t live in Antarctica—it’s not the harsh climate, though it is indeed harsh; it’s that it gets very little sunlight. Even during the summer, which is when the sun is present, the sunlight is much weaker than the sunlight received in more equatorial locations. Sunlight is the fundamental ingredient of life (except for when geothermal or nuclear [in the case of humans] options are present—even fossil fuels ultimately come from sunlight), so the lack of sunlight is a big detractor for living on Antarctica.
Though, now that I think about it, Mars is much further away from the sun than the earth, which ends up with (IIRC) Mars getting around a quarter of the sunlight the earth gets. I’m not sure what percentage of equatorial sunlight the Antarctic receives, but I would not be surprised it was actually even less than a quarter, which means that equatorial regions on Mars would still get more sunlight than the Antarctic; though I am not confident about this.
Apparently mean insolation at the equator of mars is about equal to that at 75° latitude, well inside the (ant)arctic circle… and while Earth has winters where the sun is fully below the horizon, Mars has weeks-to-months long dust storms which block out most light.
So it’s probably a wash; Antarctica is at least not much worse than Mars for light while retaining all the other advantages of Earth like “air’ and” water” and “accessibility”.
Recently I was listening to a podcast with Scott Kelly on Tim Ferris’s show, and Scott said something along the lines of “if you want to see what it’s like to live on Mars, try living on Antarctica – it’s relatively temperate compared to where you want to go”. But this misses the key reason people don’t live in Antarctica—it’s not the harsh climate, though it is indeed harsh; it’s that it gets very little sunlight. Even during the summer, which is when the sun is present, the sunlight is much weaker than the sunlight received in more equatorial locations. Sunlight is the fundamental ingredient of life (except for when geothermal or nuclear [in the case of humans] options are present—even fossil fuels ultimately come from sunlight), so the lack of sunlight is a big detractor for living on Antarctica.
Though, now that I think about it, Mars is much further away from the sun than the earth, which ends up with (IIRC) Mars getting around a quarter of the sunlight the earth gets. I’m not sure what percentage of equatorial sunlight the Antarctic receives, but I would not be surprised it was actually even less than a quarter, which means that equatorial regions on Mars would still get more sunlight than the Antarctic; though I am not confident about this.
Interesting question! It turns out that the Canadians are checking whether there’s enough light to grow tomatoes on Mars.
Apparently mean insolation at the equator of mars is about equal to that at 75° latitude, well inside the (ant)arctic circle… and while Earth has winters where the sun is fully below the horizon, Mars has weeks-to-months long dust storms which block out most light.
So it’s probably a wash; Antarctica is at least not much worse than Mars for light while retaining all the other advantages of Earth like “air’ and” water” and “accessibility”.