Will humans inhibit Mars instead of
saving Earth from the ecological catastrophe?
Recently, SpaceX held a top-secret
“Mars Workshop” in Boulder, Colorado, to discuss what it would take to colonize
Mars. Although the deliberations of the workshop were kept quiet, in the past
SpaceX founder Elon Musk and other prominent figures, including renowned
physicist Stephen Hawking, have stressed the importance of establishing a
sustainable outpost of human civilization on the Red Planet. “If there’s a
third world war we want to make sure there’s enough of a seed of human
civilization somewhere else to bring it back and shorten the length of the dark
ages,” according to Musk. Hawking believes that “[w]ith climate change, overdue
asteroid strikes, epidemics and population growth, our own planet is
increasingly precarious,” and that we must colonize a new planet in the next
100 years. “The Call of Mars” by Astronaut Buzz Aldrin advocates for a
“comprehensive plan that would lead to permanent human settlement on Mars in
the next 25 years.” Tim Urban, the writer behind the long-form blog Wait But
Why, sums up the situation with the following metaphor: “[a]ll of our eggs are
on one planet, let’s get life insurance for the species.”
The mission to colonize Mars runs
into three major challenges. First, likening a colony on Mars to life insurance
is misleading. If the earth does overheat to the point that we all fry or
becomes so polluted that we all choke, there will be no way to move the world’s
population to Mars. Not even one child per family. Rather, the idea is that the
survival of the human species will be ensured; the select few that go to Mars
will survive, procreate, and gradually build a new population. Elon Musk’s most
optimistic estimate is that SpaceX will transport one million people to Mars in
the next 100 years. The proper analogy is to the United States' Cold War plan
for nuclear warfare—to rush a few thousand "special" people to
bunkers, leaving most of humanity to be nuked.
