There's an interesting video of a guy that put together enough bioreactors making enough oxygen from him to breath from. It was WAY more than I certainly expected.
this post was submitted on 28 Dec 2025
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Mars (Planet)
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I'm currently reading this article: Biosphere 2
It discusses how a green-house (air-tightly enclosed) produced almost enough oxygen for 8 people (due to miscalculations, it actually was a bit less than that and they eventually had to supply additional oxygen from the outside after 16 (!) months.)
That reminds me of this great game from 1999, Biosys, that was inspired by the Biosphere 2. I need to give it a spin again, I remember it being quite fun
You're just gonna say that and not share a link?
You made me search again for it. link
Thanks! Comment was mostly in jest, but I appreciate the follow up.
Fun tidbit, 10yr old me misunderstood the expelled gasses learned in science class and felt I was doing my part by making sure I farted by a tree and not letting it go to waste.
seriously though, any serious attempt to live on mars would obviously use electrolysis of water to produce oxygen on mars, because to do so you only need electricity and water.
you need about 1 kg of water and 1 kWh of electricity per person per day.
source: my own math
you can calculate this if you consider that people need about 8 MJ of energy a day, and bread has around 15 MJ of energy per kg, so people need around 0.5 kg of bread a day, that's approx. 0.5 kg of carbon atoms. since each carbon atom combines with 2 oxygen atoms, that makes twice as many oxygen atoms as carbon atoms. assuming they are the same mass (which they almost are), that's about 1 kg of oxygen a day. 1 kg of water contains about 1 kg of oxygen atoms.
about how much energy you need: you can calculate this with Standard enthalpy of formation of water. (given in the sidebar here)
I'm just too lazy to do this rn, so you're gonna have to believe me.
and about how to get electricity, see my post here
and about how to get water, see my post here and this article.
and then you could produce O2, which you're gonna breathe in, and you're gonna exhale CO2, which you then need to remove from the atmosphere, which you can do with a CO2 scrubber
Oxygen isn't the real issue. The lack of atmosphere is a side effect of the real issue. No one will colonize Mars before Venus because the gravitational well issue is far harder to solve than pesky greenhouse gasses.
Mars can hold an atmosphere just fine, idk what you're talking about.
Most of the martian atmosphere is CO2 and water vapor, and both freeze when it's cold enough. That's exactly what happens. The martian poles are so cold that the atmosphere freezes there and causes the martian polar caps. The atmosphere is there, just frozen.
The gravity well of Mars is about ⅓ that of Earth. Humans won't fare well there. Also Mars' atmosphere used to be much thicker from what I understand. It is slowly losing its atmosphere due to lack of gravity.
Venus is easier to terradorm just because of it having a gravity well that is closer to 0.95-0.98 that of Earth. Throw some ice asteroids at it to create oceans and it may have an equal mass to the Earth.