[imagesource: Abiboo Studio]

In April, we wrote about what a self-sufficient city on Mars for 250 000 people could look like, and included a video of a tour through the city.

We heard mostly from the founder of the architectural studio Abiboo, Alfredo Munoz, who spoke about the design and concept for Nüwa – the name of the future sustainable city on Mars.

The name comes from the Chinese mythological goddess who melted together coloured stones to patch up the sky, which is appropriate on so many levels.

He believed that with the right resources and technology in place, Nüwa could be finished by 2054 at best or 2100 at the latest.

Now, Gisela Detrell, an aerospace engineer at the University of Stuttgart in Germany, is adding to the conversation and speaking about a city holding up to one million residents.

As per CNET, Detrell is part of an international team of scientists and academics, architecture firm Abiboo Studio and the public-private Sustainable Offworld Network (SONet) community that believes the first proposed city for Mars could be a reality.

They’re not wasting any time and have submitted plans to the Mars Society to build Nüwa as soon as possible.

I mean, there is a lot more action in space than ever before.

Elon Musk has plans with NASA for commercial space travel, movies are going to be made in space, and tons of research is taking place on the red planet (there’s the Perseverance rover and the Ingenuity helicopter ), too.

So perhaps the plans for a Martian city are not that far out.

Detrell works in the field of life support systems, ensuring that astronauts have all the food, water, and oxygen required to survive in space on future missions.

She says that human survival on another planet, especially one like Mars, depends on finding solutions to four key factors.

Those are infrastructure, sustainability, shelter, and life support.

She notes that constantly bringing resources for survival from Earth to Mars is just not possible:

“There are several issues that we have to face on Mars from radiation to providing all the food and oxygen that the people living there would need — but also looking at how to use the resources on Mars, starting from where would our city be located or which different locations we could have.”

…”As the city grows, it has to be able to depend only on the resources directly on Mars and recycling as much as we can,” Detrell said.

“All the ways that we humans produce, we should be able to produce enough oxygen, water and food to sustain humans and close the cycle almost completely.”

While Nüwa is still in the ideas stage, she said she would absolutely live on Mars if given the chance:

“Because it is an adventure,” Detrell said.

“It’s something that allows us as humanity to move forward, not just by the fact of one single person being on another planet, but all the technology development that it requires. And I want to be part of it.”

Well, I am officially getting on that cryptocurrency train so that I don’t miss the connection to Mars when things start to get more real.

[source:cnet]