Settling Mars

 Another extract from Robert Zubrin's  article The Mars Dream is Back  (See the previous extract with my comments here)

Mars can and should be settled. But it is important to be clear about how and why this should be done.

Elon Musk has propounded the idea that thousands of Starship flights should rapidly land a million people on Mars to create a metropolis that will “preserve the light of consciousness” after the human race is destroyed on Earth. This idea, which Musk says is inspired by Isaac Asimov’s noteworthy Foundation science fiction trilogy, is seriously misconceived.

In Asimov’s novels, a group of scientists are sent to settle the planet Terminus (also the name Musk has suggested for his colony) on the edge of the galaxy, so that after the anticipated collapse of the galactic empire their descendants can emerge to reconstruct civilization. It’s a grand read. But it is not applicable to the task at hand.

A human Mars civilization cannot be created in the manner of the D-Day landings, delivering settlers to land on the hostile shore 100,000 people at a time. The troops on Normandy beach could be supported from England by Liberty ships capable of carrying 10,000 tons of cargo each across the channel in a matter of hours. In contrast, Starships will be able to carry only about 100 tons of cargo from Earth to Mars and will take 6 to 8 months to perform the transit. Consequently, a Mars settlement of any size cannot be supported from Earth. Before large numbers of people go to the Red Planet, the agricultural and industrial base that are needed to feed, clothe, and house them will have to be developed, built, and up and running. The settlement of Mars must therefore occur organically, as the settlement of America did, with small groups of pioneers creating the first farms and industries that provide the basis for supporting ever larger waves of settlers to follow.

Furthermore, Martian civilization is very unlikely to emerge in the form of a million-person metropolis, as any city of that size requires a well-developed system of long-distance transportation to provide it with necessary materials. That is why million-person cities on Earth were rare until the invention of railroads. Instead, the initial settlement of Mars is most likely to occur in the form of a multitude of smaller towns, with locations optimized to access different types of material resources, and populations of thousands to tens of thousands, with perhaps 50,000 (the size of Renaissance Florence) representative of a cultural capital.

Regardless of how it is distributed, no Martian million-person civilization could possibly survive the collapse of human civilization on Earth. Technological civilization requires a vast division of labor. Given the multitude of the components and alloys in a good electric wristwatch, it is unlikely that a society of 1 million people could produce one, or even a wristwatch battery, let alone an iPhone.

So, the idea of sending people to Mars to survive the extermination of terrestrial humanity simply won’t work. Furthermore, it is so morally repulsive that its embrace would doom any program so foolish as to adopt it. Coated with ideological skunk essence, its protagonists would appear more like the selfish characters in Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death,” dancing in a castle while everyone outside dies in an epidemic, than the heroes of Asimov’s Foundation series.

We are not going to Mars to desert humanity. We are going to Mars to strengthen humanity — to vastly expand its power to meet all future challenges by establishing new highly-inventive branches of civilization. We are not going to Mars to “preserve the light of consciousness” in an off-world hideaway. We are going to Mars to liberate human minds by opening an unlimited frontier to human hands. We are not going to Mars to party while the Earth burns. We are going to Mars to prevent Earth from burning by showing that there is no need to kill each other fighting over provinces when by invoking our higher natures we can create planets.

Together to Mars, then together with Mars, human freedom will expand into the cosmos.

See my piece from July 2024 Will there ever be a viable colony on Mars, where I come to not dissimilar conclusions.  We might be able to get to Mars (that seems very likely), but the economics of settling on Mars is a different story.  There aren't going to be a thousand ships packed with settlers, because they have nowhere to settle.  There are no grasslands, no forests, no seas.  Just a forbiddingly cold world with a very, very thin and poisonous atmosphere.  Yes, technology will allow us to live in domes, and maybe survive.   But that will be costly, in dollars, and in terms of resources, especially energy.  We will need energy to transform regolith into food and shelter.  We will need time to transform regolith (toxic rubble and sand) into soil.  And even then, for hundreds of years, we will need to grow our plants under protective domes.  Mars is not the New World, with all nature's bounty.  It's a harsh, lethal, dangerous world where mankind will have to work hard to make ourselves a garden. 

Note that Zubrin does NOT see Mars as a bolthole for billionaires (which of course it isn't and won't be for centuries) and also regards the very idea as "morally repulsive" (which it is.)