Neither Elon Musk Nor Anybody Else Will Ever Colonize Mars

Mars does not have a magnetosphere. Any discussion of humans ever settling the red planet can stop right there, but of course it never does. Do you have a low-cost plan for, uh, creating a gigantic active dynamo at Mars’s dead core? No? Well. It’s fine. I’m sure you have some other workable, sustainable plan for shielding live Mars inhabitants from deadly solar and cosmic radiation, forever. No? Huh. Well then let’s discuss something else equally realistic, like your plan to build a condo complex in Middle Earth.

OK so you still want to talk about Mars. Fine. Let’s imagine that Mars’s lack of a magnetic field somehow is not an issue. Would you like to try to simulate what life on Mars would be like? Step one is to clear out your freezer. Step two is to lock yourself inside of it. (You can bring your phone, if you like!) When you get desperately hungry, your loved ones on the outside may deliver some food to you no sooner than nine months after you ask for it. This nine-month wait will also apply when you start banging on the inside of the freezer, begging to be let out.

Congratulations: You have now simulated—you have now died, horribly, within a day or two, while simulating—what life on Mars might be like, once you solve the problem of it not having even one gasp worth of breathable air, anywhere on the entire planet. We will never live on Mars.

Let’s discuss the breathable-air problem. Earth’s atmosphere is rich with oxygen due in large part to all of the green plants photosynthesizing here. We got green plants out the ass. Some people have the idea that making Mars’s atmosphere breathable is as simple as introducing some green plants to it: They will eat up sunlight and produce oxygen, and then people can breathe it. That is uhhhhh the circle of life (?) or whatever. They call this idea “terraforming.”

At this point in our discussion I must acquaint you with two dear friends of mine. Their names are The South Pole, and The Summit Of Mount Everest.

The South Pole is around 2,800 meters above sea level, and like everywhere else on Earth around 44 million miles closer to the sun than any point on Mars. It sits deep down inside the nutritious atmosphere of a planet teeming with native life. Compared to the very most hospitable place on Mars it is an unimaginably fertile Eden. Here is a list of the plant-life that grows there: Nothing. Here is a list of all the animals that reproduce there: None.

Even with all the profound advantages the South Pole enjoys compared to Mars, even on a planet where living things have spent billions and billions of years figuring out how to adapt to and thrive within an incredibly diverse array of biomes—on a planet where giant tubeworms the size of NBA basket stanchions have colonized lightless ocean depths at which a human would be crushed like a grape under a piano—the South Pole simply cannot support complex life. It is too cold, and its relationship with sunlight too erratic, for living things to sustain themselves there. On astronomical scales it is for all practical purposes in the exact same spot as some of the most life-rich and biodiverse places in the known universe, and yet no species has established a permanent self-sustaining population there. Ever.

The summit of Mount Everest is around 8,800 meters above sea level, squarely within those balmy Earth latitudes that get nice long sunlit days all year round. Compared to anyplace on Mars it is the very womb of God. No plant life grows there. No animals live there.

Even with steady year-round subtropical sunlight, even with conditions infinitely more nurturing than those found anywhere on Mars, the summit of Mount Everest cannot support complex life. It’s too cold; the air is too thin; there is no liquid water for plants and animals to drink. Standing on the top of Mount Everest, a person can literally look at places where plants and animals happily grow and live and reproduce, yet no species has established a permanent self-sustaining population on the upper slopes of Everest. Even microbes avoid it.

Life on earth writ large, the grand network of life, is a greater and more dynamic terraforming engine than any person could ever conceive. It has been operating ceaselessly for several billions of years. It has not yet terraformed the South Pole or the summit of Mount Everest. On what type of timeframe were you imagining that the shoebox of lichen you send to Mars was going to transform Frozen Airless Radioactive Desert Hell into a place where people could grow wheat?

