Natural and Social Sciences Colloquium: ‘How real was ‘The Martian’?’ to be held Tuesday

Dr. Simon Gilroy, professor from the University of Wisconsin — Madison’s Department of Botany, will be on campus Tuesday, Feb. 20 to share his exciting space-related research with the community. “How real was The Martian?” will be held at 4:15 p.m. in the Sladek Distinguished Science Forum (DSC 163). All are invited to attend. Light refreshments will be served before the seminar.

Mars is a long way away. The distance from Wisconsin to Mars is between 35 and 250 million miles, making the journey both very long and very complex. Humans traveling to Mars will need to be largely self-sufficient for the air they breathe and the food they eat. Being effectively cut off from the Earth leads to many challenges that we need to overcome to make this kind of exploration a reality.

How can you grow enough food for a trip to Mars? Could you plant crops in the Martian soil to survive once you are there? Could we terraform Mars to make it habitable or will we always be living inside some kind of Martian base? What happens to human biology once you leave the safety of the Earth’s protection? Could humans even make the trip or is our kind of life in reality too closely linked to the conditions of our home planet? This seminar by Dr. Simon Gilroy will explore these questions in the context of space biology and astrobotany.