2 . What are your retirement plans? Keep working? Get more exercise? Or learn something new? You may put them on hold. There’s a chance that, sooner or later, you might have to move further than you were thinking, as far as mars.

On Thursday, National Geographic will show the first-ever Mars show home, giving earthlings (地球人) an idea of what their life could look like on the Red Planet. In the not-so-distant year of 2037, the igloo-shaped structure could be the home of your future.

It shows a house built using recycled spacecraft (航天器) parts and Martian soil, called regolith, which has been microwaved into bricks. Some parts of the home are recognizable—a kitchen, a bedroom—but there are fundamental differences that are important to human survival.

As the Martian atmosphere is around one hundredth as thick as the Earth’s, people will need permanent (永久的) shelter from the sun; society will move largely indoors. Most buildings will be connected by underground passages and the houses won’t have windows. The homes will have simulated solar lighting, or natural light that has been bent several times.

Walls will need to be 10 to 12 feet thick to protect people from dangerous rays (光线) that can pass through six feet of steel, and a double air-locked entrance to keep the home under proper pressure.

“We don’t think of our houses as things that keep us alive, but on Mars your house will be a survival centre,” says Stephen Petranek, author of How We’ll Live on Mars. This is not just the stuff of sci-fi. “10 to 20 years from now there will certainly be people, on Mars.” Petranek says.

“We’ve had the technology for 30 years to land people on Mars, but we haven’t had the will,” Petranek says. But two main factors have “completely swung public attitudes”.

The private companies’ participation has forced government agencies to speed up their game, and influential films such as Gravity and The Martian have caught society’s eye.

6 . Do you want to travel back in time? What about traveling into the future? There’s an easy way to do it.

One way you can make a time travel journey is by writing a letter to your future self to be opened in the future. To your future self, the letter will be a visit to the past. What can be gained by writing a letter to yourself? It depends on how good your letter is. You have the chance to say something to your future self. What would you want to communicate? You’ll be able to talk to yourself 5, 10, 15 years down the road. There may be instructions for your future self, or you may have goals that you will want to check up on.

There are a lot of things you could include in your letter or letters to yourself. The more you include, the better the letter will be to you. Here are some ideas of things to include in your letter:

Your thoughts and feelings about life, religion, politics, society, etc; Your feelings for your family; Your likes and dislikes; Your dreams; The type of person you want yourself to become...

Be creative with what you put in your letter. Include a picture of yourself or family to show the period from which the letter came.

You can store your letter in a number of different ways. You can give your letter to a friend or family member to keep and mail to you. If you can get others to take part, have them write letters to themselves as well and ask someone to be the letter holder until it’s time to send the letters. You can also use a service online to store your letter and e-mail it to you.

Make the most of your letter writing, and you’ll help your future self make the most of the present.

7 . What will man be like in the future-in 5,000 or even 50,000 years? We can only make guesses, but we can be sure that he will be different from what he is today, for man is slowly changing all the time.

Let us take an example. Man, even five hundred years ago, was shorter than he is today. Now, on average（平均），men are about three inches（英尺）taller. Again, in the modern world we use brains a great deal. Even so, we still make use of only about 20% of the brain’s capacity（容量）.As time goes on, however, we shall have to use our brains more and more, and eventually we shall need larger ones! This is likely to bring about a physical change to the head, especially the forehead, will grow larger.

Nowadays our eyes are used very often. In fact, we use them so much that they become weaker and we have to wear glasses. But over a very long period of time it is likely that man’s eyes will grow stronger.

On the other hand, we tend to make less use of our arms and legs. These, as a result, are likely to grow weaker. At the same time, however, our fingers will grow more sensitive because they are used a great deal in modern life.

But what about hair? This will probably disappear from the body altogether in course of time because it does not serve a useful purpose any longer. In the future, then, both sexes are likely to be bald（光头的）.

Perhaps all this shows that future man will not be a very attractive being to look at! This may well be true. No matter how great the change is, future man will still have a lot in common with us.

8 . Do you want to live another 100 years or more？Some experts say that scientific advances will one day enable humans to last tens of years beyond what is now seen as the natural limit of the human life span.

“I think we are knocking at the door of immortality(永生),”said Michael Zey，a Montclair State University business professor and author of two books on the future. “I think by 2075 we will see it and that's a conservative estimate（保守的估计）.”

At the conference in San Francisco，Donald Louria,a professor at New Jersey Medical School in Newark said advances in using genes as well as nano technology（纳米技术）make it likely that humans will live in the future beyond what has been possible in the past. “There is a great push so that people can live from 120 to 180 years,” he said. “Some have suggested that there is no limit and that people could live to 200 or 300 or 500 years.”

However, many scientists who specialize in aging are doubtful about it and say the human body is just not designed to last past about 120 years. Even with healthier lifestyles and less diseases, they say failure of the brain and organs will finally lead all humans to death.

Scientists also differ on what kind of life the super aged might live." It remains to be seen if you pass 120, you know; could you be healthy enough to have good quality of life？" said Leonard Poon，director of the University of Georgia Gerontology Centre." At present people who could get to that point are not in good health at all."