The world’s tallest building, the world’s largest mall, the world’s largest indoor theme park, Dubai has many architectural accolades. But this might just be the most ambitious yet…a Martian city.

The UAE announced its ambition to colonize Mars within the next 100 years back in 2017, and now architects are starting to envision what a Martian city might look like. Oh, and it’s going to be constructed it in the desert outside of Dubai.

‘Mars Science City’ was originally going to cover 176,000 square meters of desert, and cost a cool Dhs495 million. It was intended to be a technology space for Dubai’s Mohammed Bin Rashid Space Centre, to develop technologies needed to colonize Mars. The architects were asked to create a city proto-type which would sustain life on Mars, and then adapt it for use in the Dubai desert.

 

For this *very* unique commission, the architects have to overcome the huge challenge of creating a structure which will make the inhospitable environment of Mars habitable. Sounds pretty straight forward, right? Well, factor in that the average temp on Mars is a rather chilly -63 degrees C with a very thin atmosphere and it gets a little trickier.

So, how is this going to be at all possible? To maintain a comfortable temperature and habitable air pressure, the Martian city would be constructed from pressurised biodomes, and each would be covered with a transparent polyethylene membrane, and have oxygen filling each biodome by applying electricity to underground ice.

So, life on Mars might be not so distant after all!