People have this idea that life is like some kind of magical force; that the reason Mars does not have life is that life has not yet gone there; that once life goes to a place, then it just figures out how to go on living there. This, I think, is a consequence of more people having gotten their science education from the movie character Ian Malcolm than from actual science classes. More generously, it is a testament to humans having formulated nearly all of their ideas about the nature of life from the absolute easiest (and only known) place to have life.

In any case Malcolm was exactly, precisely wrong when he said “Life … [Jeff Goldblum stammering] … finds a way.” Sure, yes, when “life” is “bacteria” and the challenge before it is how to propagate inside of my house, yes: In that case, life finds a way. In the bigger picture, no, life does not find a way. It has not found a way, even at the prokaryotic level, anywhere else humans have figured out how to look, except here on Earth.

Finding ourselves on this lush, beautiful, abundant planet is not some testament to the ingenuity and resourcefulness of life. Nor is it a coincidence. This is where life could happen; we are here because this is where we could be. Even here, even where things were as comfortably laid out as our brightest minds could ever imagine, it took billions of years, reproductions beyond counting, before any individual life got advanced enough to think something as silly as “Hey, let’s go live on Mars.”

Humankind will never establish a permanent human settlement on Mars. Ever. Moreover there is no need to try to come up with some way to build one there.

The doomsday scenarios that science-fiction writers—and their contemptible counterparts, futurists—have imagined would necessitate an escape from Earth can be broken down into two categories. First there are the ones that would not come close to making Earth as hellish and inhospitable as Mars. These include global nuclear wars, food-chain collapses, extermination-level pandemics, and eugenic boogeymen like “overpopulation.” None of these present a scenario in which Earth all at once completely ceases having breathable oxygen, for example, or suddenly no longer enjoys a magnetosphere. In the aftermath of even the worst of these scenarios, if you were picking one of the two planets to engineer into habitability, the Earth would remain the infinitely superior option. For planning purposes, the planet to prepare for use as a base of survival in an apocalyptic event is the one where you’re reading this blog.

Second are the scenarios that are not even worth considering. These are your planet-destroying asteroid strikes. Let’s be optimistic and generous and say that, over the course of 500,000 years of species-wide concerted effort that would more than exhaust the resources of the planet where we already live, Mars could be “terraformed” into a place where a permanent human settlement could eke out a horrible nightmare of a sustainable existence for a while, pointlessly, telling each other sad stories of what it was like to live in the endless biodiversity and beauty of the world Mars’s loser inhabitants ruined for the cause of abandoning it. OK great. Truly a beautiful dream you got there. Unfortunately it only makes sense if you can anticipate a planet-destroying asteroid strike 500,001 years ahead of time, but also cannot avert or mitigate it in any other way. Otherwise you are simply rolling the dice that the planet-destroying asteroid strike will not happen at any time in the interim, while you busy yourself rendering the Earth uninhabitable for the sake of leaving it for someplace even worse.

But more importantly: There is no scenario in which humans can try to colonize Mars and also survive on Earth long enough to go live in that colony! I am sorry to be the Bad News Guy here. But there you have it: The effort to colonize Mars will help ensure nobody survives long enough to live in that colony. That makes the idea of trying to build that colony morally reprehensible.

In these latter days everybody is familiar with concepts like the carbon footprint, sustainability, and the like. Measures of the ecological cost of the things we do. One of the most irksome problems bedeviling Earth’s biosphere at present is the outrageous cost of many aspects of many human lifestyles. Society is gradually and too late awakening to, for example, the reality that there is an inexcusable, untenable cost to shipping coffee beans all around the world from the relatively narrow belt in which they grow so that everybody can have a hot cup o’ joe every morning. Or that the planet is being heated and poisoned by people’s expectation of cheap steaks and year-round tomatoes and a new iPhone every year, and that as a consequence its water-cycle and weather systems are unraveling. Smearing the natural world flat and pouring toxic waste across it so that every American can drive a huge car from their too-large air-conditioned freestanding single-family home to every single other place they might choose to go turns out to be incompatible with the needs of basically all the other life we’ve ever detected in the observable universe. Whoops!

