Science and Technology
The year is 2035. The idea of transforming Mars into a human home is no longer just a distant dream. A first large vehicle lands on the red surface, but it’s not a luxury space condominium. It’s not a ready-made habitat. It’s a flying construction kit, full of autonomous machines, designed to build the first underground city on Mars from scratch. Instead of human engineers descending the ramp, the first to set foot on Martian soil is a robotic exploration vehicle, ready to begin the most ambitious construction project in history.
This underground city on Mars doesn’t appear by magic, nor with a single spacecraft. Waves of cargo ships arrive, each bringing key components of the ecosystem: a solar farm spanning dozens of acres, a compact buried nuclear reactor, a tunnel boring machine that excavates and builds walls, a chemical plant that transforms ice into water, air, and fuel, and finally, the tools to assemble enclosed farms capable of feeding human colonists. Before anyone can live in this underground city on Mars, an army of robots builds energy, shelter, atmosphere, and food, using mostly what the planet itself provides.
The starting point is obvious: without energy, nothing else happens. The first autonomous exploration vehicle arrives on the surface with a very clear mission: To raise the electrical backbone that will power the entire future underground city on Mars.
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This mission begins with the deployment of a massive solar farm. The spacecraft didn’t bring traditional rigid panels, but rather thin-film flexible solar panels, rolled up like carpets. As soon as they land, two rovers work in tandem, connected by a cable, in a synchronized mechanical ballet.
They unroll strips of high-efficiency photovoltaic cells directly onto Martian dust, anchoring the material to the ground to withstand the planet’s thin, fast-moving winds.
So it’s not just two rovers. A small army of ten vehicles is expanding the farm day after day, covering several hectares with these solar leaves.
In less than a week, this robotic front assembles a farm of about 10 acres, capable of generating around 5 megawatts.
That’s enough energy to power a small city, and it’s the first major engineering success behind the future underground city on Mars.
But Mars is not kind to solar panels. Planet-scale dust storms can blot out the sun for weeks.
A solar farm is perfect for the initial phase, but it cannot be the only permanent energy source. For an underground city on Mars that operates 24 hours a day, a source that doesn’t depend on sunlight is needed.
The solution arrives on the second large ship. Inside it lies the heart of the future hybrid energy grid: a compact nuclear reactor, designed specifically for hostile environments like Mars. It’s not a complicated pressurized water reactor, full of giant circuits.
It is a solid uranium core, a kilopower fission design, which uses a heat pipe to transfer the intense heat from the core to a simple piston engine.
This piston activates a generator and creates a constant flow of electricity. However, this reactor cannot be exposed on the surface. Before it can function, it needs protection.
The robots dig a deep hole, lower the reactor, and use the Martian soil itself as a shield. Buried beneath the red sand, connected by cables to the growing base, the reactor provides continuous power, immune to the Martian night and dust storms.
In practice, the underground city on Mars is born with a hybrid grid. During the day, the solar farm provides large amounts of energy.
At night or during periods of low light, the nuclear reactor takes center stage. Together, the two sources give the base the energy reliability needed to take the next step: to leave “outpost mode” and begin building a civilization.
Mars is not a friendly place to live outdoors. Lacking a magnetic field, its surface is constantly bombarded by solar and cosmic radiation. The atmosphere is too thin to filter this radiation and retain heat.
Temperature variations can reach tens of degrees in just a few hours. In practice, attempting to build a city exposed to the surface would be asking for radiation and cold to destroy any hope of long-term survival.
Therefore, the solution chosen for 2035 is clear: don’t build upwards, build downwards. The underground city on Mars needs to be built in sealed tunnels and caves, where the rock and soil act as a natural shield.
That’s where the third large spacecraft comes in, bringing the star of Martian construction: a next-generation tunnel boring machine, designed by artificial intelligence and assembled like an underground factory on wheels. This machine not only excavates, but also removes debris and leaves behind a nearly finished tunnel.
Measuring approximately 100 meters in length, it is installed in a launch pit and prepares to make the first cut, the first “street” of the Marte Alfa Base.
Drilling on Mars is not the same as on Earth. The lower gravity changes the way the machine is pushed against the rock.
The tunnel boring machine uses hydraulic claws to grip the tunnel walls themselves, anchoring itself while its rotating head crushes the ground ahead and expels a constant stream of fragmented rock behind it.
Automated trains haul this debris away, clearing the way for the machine to move forward without interruption.
At the same time, robotic arms lift segments of concrete and line the walls, forming the finished tunnel as the excavation progresses. The obvious question is: where does all this concrete come from? The answer is simple and elegant.
The very rock excavated by the tunnel boring machine becomes raw material, processed in a concrete plant on the surface that 3D prints the segments to be installed in the next section of the tunnel. The train that carries debris away returns carrying the finished pieces made from that same rock.
Still, a concrete tunnel isn’t enough. Concrete isn’t airtight. To transform this space into a breathable environment, a perfect seal is needed. The engineers use a two-component epoxy mixed with Martian dust.
