Some other workable plan
Why do grown-ass people keep talking about colonizing Mars?
Albert Burneko points out how absurd the whole thing is.
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.
Well if we pack a whole lot of suitcases full of breathable air won’t that take care of it?
Or plants? Can’t we pack a whole lot of suitcases full of plants and stick them in Mars and boom there’s our breathable air?
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.
Well…they just didn’t want it badly enough. Humans know how to want stuff.
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?
Um…ten years maybe?
Great! I’ve been saying that for years….
We don’t even do a very good job of building ecosystems on earth; only about 1/3 of them succeed in becoming self-sustaining, healthy systems. We don’t understand ecosystems. Think about the most complex human built thing you know…I usually think of the economy…and realize that it is many orders of magnitude simpler than a prairie or a wetland.
I specialized in building/restoring wetlands. Did I have any of them succeed? Well, one of them might have, in time, if the funding hadn’t been cut off halfway through. The other? I left it in the hands of the Corps when I graduated, and they just sort of shrugged. Of course, since I had floods the first year and drought the second, it wasn’t too healthy anyway. I would have needed decades more to make it work in the standard conditions in northern Texas…which is way more hospitable than Mars.
I am personally opposed to any move anyone might make that might deter Elon Musk from any attempt that he might make to set up house on Mars. (Aside: the likelihood of him being able to install the refuelling and rocket-launching infrastructure there for the return trip is pretty remote, but please don’t tell dear Musk that.) Of course, Trump would never join him in such an endeavour. A Martian sandstorm would likely come along and blow his wig off..
Thank you, Ophelia, Alex Burneko & iknklast. The idea of ‘greening’ Mars (an idea which even Richard Dawkins, who should know better, has found – when talking about Musk, whom he claims to admire – ‘fascinating’ and ‘worthwhile’) — it is comic-book stuff, and almost certainly derives from poring over science-fiction books & comics, and watching films like Star Wars, in adolescence; as well as from a wilful ignorance of ‘nature’ (which is assumed to be merely something that bends readily to human will); and derives, too, from delusions of grandeur, delusions that billionaires appear to be very prone to.
Dawkins on Youtube on the matter: https://youtu.be/AICgrmqGcSE?si=bzl_4A_LsOmSH-Lo
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And here’s another clip, where Dawkins talks about his very ‘favourable impression’ of Musk because of his ‘intelligence’ (always a very important concern for Dawkins), and because Musk is ‘knowledgeable’ and has a ‘concern for the welfare of the world’. One need only pay attention to Musk’s Doge ravages and to his response when asked by the Fox News anchor Brett Baier about the Ukraine war to realise that Musk’s knowledge is very limited, and that he has very little concern for the welfare of the world, his main concern being about the welfare of himself and his companies.
https://youtu.be/PmQR3FWlVqY?si=dvXc5kDkTKIj6bGg
But but but [insert some mush about the human spirit of exploration, new frontiers, reaching for the stars, overcoming impossible odds]. What would we be if we gave that up? We’d be no better than animals! [Sit back and bask in Sorkinesque self-righteousness.]
I think the Antarctica and Mt Everest/Chomolungma comparisons are pretty telling.
Excellent piece. Lots of great observations, delivered with bitter, stinging wit. A bit that jumped out particularly:
So far as we can tell, everywhere but the thin, inhabitable layer of Earth in which we live wants to kill us. (Well, it might not actually possess the drive and desire to do so, but it is still mindlessly, unconcernedly lethal. The presence or not of any volitional animosity is beside the point.)
I’ve mentioned it before, but I highly recommend A City on Mars, by Zach and Kelly Weinersmith. They examine a great many issues with any space colonization efforts, be it Mars, the Moon, Europa, an asteroid, a long-term ship heading to an exoplanet, or something else. Very informative and entertaining, well-researched. I think the tone is, roughly, “This is an insurmountable problem, but if it weren’t, let’s look at this other problem, which is also insurmountable”.
Dawkins is weirdly deluded on this front (or in awe of Musk’s vast wealth which is even more disgusting?). Musk is an absolute ignoramus. Berneko gives a good assessment of what’s possible w/r/t Mars. We would have to make a global effort (not just the US, and not just the one richest person in the world) to transport enough ‘stuff’ from our own habitat (namely Earth) to Mars (where it probably wouldn’t survive long either, including oxygen and water) somehow, which would effectively cripple Earth, and essentially throw it at a planet that doesn’t want it. Not to mention the enormous amount of pollution several hundred (thousand?) rocket launches would do to the atmosphere. Mars however, would be ultimately, in the big picture, be fine. It never supported life in the first place, but the Earth would be ruined. The more people that buy into Musk’s fantasies, the less faith I have in humanity. It simply can’t be done. There are things such as the laws of physics, gravitation, distance, along with many other realities that Musk is hopelessly ignorant of. I don’t know why people like Dawkins give him credit for any intelligence at all. Musk is stupid, and he wants your money, and if you are a US taxpayer? — he already has some of it, and he’s using it for stupid vanity projects that benefit nearly no one.
