Life on Mars?

    A little more than 40 years ago, Dubai was a tiny pearl-fishing village lined with dirt roads. Now it's the largest and most futuristic city in the world, the jewel of the United Arab Emirates (UAE). From manmade, palm tree-shaped archipelagos to jetpack-wearing firefighters and the world's tallest building, the city has a reputation for taking on insanely ambitious projects and executing them with swiftness and expertise. Now, the UAE has a vision to build an even crazier city—on Mars.
    Dubbed "Mars 2117," the UAE Martian city isn't slated for construction anytime soon. In fact, it is slated for sometime in the next 100 years.  "'Mars 2117" is a seed of an idea that is being sown today to reap the fruit of new generations led by a passion for science and advancing human knowledge.  The UAE envisions a Chicago-size city of about 600,000 people.
   Mars is not for the faint of heart. To date, only the United States has successfully landed any spacecraft on the red planet, although Russia and Europe have tried. Then there are the challenges of getting astronauts there safely, feeding them, housing them, and keeping them sane.
    The UAE's space agency, created in 2014, plans to send a spacecraft named Hopeinto orbit around Mars in 2021. The nation doesn’t have its own rockets to launch, but it does have a lot of money—and a track record of making big dreams come true. And, for better or worse, the UAE lacks a lot of the bureaucratic and political structures that can slow NASA's progress. If there's anyone who can build a city on another planet, it might be the country that's built the most extreme city on Earth.