Mars Human City Plans Start Now, With Nüwa

A team of creators called Detrell revealed plans to create a city on Mars. This is the first major – or at least first public – set of plans to be submitted to the Mars Society, and one of the most impressive plans we've seen for such a thing so far. Detrell is made up of the architectural firm ABIBOO Studio and the Sustainable Offworld Network (SONet) community, and they have a very interesting plan.

The ABIBOO site shows Nüwa City in all its proposed glory. The city is shown with a proposed population of 250,000 residents. The city is embedded in the cliff near Tempe Mensa on Mars, "protected from radiation and meteorites while having access to indirect sunlight."

Macro-buildings on the cliff are connected with high speed elevators, with sky-lobbies in between. At the end of each Macro-building, at the cliff wall, Green-Domes allow space for parks and experimental vegitation growth.

This city has plans for a shuttle service between Mars and Earth, too. The launch window would open every 26 months and tickets would cost approximately $300,000 USD for a one-way trip.

"As the city grows, it has to be able to depend only on the resources directly on Mars and recycling as much as we can," said aerospace engineer Gisela Detrell in an interview with CNET. "All the ways that we humans produce, we should be able to produce enough oxygen, water and food to sustain humans and close the cycle almost completely."

The name Nüwa 女媧 comes from the Chinese mother goddess, creator of humanity. The name consists of a prefix nü, 女, generally attached to the front end of a goddess name, and the character 媧, unique to this name. She is also known as 媧皇, Wahuang, Empress Wa, creator of the five-colored stones made to patch the sky and protect the Xin Dynasty.

Another major point at which this character was depicted recently came in a statue named "Sky-Patching – Nuwa'" by Prof. Yuan Xikun. This statue was shown in Times Square in NYC in April of 2012 to exhibit the importance of protecting our ozone layer on Earth. This is the sculpture that you see at the head of this article, courtesy of Google Arts and Culture and the Beijing Jintai Art Museum.