All of what makes, say, the lifestyle of your average McMansion owner in Ashburn, Va. anathema to life, writ large, applies a billionfold to each person in a theoretical Mars colony. Their carbon footprints would be the size of entire nations, by the time they even pressed the first normal human-sized actual footprint into the red planet’s sterile frozen regolith. Shipping a pound of coffee from the Bean Belt to Connecticut is nothing at all compared to shipping flour to goddamn Mars.

This is only part of why that other spooky doomsday scenario, the sun’s inevitable expansion and consumption of the Earth, is also not worth considering as a reason to plan a Martian relocation. That is not even going to appreciably begin happening for something like four billion more years. That is such an incredibly long time from now, buddy! The human race has only existed for something like 300,000 years. Four billion years is 13 thousand times as long as that. Four billion years ago, the Earth was a largely molten volcanic blob with no life more complex than microorganisms on it. Another 3.75 billion years elapsed before the first dinosaurs showed up. You could fit the entire lifespan of humanity (so far) 216 times over—just into the gap between when the dinosaurs all died out and when humanity first shows up in the fossil record.

You see where I am going with this. Spoiler alert! There will not be any human beings around when Sun Get Large even begins to become a problem. Planning around this issue is like some primordial amoeba trying to score some choice oceanfront Pangaean real estate against the possibility that humans would gentrify it in the 1990s. Even in the most optimistic plausible daydream, in which some descendants of humanity still exist four billion years from now to concern themselves with the ballooning sun, they will not be anything like us; they might even be all fucked-up and gross; they can go to hell. In any case you can unpack the canned goods.

None of what’s in the preceding uh 38 or however many exhausting paragraphs is unknown to Elon Musk, the mega-rich clod and dullard famous for buying things for more than they’re worth and then making them worse, who tweeted over the weekend some silly shit about his Martian colony, ah—what even is the word here? Plan? Vision? Intention? Anyway this is a thing that he thinks must and can and will happen. He sees his SpaceX company’s work as part of the endeavor to colonize Mars someday.

This doofus’s birdbrained space-colony takes are important to know; that alone is a very awful and embarrassing true thing to say about the state of things. Capitalist society permits such profound inequalities of wealth and power, and the U.S. has allowed its public sector to lapse into such abysmal decay, that a guy like Musk exerts a terrible gravity on the world around him: What he is interested in seeing done, some number of other people will work on doing, because that work pays better than nearly all others. Whatever pit he wants to throw his money into, some appalling volume of the world’s resources and human labors will follow it down.

Those labors will be, for the people doing it under Musk, basically suicidal. A revealing and chilling phrase in his tweets about this stuff is “the probable lifespan of consciousness”; increasing this is what Musk views as the essential bleak and hideous goal of interplanetary colonization. What percentage of the human race—or any of the non-sentient life forms—need survive to ensure the mere continuity of consciousness?

This ordering of priorities, in which the sacrosanct goal is to extend “the probable lifespan of consciousness” and space colonization the means, is above all else a monstrous permission structure for this outspoken bigot’s vile social ideas, a kind of reductio ad absurdum for what’s been doing business as “effective altruism” for a while now. The fantasy—and it is a fantasy—isn’t one of space travel and exploration and some bright Star Trek future for humanity, but one of winnowing and eugenics, of cold actuarial lifeboat logic, of ever greater reallocation from the dwindling many to the thriving few. That’s the world as Elon Musk and his cohort want it; Mars colonization is just a pretext.

In a saner society, a rich guy with Musk’s well-known and unapologetically expounded views would sooner find himself under a guillotine than atop a space agency with the power to dragoon the world’s resources into his k-hole John Galt cosplay. The certainty that he will never make another planet habitable is no comfort to the rest of us, when in the act of trying he may do the opposite to this one. The doomsday scenario is coming from inside the house. I hope he dies on Mars.