But is it even possible to transport enough ‘stuff’ from our own habitat to Mars? It doesn’t look possible to me.
I was initially quite sympathetic towards the notion of Martian terraforming after reading the Mars Trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson – it even inspired me to get into genetics, which, via a roundabout way, lead to my current career.
The scenario put forward by Robinson, which is probably the most “realistic” of the hopeful scenarios, envisages technology far beyond what is available to us, untold Trillions in funding and still takes centuries to achieve a minimally viable surface temperature. And in that scenario, while things sometimes go wrong with the terraforning project, they are only minor and easily overcome by scientific geniuses who command near god-like control of physical forces (gigantic space mirrors, space elevators, asteroids directed into Martian orbit to thicken the atmosphere)
I still love the Mars Trilogy but people like Musk read it and think it plausible, while in reality it’s a very entertaining and entirety fictional scenario that has a veneer of plausibility due to the effort of the author – as all good sci-fi, it inspires, but it isn’t a road map.
With time and effort and extremely advanced tech, terraforming Mars may be possible – by the year 20,000 AD.
That sounds way more credible.
Right, I highly doubt it. The idea is so absurd anyway. We have evolved to thrive in our habitat, so either we have to fundamenally biologically change (and soon!, not at Evolution’s pace), or our environment has to suit us. When we go to the moon (or any hostile environment) we have to take enough of our habitat to sustain us. The ocean pressure at deep depths illustrates that. We’d have to transport enough infrastructure to Mars to simulate an Earth-like environment, then supply it with enough ‘stuff’ to sustain us. It’s not there, we’d have to bring it from here.
Nah, it’s the ravings of a profoundly ignorant lunatic. Dawkins is either deluded or shining Musk on in an attempt to flatter him, but for what reason I have no idea. ($?)
And at eight billion people, how many people would be invited to live on Mars, a few hundred, a few thousand? All disgustingly rich racist white people I’m sure. Meanwhile the Earth is damaged, possibly beyond repair. Gawd but the guy’s an idiot.
People will look back 50 years from now and see how weird and cultish and malevolent this guy was, because they sure don’t see it now.
The Dawkins thing… I don’t know. Is he going senile? I read a couple of his books many years ago that I found very agreeable — really fascinating concepts that changed my way of looking at things. Awesome stuff. Has his celebrity as a science popularizer gone to his head? I can’t figure it out. His perspectives on evolution and atheism are iconic, yet I find myself thinking that now he’s lost the plot.
Pardon me for preferring a launch base on Luna and an orbital solar array somewhere around L5.
As for transporting enough stuff – no. Doing a wetland restoration, I had to transport ‘stuff’ halfway across Oklahoma…a modern state (sort of) with the ability to stop for gas and water plants, etc etc etc. More than half the plants died. It was a five hour trip (usually three, but because of the frequent stops, it took longer).
What we were transporting would be going into a similar system, where there was adequate water, nutrients, and sunlight, and once upon a time was an established system. After the transplant, about half the remaining plants died. Our success rate was low, and we didn’t really have any truly adverse circumstances.
You can’t just ‘transport plants’ or ‘transport seeds’. They need other things…water, of course. Soil. But also, fungus. Particular fungus which associates with plant roots. But you can’t take them with the fungus, because the roots have to be sterilized so a system isn’t messed up by other things invading, so you have to inject the fungus after planting. I realize they would probably say they are taking seeds, but seeds also need the fungus, which the system provides when they get to the proper stage in their development. Mars wouldn’t have that.
You would need pollinators. Humans can fill that role, but it is slow and tedious, and slow and tedious doesn’t strike me as something Musk does.
Plants also require a particular day length before they will germinate. Mars does not have the same day lengths we do. Plants can evolve to different temperatures, different soils, different water regimes, different wave lengths, but it doesn’t happen fast enough to support a colony on Mars.
We were dealing with a small system, and only a very small part of that small system. It ran far over budget, and in the end, was only marginally successful. The cost for colonizing Mars is likely to be so high you could probably save every ecosystem on Earth for the money…and have some left over. And restoring damaged ecosystem has at least some probability of success. On Mars, it is zero.
There was an instructor in my writing program who was writing a book on the future of the moon. He was going through all this high tech stuff, etc, and how we would be colonizing the moon, mining asteroids for minerals, etc. I asked him if he had talked to any scientists. Oh yes, he says. I talked to a couple of astronauts and some psychologists who work with astronauts. Really? No biologists? No physicists? No chemists? No geologists?
People like the high tech ideas of colonizing other planets/moons. The day to day work of maintaining a livable system bores them, so they brush it away. I don’t care how many spaceships we are able to get to the moon or other planets, there is a need for a lot more thought about the science before the fools rush in (though if Musk would take Trump with him, I would gladly contribute part of my taxes for the trip).
