As famous scientist Dr. A. Schwarzenegger once said: “Get your [redacted] to Mars.” and this is just the perfect way to convey the energy of people who have been fascinated with the idea of living on the red planet, but there’s a paradox involved in trying to make this dream come true.
Mars Has Been in Our Sights as a Second Home Forever
The idea that Mars is relatively similar to Earth predates scientific evidence to support that idea by a long shot. In the late 1800s, as telescopes became powerful enough, Giovanni Virginio Schiaparelli observed what he called “canali” or channels on the surface of Mars using a telescope that was almost not powerful enough to make out the surface of the red planet.
“Today, we know the ‘canali’ are an optical illusion. However, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the idea of artificial structures on Mars fueled fascination with the possibility of intelligent life next door.”
In 1912, Edgar Rice Burroughs’s A Princess of Mars told the story of a Confederate soldier transported to “Barsoom”, the native word for Mars, and having grand adventures there. Clearly, people were full of hope that we weren’t alone in our solar system, much less the known universe. It’s a rip-roaring science-fantasy story that’s still a great read today, but sadly the tantalizing idea that something like Barsoom could be a reality didn’t last long.
After our telescopes got much better, and particularly after we sent unmanned craft to Mars, the idea that there were already intelligent beings living there was pretty much put to rest, but that didn’t put a damper on the idea that we could still live on Mars. There’s always the sense that if the history of our solar system had gone a little differently, Mars would be the planet teaming with life, and this article would be about how maybe the Earth could have had life on it.
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I remember reading Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy in high school, and just marveling at the idea of slowly turning the red planet green and blue over the course of centuries. Likewise, in Anthony Weir’s The Martian a stranded astronaut tries to survive for months on the surface of Mars with very few resources, as he awaits rescue.
One of my favorite books is Frederik Pohl’s Man Plus, a 1976 novel about an astronaut who undergoes an augmentation process to transform him into what’s essentially a Martian—someone designed to live in Martian conditions, as they work to make the planet habitable for regular humans.
But—and this is a key point—these are just dreams and stories, which may only have the thinnest connections to reality. So how hard would it actually be to terraform Mars so that humans could live on it like we do on Earth?
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What Would Terraforming Mars Involve?
Until a few billion years ago, according to scientists, Mars was on a parallel course to Earth. Both planets are in the goldilocks zone, though Mars is further away and only gets half as much solar energy as we do.
At one point, both planets had thick insulating atmospheres that allowed for liquid water on the surface, and both planets had the organic chemicals needed for life. Though we still don’t know exactly how life started on Earth or how it (presumably) started elsewhere in the universe, we know that you need certain conditions as a precursor to it and both Earth and Mars had those favorable conditions.
Then, something catastrophic happened to Mars at some point in its history. Its magnetic field collapsed 3-4 billion years ago, and solar winds stripped away its atmosphere, leaving a cold and barren planet with an atmospheric pressure only 0.6% that of Earth’s. So the first step would presumably be to restore a thick atmosphere to Mars and let it warm up enough for water to flow freely on the surface.
There are lots of proposals on how to do this, such as Elon Musk’s idea of nuking Mars, or the notion of bio-engineering extremophile organisms like algae that can release carbon dioxide from the planet’s surface.
The problem is that the “math ain’t mathing” on these plans because they require such enormous amounts of CO2 that there still won’t be enough after all that effort. There are talks of crashing asteroids or comets into Mars, or deep excavations to release more gas—the plans are varied and many.
For me, the hurdle here is mainly energy and materials. Personally, I think we’d need to reach the first rung on the Kardashev Scale before we’d have the energy and material resources to attempt a global transformation of Mars.
It will also take contributions from just about every discipline—genetics, AI, robotics, materials science, even social sciences like psychology, to create a roadmap to that very distant destination. Terraforming Mars (assuming it’s possible in principle) will be the biggest human project in history by a long shot, and I suspect most of it will be done without direct human intervention, but rather tireless machines.
That said, establishing colonies and industrial capacity on Mars is the first step towards that eventual goal, and that’s something we can do with the technology of today, but it’s still going to be a hard sell.
The Real-World Incentives Are Weak
Having a whole second planet to call home is literally priceless, and on the grand scale of history it’s worth it in principle. However, we don’t live and allocate resources on timelines that span centuries or millennia. Leaders are in power for four or five years at a time, there are pressing problems on Earth that make it hard to justify significant investment in something like a small Mars base, much less a (very) long-term plan to convert an alien planet to be livable.
It’s not so much about technological, engineering, scientific, or even energy obstacles. Our entire economic and global political regime would have to change to take on a real-deal terraforming project. Like the people who built the pyramids, there would have to be a strong external motivator to tackle something extraordinarily difficult, involving lots of sacrifice.
Just as the Apollo program was driven by Cold War competition rather than pure scientific curiosity, a Mars colonization project would likely need a similar geopolitical or economic incentive.
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Paradoxically, Developing Terraforming Tech for Mars Could Help Earth
The paradox here, though, is that the more we spend time and energy thinking up solutions to the conundrum that is Martian colonization and eventual terraforming, the less likely it is we’ll actually need to do it.
There’s not a single related innovation I can think of for the colonization project that wouldn’t somehow help us on Earth right now. Robots that can autonomously build human habitats from local materials? Yeah, we need that here. Genetic engineering to make people hardier, healthier, and otherwise better equipped for a harsh universe? Sounds good on any planet.
Those heavy-duty Starship rockets that SpaceX are working on are part of a plan to get to Mars, but they might as well be part of a plan to jumpstart the process of moving our most damaging, energy-hungry industries into orbit.
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If we can figure out how to divert asteroids to crash them into Mars, it means we can figure out how to put resource-rich asteroids into Earth orbit and mine them. I could list hypothetical examples all day here, but you probably get the idea.
The Dream of Mars Is What Matters
The history of science is littered with examples of people who discovered amazing solutions while working on an entirely different problem. Alexander Fleming was studying bacteria when he accidentally discovered penicillin. Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen was messing around with cathode rays when he accidentally X-rayed his hand. Superglue was created while trying to make clear plastic gun sights.
Whether we actually go to Mars or not, whether we ever try to terraform it or not, it’s a big mistake to only think about the destination, when most of the value of this exercise is in the journey along the way,
The romantic sci-fi lover in me wishes that it really is within the power of human beings to reach out to another world and reshape it into a home for us. I also know that if humans have a future that’s long enough, then eventually we’ll have to reckon with how dangerous our universe is and that we’ll need to hedge our bets as a species and spread further than our solar system.
You can extend this line of thinking to Mars being a practice run for any of the numerous extrasolar Earth-like planets we’ve discovered. Perhaps Mars is even harder to transform than most of them would be.
While it’s natural to concentrate on immediate problems here on Earth, I think the next time you’re quick to be dismissive about talks related to living on Mars one day, remember that the history books tell a neater story than reality, and that our journey through time isn’t a straight line, but more like a maze with many dead ends, but also many unexpected treasures.
