“How do you think we should live on Mars?” That’s the question that was recently posed to more than 200 people in England.
The answer has just landed in a public square in Bristol, UK—and it’s a two-story, solar-powered dwelling with a kitchenette, a hydroponic garden, and a “Martian toilet.”
Dubbed the Martian House, the structure will open to the public next week and host a series of talks and workshops about sustainable living.
Unlike the flurry of farfetched renderings of Mars colonies populating the internet, the Martian House is a tangible object that’s designed to get people to think less about actually colonizing space and more about living with scarce resources, and within your means in a constrained environment.
The Martian House was conceived of by artists Ella Good and Nicki Kent, who wanted to use Mars as a lens to focus on what we really need and how we want to live on Earth.
It was designed by two British architecture and design firms: Pearce+ and Hugh Broughton Architects, which has designed a number of science research stations in Antarctica. The architects consulted with space scientists about the climate conditions on Mars and how those should translate into their design.
Naturally, plants hold a special place on the second floor of the Martian House. Together with a kitchenette, the “hydroponic living room” is contained within a pressurized, double-skin inflatable structure lined with gold foil. This comes with a window and a skylight, and the gold coating is meant to reflect the sun and reduce heat gain on the surface.
On Mars, the walls within would be filled with Martian regolith, a silt-like volcanic rock that’s readily available on the planet. The Bristol version, however, is filled with air.
Meanwhile, the ground floor houses compact bedroom pods and a Duravit toilet with a heated seat, illuminated bowl, and an odor extraction mechanism because you can’t just open the window on a planet with so little oxygen.
On Mars, this half of the house would be built underground, within Mars’s empty lava tubes. In Bristol, it sits in a boarded-up shipping container.
The Martian House was designed to withstand the red planet’s harsh climate (an average temperature of -80 degrees and high cosmic radiation), but this isn’t meant to be a NASA-proof house for Mars.
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