Exactamundo. But a guy can dream can’t he? Well not on my dime, tyvm.
twiilter#15
I certainly admire some of Dawkins’ books, but, partly because I have just finished Patchen Barss’s excellent biography of Roger Penrose (a man who intrigues me) , “The Impossible Man: Roger Penrose and the Cost of Genius”, I suspect that Dawkins is suffering from the same hardening of spirit, the clinging to personal dogmatisms, and the creeping narcissism afflicting the aged and feted especially, that made much of Penrose’s later work unsatisfactory. I am thoroughly and no doubt deservedly un-feted, but as I grow older and older, I do not want to follow the same path – but who knows?
Penrose was – is, rather, since he is still alive at the age of 94 or 95 – a great scientist and mathematician, whereas Dawkins is an excellent populariser of science, and, of course, a very skilled debater.
On the other hand, we are doing a very good job of de-terraforming the Earth…
[…] a comment by iknklast on Some other workable […]
Which makes it all the more bizarre that some of us think we could just solve all the problems involved in moving to Mars without breaking a sweat.
Imagine if we spent a fraction of the time, thought, and money into ‘terraforming’ the currently uninhabitable parts of our own planet? Two thirds of it is currently covered by water, but we’re unable to make it rain to order anywhere.
Anyone who has ever tried to make a garden knows how finicky plants are, even with ideal conditions, and yet we’re destroying some of the biggest, most long-lived, and absolutely vital plants which have ever evolved, in order to cover the ground with the melted remains of long-dead plants and animals to enable us to use environment-destroying machines to transport us quickly from one environmentally impoverished place to another similar one.
There are no machines in existence which could generate an atmosphere like ours on Mars faster than it would be dissipating into space due to the lack of both adequate gravity and any magnetosphere. We can’t build such machines, because they would require more resources than are available even here.
Musk is like a toddler who has built a one-bucket sandcastle, and now believes that he can build a sandcastle as big as Malbork out of nothing. Who has toddled from the living room to the kitchen in a small apartment in South Dakota, and now fancies himself able to toddle all the way to Australia.
My husband jokes that he must have seen that documentary about living on Mars – you know, the one with Matt Damon – and got jealous.
Not to mention terraforming has yet to be invented.
My argument about terraforming: earth life has spent 4 billion years specializing to earth geochemistry and geophysics. Can’t undo that.
By the way, I posted a new piece in the comments on my last piece.
Ryan, I like your new piece very much. Your title and subtitle explain a lot to me.
As you noted, your new piece is in the comments here:
https://www.butterfliesandwheels.org/2025/guest-post-thoughts-on-a-fossil-carbon-free-base-for-heavy-industry/
I see A City on Mars is available at my local branch of the library system!
Anyone who is serious about off earth human habitation should look at the Biosphere 2 project.
The people who did that had the hubris to think they could get it right on the 1st try. People who actually want such a thing to succeed should make something they think has a chance of working, close it up, have something go wrong, fix that, close it up again, see what the next thing is to go wrong, rinse and repeat. If they ever get their Biosphere 3 to work for a decade or more, that might be the time to try such a thing at a moonbase or a rotating space habitat. They should bring in someone with something like Iknclast’s experience with attempts at ecological restoration to give them advice. I like the idea of such an experiment to also give us data on how to keep earth ecosystems healthy.
Another factor that Musk et al. seem to neglect. We know from the ISS that months at zero gee is *bad* for human health. We have *zero* data on the health effects of gravity somewhere between zero & earth gravity. A moonbase would give us such information with the humans close enough to be returned to earth when/if bad effects show up. Some sort of habitat rotating to give Mars gravity should be run for years before a humans to Mars expedition is launched.
The subject of space exploration, and what does and does not make sense, is very interesting to me. I’ve been cooking up a new plan and rationale for a national space program as a matter of fact. I could write it up if anyone was interested. It’s called the Visual Exploration of the Solar System. I would break it up into several pieces:
1. Arguments against colonization, resource extraction, and human spaceflight in general
2. A detailed scientific critique of NASA’s follow the water program and Astrobiology as currently practiced
3. A review of nationalistic and general interest reasons for having a space program without promise of eventual economic reward. Prehistoric cave painters get a mention.
4. Description of the archetecture and missions I recommend. The goals are geologic mapping, geophysics, geochemistry, and nature photography.
Does that interest anyone? It would take me a while to write it up.
It sounds interesting. You might want to ask the people at Skeptical Inquirer first.
Ditto! I’ve put it on hold.
I might also recommend a book called Rare Earth: Why Complex Life is Uncommon in the Universe by Peter Ward and Donald Brownlee.
TL;DR the authors conclude that while life is probably ubiquitous in the universe, the recipe to evolve complexity depends on other factors (the presence of a large, stabilizing satellite, plate tectonics, etc.) that are a good deal less likely than the near-inevitable first chemical steps.
Ok so I dropped in at the branch and carried off A City on Mars and will commence reading with all due haste.