This is not a sci-fi movie.
The United Arab Emirates wants to establish the first “inhabitable human settlement” on planet Mars by 2117. Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid said his country will spearhead the “dream” of landing people on other planets.
“Human ambitions have no limits, and whoever looks into the scientific breakthroughs in the current century believes that human abilities can realise the most important human dream,” Sheikh Mohammed said in a press release.
A team of Emirati engineers have a plan to construct a city on Mars — built by robots. The UAE’s Mars 20117 Project will work to accelerate research in space science that could make such a settlement possible. The Emiratis said they will work with an international scientific consortium to collaborate on efforts to put humans on Mars, the fourth planet from the sun.
The average distance in a straight line between the Earth and Mars is 140 million miles, but a spacecraft sent to the planet would have to travel further because it must orbit the sun and cannot travel straight through it. Mars takes 687 Earth days to orbit the sun. The fastest spacecraft launched from Earth is currently headed to Pluto, but a ship of similar speed would take an average of 162 days to reach Mars.
The project will also seek to “develop faster means of transportation” between earth and Mars, and will examine how inhabitants of Mars will obtain food and energy.
The UAE previously announced a project aimed at sending the Arab world’s first spacecraft to Mars, to land on the planet in 2021. The planet measures just 15 percent of the Earth’s volume and experiences the solar system’s largest dust storms.
The Emiratis said the Mars project was designed to “serve humanity” and did not specify a budget fot it.
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