What happens if a man dies on Mars?

_{Source: marssociety.org}

Hello, dear readers Geektimes! I have prepared for you a translation of a small, but entertaining article-reasoning on a topic that is certainly relevant in the future.

Already today it can be assumed that one of the people living on Earth will become the first man to die on Mars. The private company Mars One plans that after a one-way flight to the "red planet", space travelers will remain on it until the end of their days.
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Billionaire and space tycoon Ilon Mask has already said that in the end he himself would like to die on Mars. His company, SpaceX, plans to fly to Mars and return to Earth, but, as Musk himself remarked last week, given that the risk of death is very high, all people leaving for the first flights should be prepared for the fact that they will not return. . If members of our race get to Mars, at least some of them are likely to die on the "red planet."

This event would become a kind of landmark in the history of mankind, since for all the flights into space only three people died in it. We are talking about the cosmonauts of the Soyuz-11 mission, who died as a result of the depressurization of the descent vehicle at an altitude of 167 km above sea level, far beyond the boundary between the Earth’s atmosphere and the rest of the universe. The bodies of astronauts were not buried in the earth and the atmosphere of another planet or cremated on it.

So let's try to imagine what will happen to the human body if it dies on Mars?


_{Conceptual image of landing on the "red planet" from SpaceX. Source: SpaceX}

Being left on the surface of the “red planet”, the human body would survive for a very long time period. On earth, its destruction begins with the work of decomposition bacteria, using organic matter to ensure its own vital activity. On Mars, we still have not managed to find any species known to science.

Immediately after death, the body, however, will still begin to decompose: the bacteria brought from Earth and the bacteria contained within it will get down to business. If the body is on the surface in the area of ​​the Martian equator, where temperatures sometimes reach quite “pleasant” peaks throughout the day, the microorganisms will have several hours at their disposal. However, due to the absence of an insulating atmosphere, the planet cools rapidly. The temperature of even the soft Martian nights is comparable to the temperature of the polar nights on Earth. The body will freeze, the bacteria will stop their activity and the slow process of dry mummification will begin.

Cold preservation will be countered by ionizing radiation, which destroys organic compounds and increases the planet’s radioactive background to unprecedented levels on Earth. A completely plausible explanation for why we can’t find any signs of life on the “red planet” lies precisely in the fact that a high level of radiation on it “roasted” any organic compounds to a gaseous state, destroying all traces of their previous forms of existence.

Ultimately, the radiation "will end" with most of the body, but it will take an entire eternity - 100 million years from the moment of the first human death on Mars. It is possible, however, that the bones of the deceased can still be found.

Being humane people, the Martian settlers will hardly ever dump the bodies on the surface and leave them like that. However, in the case of burial, the remains will probably remain even better than in the case of being on the surface. The conditions in the soil will continue to be dry and cold, while she herself will at the same time protect the remains from radiation.


_{Mars Surface (Source: NASA / Jet Propulsion Laboratory / Cornell University)}

To get rid of the body, Mars researchers or displaced people will have to resort to its cremation or controlled decomposition. Both options are possible. Mars One ideologists have already chosen cremation as a method. Cremation fire will require two resources that Martian missions are already planning to mine or produce on the "red planet": oxygen and fuel. However, even if the settlement will not produce combustible substances, the excess fuel remaining from the flight will probably be enough to sustain combustion.

Another possible approach to this problem can hardly be called acceptable for civilized inhabitants of the Earth, since it actually boils down to composting human bodies. However, as Paul Volp, chief specialist in space bioethics at NASA, told the Slate magazine in an interview, this option seems unlikely to him. “There are societies on our planet that are in dire need of fertilizer, but even they do not use the bodies of the dead for these purposes,” he says. It is interesting, however, that this is one of the first options that comes to mind for many people.

Such an approach is not devoid of common sense: any semi-permanent Martian colony will benefit a lot from the composting system, which preserves food waste and processes it back into new plants. And besides, astronauts are already breaking earthly taboos on waste, using, for example, recycled urine as a drinking liquid. Therefore, if we manage to overcome the taboo of death, the active composting of the human body will not differ much from its burial in the ground.

Nevertheless, no other expedition to Mars, except Mars One, has provided clear plans for possible scenarios in case of its death. Apparently, NASA is going to use a similar approach to prepare the current astronauts. We are talking about the development of "emergency situations" or death simulations , during which, as the astronaut Chris Hadfield wrote, the whole team tries to find answers to the simplest questions: "What to do with the body and its smell?" How much time will it decompose? How to notify the family of the deceased? How should the public relations team respond to this? ”

Of course, in order for at least one of the above to become relevant, we must first get to Mars. However, planning the last years of your life in advance is a prudent exercise in any case.

The author is especially grateful to the Blue Marble Space Research Institute and personally to Jim Cleves for thinking about death and decomposition of the body on Mars.