Martian House in England Explores Life on Red Planet

The underground level below the inflatable part makes use of lava tubes that occur in the crust of Mars. (Reuters)
The underground level below the inflatable part makes use of lava tubes that occur in the crust of Mars. (Reuters)
TT
20

Martian House in England Explores Life on Red Planet

The underground level below the inflatable part makes use of lava tubes that occur in the crust of Mars. (Reuters)
The underground level below the inflatable part makes use of lava tubes that occur in the crust of Mars. (Reuters)

“How do you think we should live on Mars?” That’s the question that was recently posed to more than 200 people in England.

The answer has just landed in a public square in Bristol, UK—and it’s a two-story, solar-powered dwelling with a kitchenette, a hydroponic garden, and a “Martian toilet.”

Dubbed the Martian House, the structure will open to the public next week and host a series of talks and workshops about sustainable living.

Unlike the flurry of farfetched renderings of Mars colonies populating the internet, the Martian House is a tangible object that’s designed to get people to think less about actually colonizing space and more about living with scarce resources, and within your means in a constrained environment.

The Martian House was conceived of by artists Ella Good and Nicki Kent, who wanted to use Mars as a lens to focus on what we really need and how we want to live on Earth.

It was designed by two British architecture and design firms: Pearce+ and Hugh Broughton Architects, which has designed a number of science research stations in Antarctica. The architects consulted with space scientists about the climate conditions on Mars and how those should translate into their design.

Naturally, plants hold a special place on the second floor of the Martian House. Together with a kitchenette, the “hydroponic living room” is contained within a pressurized, double-skin inflatable structure lined with gold foil. This comes with a window and a skylight, and the gold coating is meant to reflect the sun and reduce heat gain on the surface.

On Mars, the walls within would be filled with Martian regolith, a silt-like volcanic rock that’s readily available on the planet. The Bristol version, however, is filled with air.

Meanwhile, the ground floor houses compact bedroom pods and a Duravit toilet with a heated seat, illuminated bowl, and an odor extraction mechanism because you can’t just open the window on a planet with so little oxygen.

On Mars, this half of the house would be built underground, within Mars’s empty lava tubes. In Bristol, it sits in a boarded-up shipping container.

The Martian House was designed to withstand the red planet’s harsh climate (an average temperature of -80 degrees and high cosmic radiation), but this isn’t meant to be a NASA-proof house for Mars.



Heatwaves in Spain Caused 1,180 Deaths in Past Two Months, Ministry Says

The most affected regions were Galicia, La Rioja, Asturias and Cantabria. (Getty Images/AFP)
The most affected regions were Galicia, La Rioja, Asturias and Cantabria. (Getty Images/AFP)
TT
20

Heatwaves in Spain Caused 1,180 Deaths in Past Two Months, Ministry Says

The most affected regions were Galicia, La Rioja, Asturias and Cantabria. (Getty Images/AFP)
The most affected regions were Galicia, La Rioja, Asturias and Cantabria. (Getty Images/AFP)

High temperatures caused 1,180 deaths in Spain in the past two months, a sharp increase from the same period last year, the Environment Ministry said on Monday.

The vast majority of people who died were over 65 and more than half were women, the data it cited showed.

The most affected regions were Galicia, La Rioja, Asturias and Cantabria - all located in the northern half of the country, where traditionally cooler summer temperatures have seen a significant rise in recent years.

Like other countries in Western Europe, Spain has been hit by extreme heat in recent weeks, with temperatures often topping 40 degrees Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit).

The 1,180 people who died of heat-related causes between May 16 and July 13 compared with 114 in the same period in 2024, the ministry said in a statement citing data from the Carlos III Health Institute. The number of deaths increased significantly in the first week of July.

The data shows an event "of exceptional intensity, characterized by an unprecedented increase in average temperatures and a significant increase in mortality attributable to heatwaves", the ministry said.

In the period the data covers, there were 76 red alerts for extreme heat, compared with none a year earlier.

Last summer, 2,191 deaths were attributed to heat-related causes in Spain, according to data from the Carlos III Health Institute.

The data from Spain follows a rapid scientific analysis published on July 9 that said around 2,300 people died of heat-related causes across 12 European cities during a severe heatwave in the 10 days to July 2.

It was not immediately clear whether the study conducted by scientists at Imperial College London and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine was using the same methodology as the Spanish data.