Scott Solomon

But you're right.

If you go outside, you need a space suit.

On the moon, there's basically no atmosphere.

And so there's certainly no air to breathe.

But not only that, because there's no atmosphere, there's no pressure.

And if you

you know, were out of your spacesuit, basically, like, you know, your body fluids would boil off.

I mean, it would be, you know, a quick and terrible death.

So you need a spacesuit that has both a pressure, internal pressure that allows your body to remain intact, but also provides you a life support system.

So giving you oxygen to breathe, removing carbon dioxide, controlling temperature, which is another thing that varies wildly on the surface of the moon.

The same basic principles are true on Mars.

Mars has the advantage that it has a little bit of an atmosphere.

And so it's still nothing that we could breathe.

But, you know, there's a little bit higher pressure.

You still would need to be in a pressure suit, though.

Here's the thing.

Anybody that goes to Mars is going to be taking some microbial life with them.

We have a microbiome, right, all these bacteria and other organisms that

that are in and on our bodies.

So it's not like we won't bring any of those with us to Mars, but what we bring is going to be a tiny fraction of what lives here on Earth.