STUNNING designs for cities that can house a million people on Mars have been unveiled by a team of scientists and architects.
The self-sufficient towns are said to protect inhabitants from the planet’s harsh conditions by placing houses on the sides of cliffs.
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The designs were put together by architectural firm Abiboo Studio, which has headquarters in Spain, the US and India.
They were developed in partnership with The Sustainable Offworld Network (Sonet), a team of academics dedicated to the development of sustainable human settlements on other worlds.
Considering Mars’ deadly atmospheric conditions, the designers chose the side of a cliff on Mars to build a “vertical city”.
This design is based on modular parts, including leisure areas and places to grow food.
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Its vertical buildings protect residents from the Martian atmosphere by embedding their homes in radiation-proof cliff faces.
Simply going to the Red Planet and building a home like you would on Earth would result in disaster due to the extreme air pressure.
“The solar and gamma radiation on Mars forced us to build spaces that are not directly exposed to the sky,” Abiboo founder Alfredo Muñoz said.
He added: “If we were to construct the buildings as on Earth, the buildings would tend to explode from the pressure.”
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The project, called Nüwa, envisions five Martian cities housing a total of one million people.
Each city – including capital Nüwa – accommodates between 200,000 and 250,000 citizens.
Aside from Nüwa, the rest of the cities follow the same urban strategy.
They include Abalos City, located in the North Pole to leverage the access to ice, and Marineris City, located in the most extensive canyon of the Solar System.
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The solution is a flexible and scalable model that could be easily applicable in many other Martian regions.
In these Martian cities’ design, the architects faced defining structures that would guarantee a habitat suitable for humans and other lifeforms.
The designs were submitted to a competition organised by The Mars Society earlier this year.
The Mars City State Design Competition aims to find the best design for a Mars city state that can house up to a million people.
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Mars facts
Here’s what you need to know about the Red Planet…
- Mars is the fourth planet from the Sun
- It is named after the Roman god of war
- The landmass of Mars is very similar to Earth but due to the difference in gravity you could jump three times higher there than you can here
- Mars is mountainous and hosts the tallest mountain known in the Solar System called Olympus Mons, which is three times higher than Everest
- Mars is considered to be the second most habitable planet after Earth
- It takes the planet 687 Earth days to orbit the Sun
- So far, there has been 39 missions to Mars but only 16 of these have been successful
Aliens may have once lived miles beneath the surface of Mars, research suggests
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In other news, astronomers have created a “Google Maps of the Universe”.
Nasa hopes to peer back in time using the James Webb Space telescope.
And, Nasa recently revealed a surreal photo of Earth taken from 4billion miles away.
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This post first appeared on Thesun.co.uk
