It was in 1969 that the first human walked on the moon. That was just 46 years ago, and now scientists are expecting to make the first commercial flight around the year 2026. This is “The next giant leap for mankind” as the Mars-One describes it in its web page. As we can se in NASA’s webpage “ Mars is a rich destination for scientific discovery and robotic and human exploration as we expand our presence into the solar system”. It has many earth-like similarities that could help in many ways learn more about the past.
But there are many things that still have to be worked on, needless to say the human body. We are not prepared to live in a different planet; our bodies could endure a few years or so but still not be prepared for life there. Just to start we have gravity, which holds us down to earth, in mars the gravity is much less than in earth which will make our bodies change intensely and not in a good way. As I found in one of my sources there are many long-term and short-term effects associated with traveling to space. To state a few we have blood circulation that comes back to gravity, since there is no gravity moving the blood efficiently in the body, there is possibilities that blood clots will occur. Also there are backaches, since there is basically nothing pulling them down humans will start to grow and muscles will stop working efficiently and this cause backaches. Fatigue is another issue, a day on mars is slightly longer than a day in earth, but that slight difference has huge effects on the humans, they stress out and fatigue due to the few hours of sleep and the bad quality of sleep. Taking it a step further now lets talk about long-term effects, the ones that will haunt you down the rest of your life. Bone loss, cellular organization, and radiation are a few. Just measuring the time it takes for an astronaut to part from earth and get to mars, the human bodies bones have lost the same density as it would loose in earth in a lifetime. Also the astronauts are exposed to some kind of radiation, due to galactic cosmic rays. These rays and solar flares may incentive different kind of diseases in the humans such as cancer, cataracts, heart disease, etc.
http://www.mars-one.com
http://www.racetomars.ca/mars/article_effects.jsp
http://www.nasa.gov/content/nasas-journey-to-mars/#.VQ3ITEIp-c9