The problem of overpopulation of the Earth is becoming more relevant every decade, especially in the 21st century. By 2022, the world’s population was already more than 8 billion people. Although this is still quite a far number from the maximum possible population calculated by scientists in the field of agronomic sciences, but the population growth rate is already comparable to the demographic crisis at a constant exponential rate. According to research in the field of demography, 9 billion people will be expected in 2050, 10 billion by the end of the 21st century.
Simultaneously with this demographic process, space rocket science and space exploration have been developing at a fairly high pace over the past 70 years. If the beginning of this era was laid by the development of engineers of the USSR, then in the future the primacy in these branches of activity of the civilization of earthlings for many years passed to the scientific world of the USA in the face of NASA. The 21st century was marked by a rapid growth of interest in practical space and planetary research from a number of countries that had not previously claimed a special place in space and planetary science – Japan, South Korea, China, India, the UAE, Saudi Arabia. The European Space Agency (ESA) has also taken a special place in the development of space exploration projects.
Special interest in planetology is shown to the planet Mars, the natural space object closest to Earth, on which physicochemical and climatic conditions contribute to the development of scientific thought about colonization in the future. Mars is in an orbit only 56 million kms away from Earth, i.e., 0.38 astronomical units (au). The diameter of Mars is only two times smaller than the diameter of the Earth, and the gravity is approximately 39.4 per cents of the Earth's. This makes it possible to consider this planet as the most realistic place for testing the primary experience of colonization of terrestrial space objects (planets and natural satellites with a solid planetary crust, with gravity from 0.3 to 1.3 of the Earth and acceptable physico-chemical parameters of the soil and atmosphere for the construction of artificial structures and their autonomous maintenance complexes). Although the chemical composition of the atmosphere of Mars differs significantly from that of Earth, but in combination with the temperature regime of the "equatorial" and "tropical" zones, as well as the physico-chemical composition of the planet's soils, it is realistic in the future to create and launch evolutionary terraforming projects by breeding special varieties of certain plant species capable of growing and reproducing in the primary physical-chemical and climatic conditions and gradually changing the chemical composition of the planet with an increase in the humidity coefficient of the lower layers of the atmosphere.
However, along with the technological problems of creating a colony on Mars, it is also necessary to solve the problems of forming a colony society – economic, social, psychological. This set of problems will closely depend on the form of colonization and architectural solutions that make it possible to adapt Earthlings to fundamentally distinctive living conditions as efficiently as possible, since a Martian colony will for a long time represent a purely urban cameral system of closely interacting small settlements.
Thus, the Mars-2222 project is designed to analyze one of the complex models of the creation and development of a Martian society in the form of a colony – technology and architectural design, philosophical, psychological, social and cultural parameters of this partially closed society.