Mars still brings the scars of the cosmic clashes that marked the childhood of the Solar System: a study by Imperial College London confirmed, which analyzed the data of the Insight probe, off since 2022 but still capable of telling us stories of four and a half billion years ago.
In fact, the result of the data confirmed that the remains of gigantic celestial bodies fell at the time when the sun system was a self -holdter of asteroids, a shower of collisions that forged the rocky planets, were trapped in the cloak of the red planet.
The seismic instruments of Insight have recorded eight Marsquake (small Martian earthquakes) two of which generated by recent impacts with craters of about one hundred and fifty meters, and also the anomalous propagation of the waves has shown that the interior of the planet is not uniform but inomogenic, full of clusters of different material (real geological fossils of those ancient collisions), some of which reach up to four kilometers of kilometers diameter. It should be noted that phenomena such as tectonics and volcanism on earth have canceled almost all traces of that primordial bombing, on Mars not, because geologically it is almost dead (it has no tectonic movements), therefore today she still preserves those wounds intact, transforming itself into a natural archive of the formation of the sun system.
Mind you, that Mars had been bombed, it is not surprising, no one were all the planets, the inclusive land, and it is enough to remember the asteroid has canceled the dinosaurs and made our own existence possible (many are happy, I, who are like Leopardi, for which it was fatal to those who are born the day Christmas, to that asteroid, if it had been a sentient being, I would have said: ” Because without that impact today we would not be there to tell it (and no, the dinosaurs did not defeat the man, as Al Bano said during the Covid, “if we defeated the dinosaurs let alone a small virus”: between the last dinosaur and the first hominid, sixty million years pass).
In any case, those scars have remained available to our science, an archive that can be read as a capsule of time. Today, however, Mars is certainly not a place to live or go to live (and I doubt it will be tomorrow): it is a completely inhospitable planet, without a magnetic field that protects from solar and cosmic radiation, with an atmosphere reduced to a one percent of terrestrial pressure, insufficient to shield any energy particle, with medium temperatures of sixty degrees below zero that oscillate from the twenty degrees just tolerable to the equator to the equator to the equator in the equator in the equator Daytime to the less one hundred and twenty -five of the poles during the winter nights, and where the measured radiations are such as to make every stay on the surface lethal (unless not to dig and live underground, it would not be a good life). In other words, Mars on his best day remains colder than a freezer and more radioactive with a merger reactor equipped only with minimal shields.
It specifies it because Elon Musk continues to tell us about the fairy tale of one million people on Mars by 2050 (by 2025, according to a 2016 tweet … by 2026 in an interview of 2020 … by 2029 in another declaration, and finally, by 2050 the most recent milestone remains) with Starship fleets that for now manage to attempt to try orbital flights, ignoring that the problems of survival. human remain enormous.
Several scientists have liquidated the matter as a stupid or ridiculous: Adam Becker speaks of the most senseless thing that can be done because even in the case of global catastrophe the land would still remain more livable than Mars, Lawrence Krauss underlines the enormous underestimation of costs and risks, Bill Anders (who in space was there with the Apollo missions) called all this, and commissioners like those of the guardian. They remember that these dreams often serve to distract us from the most urgent issues here on earth. The point is clear: we would take thousands of years to make Mars vaguely habitable (admitted to succeeding and not died during), while we are already managing to make our planet uninhabited, which has everything you need, water, breathless air, a magnetic field that defends us, a tolerable climate. Instead of earthquake Mars, we are Mars for the earth.
Instead, about Insight’s data, Giovanni “Nanni” Bignami returns to me, one of our brightest astrophysicists (the one who wrote the episodes of Superquark for Piero Angela and father of the equally brilliant Giulia Bignami, chemistry and writer), my great dead friend of 2017, who in his book remained famous that life could have come from Mars. detached after impacts of this type, when the planet had seas and rivers and could host elementary biological forms transported here as unaware passengers. In the end, the real irony is that you don’t need to imagine distant aliens. That book was titled: “We are the Marzians”.
In the sense that perhaps it was us, when we were still invisible, primitive bacteria. However, there is no need to go back to live, think of the earth (but if someone wants to go to Mars, go as well, even tomorrow, I am very favorable).