First Click: The hidden dangers of life on Mars

There are a lot of obstacles blocking Elon Musk’s ambitious plans to colonize Mars. But let’s say we do get a hundred people to the Red Planet. Let’s say SpaceX develops a ship big and powerful enough to house a hundred humans for a months-long trip in the vacuum of space. Let’s say those would-be colonists are shielded from dangerous cosmic radiation, they’re fed, watered, and kept safe from danger, and they land on Mars as our species’ first interplanetary citizens.

Well, then, the real work is just beginning. Humans would be living on Mars, but they’d have to start surviving, and as the media has shown, the Red Planet is a hostile environment indeed. A number of early reports indicated that Mars is secretly the home of a race of...