When will humans visit Mars? This physicist says that there are "real plans" for the 2030s

Next month, Mars will make its closest approach to Earth in 15 years. Astronomers hope that their observations will provide useful information on the weather and surface conditions of the red planet

The mystery of Mars continues to fascinate Michio Kaku theoretical physicist, futurist and author. Kaku ( @michiokaku ) joins Jeremy Hobson of Here & Now to talk about the speed with which humans could go to Mars, and other advances in the world of science

that once were science fiction are now being translated into science of the actual rocket, "says Kaku.

Interview Highlights

About how long we could have humans on Mars [19659008] "Well, let's be honest: It only takes three days to go to the moon. So the Moon is a jump, a jump and a jump from the Earth, and I personally believe that at some point in the future, people will spend their honeymoon.

"Mars … is another wax ball, two years for a round-trip mission to Mars, plus all the problems of weightlessness, micrometeorites, radiation, etc. But there are technical problems. We have of course sent some robot probes to Mars, some in fact, and there are real plans to go to Mars in the 2030s, first on the moon – according to a new presidential directive signed in December – first to the Moon, using the Moon as a base, then to Mars maybe around the 2030s. And maybe after that, the exploitation of the asteroid belt. "[19659010] On the long term plan for March

"We want to start the Mars terraforming process first – if you could increase the temperature by 6 degrees in the future, you could induce an artificial greenhouse effect that would disappear by itself Some people think that if we have satellites es, solar satellites that orbit around Mars and reflect sunlight up to the polar ice caps, then you could melt the polar ice caps and then the rivers and seas could flow freely on the surface of Mars. about 3.5 billion years ago. And then the transgenic plants would thrive in the atmosphere – the plants like carbon dioxide, and it may be possible to genetically alter the algae and plants that will grow in that environment. And then the mining operations could also take place. The first thing you want to extract would be ice, to extract the drinking water – once you purify it – and break it down into oxygen and hydrogen for rocket fuel and for breathing

"The word Key is self-sufficient: You do not want a colony in Mars weighing on the US economy. You want him to be self-sufficient, that he has his own mine, that he has his own farming and his own industries. And of course, it's more long-term. We are not talking about this soon. But the basic foundation is laid now, even as we speak. "

On which will go to March first: a private company or a government space agency

" This is the key question. You see in the '60s, everything was done by the government and things were really expensive. In 1966, the Apollo Space Program budget absorbed 5% of the federal budget as a whole. It's amazing. You can not self-sustain a space program with this kind of cost, 5%. 100 percent of the federal budget. Now prices have dropped dramatically. In fact, the movie "The Martian", with Matt Damon, cost $ 100 million. But the Indians sent a probe to Mars for $ 70 million. So a Hollywood movie on Mars costs more than going on Mars – that 's how the price went down.

"Normally, it costs around $ 10,000 to put a pound into orbit – that's your weight in gold. Think of your body made of solid gold. That's what it costs to just put yourself in orbit around the Earth. However, Elon Musk claimed that it could lower the cost by a factor of 10. And that would open the space for development. And remember that these people have a vision for the future. Elon Musk's vision is that we become a multi-planetary species, because after all, dinosaurs did not have a space program, and that's why dinosaurs are not there today. So we need a backup plan, explains Elon Musk.

"But then Jeff Bezos, the richest man in the world, at the head of Amazon, declares that he wants to make Earth a garden.He wants to put polluting industries in the space so that the Earth becomes a park, a garden, which is fundamentally a testimony to a clean environment, a new vision for the planet Earth.We therefore have billionaires of Silicon Valley who arrive with a new vision, a new energy and of course a lot of money. "

On the gravitational wave laser observatory (LIGO), and what it means to be able to detect gravitational waves [19659018] "I think it's great, and finally we're going to put LIGO in space, what's called LISA – the laser interferometer space antenna, which are three satellites connected by laser beams. detect the gravity waves of the Big Bang itself.We will get images of baby – baby pictures of the infant universe, perhaps a thousandth of a second after the moment of creation. Now, the Big Bang images that you see on the Internet are images that were taken more or less when the universe was 300,000 years old. But we do not want it. We want the baby pictures of the universe to leave the womb at the moment of creation. And physicists like me are hoping to find evidence of an umbilical cord, an umbilical cord of the infant universe that emerges from the uterus and connects it to a parent universe.

"The point I am raising is that with the gravity wave detectors in the space, we can just have the ability to detect the pre-Big Bang universe. radiation at the moment of the Big Bang, or just after, you can roll back the video tape.The string theory is what I do in life, it's my day job, and the theory of the Strings is a theory that goes even beyond Einstein and that precedes the Big Bang.And string theory makes several predictions about what was the pre-Big Bang universe, and we could be able to launch the video on LISA to detect radiation before the moment of creation to give us an idea of ​​the pre-Big Bang universe. "

Copyright NPR 2018.