What are your retirement plans? Keep working? Get more exercise? Or learn something new? You may put them on hold. There's a chance that, sooner or later, you might have to move further than you were thinking, as far as Mars (火星).
On Thursday, National Geographic will show the first ever Mars show home, giving earthlings an idea of what their life could look like on the Red Planet. Set in the notsodistant year of 2037, the iglooshaped structure could be the home of your future.
It shows a house built using recycled spacecraft parts and Martian soil, called regolith, which has been microwaved into bricks. Some parts of the home are recognisable—kitchen, bedroom—but there are fundamental differences that are vital for human survival.
As the Martian atmosphere is around one hundredth as thick as the Earth's, people will need permanent shelter from the sun and society will move largely indoors. Most buildings will be connected by underground passages and the houses won't have windows. The homes will have simulated solar lighting, or natural light that has been bent several times.
Walls will need to be 10 to 12 feet thick, to protect people from dangerous rays that can pass through six feet of steel, and a double airlocked entrance to keep the home under proper pressure.
"We don't think of our houses as things that keep us alive, but on Mars your house will be a survival centre，" says Stephen Petranek, author of How We'll Live on Mars. This is not just the stuff of scifi. "Ten to twenty years from now there will certainly be people on Mars，" Petranek says.
"We've had the technology for 30 years to land people on Mars, but we haven't had the will，" Petranek says. "But two main factors have completely swung public attitudes."
The private companies' participation has forced government agencies to speed up their game, and influential films such as Gravity and The Martian have caught society's eye.