Sprayed onto the joints, this material reacts and forms a foam that penetrates each microcrack. The hardened foam becomes a continuous sealant that transforms the tunnel into a pressurized cocoon.
In this way, the first sections of the underground city on Mars gain air, controlled temperature, and protection against radiation.
The tunnels function as main streets. The tunnel boring machine then proceeds to excavate large side caverns, which become central halls, laboratories, living quarters, and common areas.
In one year, the result is a network of tunnels, intersections, side streets, exits to the surface, and even a Martian elevator connecting the underground city on Mars to the world above.
Viewed from the outside, almost nothing reveals the scale of the project; beneath the dust lies a multi-level city, shielded from radiation and ready to be filled with life.
Shelter isn’t enough. An underground city on Mars needs to breathe, drink, and have a way to return home. The next piece of the puzzle is a life-support factory, a chemical refinery built on the surface to transform the Martian environment into raw materials for civilization.
The first target is water. On Mars, it’s not flowing on the surface, but frozen in glaciers buried beneath the dust. Drilling robots, veritable mechanical “moles,” descend meters deep to find deposits of ancient ice.
When they encounter a large glacier, pumps begin to melt the ice and bring liquid water to the surface. For the first time in a long time, water is flowing on Mars to supply an underground city.
The refinery receives this water and, along with energy from the solar farm and reactor, initiates vital processes. A pipeline transports water to the central modules.
Meanwhile, giant compressors harvest carbon dioxide directly from the thin atmosphere, freezing the CO₂ and concentrating it.
With water and energy, the first chemical “miracle” occurs: electrolysis. The factory uses electricity to break water molecules into oxygen and hydrogen.
Oxygen is separated, compressed, and stored. This is the air that the colonists will breathe in the tunnels of the underground city on Mars. The hydrogen goes to the next stage, the Sabatier reaction.
In this process, hydrogen combines with carbon dioxide to produce two things: more water and methane. The water returns to the cycle, replenishing the stock. The methane becomes rocket fuel, the same type of fuel that allowed the spacecraft to get there.
For the first time, a rocket is refueled on another planet using local resources, opening a road back to Earth for those living in the underground city on Mars.
With energy, shelter, water, and air guaranteed, what’s missing is what transforms an outpost into a home: food. The same factory that produces water, air, and fuel begins to extract nitrogen and generate fertilizers, closing the agricultural cycle.
In the most protected levels of the underground city on Mars, the first farms emerge. Called the “green heart” of the city, they are controlled environments, illuminated by a “synthetic sun,” and powered by the constant energy of the nuclear reactor.
There, the first Martian seeds are planted. The cultivation structures, irrigation systems, temperature and CO₂ control are operated almost entirely by robots.
Over time, these farms begin to produce real crops, the result of a closed ecosystem where nothing is wasted.
Water is recycled, nutrients circulate, and organic waste becomes input. At this point, the underground city on Mars officially ceases to be entirely dependent on cargo ships for survival; it becomes capable of producing a significant portion of its own food.
This agricultural factory doesn’t just produce food. It’s the boundary between a “temporary base” and a “permanent city.”
From the moment the underground city on Mars is able to generate energy, air, water, and food locally, the countdown to the arrival of the first human colonists is officially underway.
While Mars silently transforms beneath the dust, a new type of spacecraft is being prepared on Earth. It’s not a cargo ship for machines, it’s a passenger vehicle.
Inside, the most precious cargo of all: the first colonists who will live in the underground city on Mars, built for them by an army of robots.
After months of traveling between two worlds, the spacecraft lands near the Mars Alpha Base. Inside, everything is ready. Clean, pressurized, and illuminated tunnels connect the living areas, main halls, farms, and technical corridors. Water reservoirs and oxygen tanks maintain the internal atmosphere. The hybrid power grid keeps everything running.
The colonists descend, traverse the rugged landscape of the Martian surface, and enter the airlock that leads underground.
The pressure is equalized, the inner door opens, and they see for the first time the underground city on Mars that the robots have built.
Wide streets, metal corridors, modular housing units, the green glow of the farms, and the constant sound of machinery working in the background.
It is the first human home on another planet built almost entirely without human hands, a direct testament to the creative capacity of the species.
Ultimately, the first underground city on Mars is not just a daring feat of engineering. It’s a new way of thinking about colonization, construction, and survival.
It is born buried beneath the sand, shielded from radiation, nourished by a combination of sun and nuclear core, supplied by water from ancient glaciers, and sustained by underground farms.
All of this is being built by machines decades after the idea of a city on Mars seemed like just a distant dream.
The underground city on Mars becomes living proof that it is possible to take a hostile world, full of limitations, and transform it into a closed ecosystem where energy, air, water, and food are produced from local resources.
It’s a full-scale laboratory of what humanity can achieve when it combines robotics, chemistry, energy, and long-term planning.
And you, would you consider living in an underground city on Mars knowing that everything was built by robots before you arrived?
Bom de imaginacao se vive…,em Marte
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