Why colonizing Mars is a stupid idea.
Colonizing Mars is a stupid idea.
Mars is colder and drier than Antarctica. Antarctica would be a better choice.
Mars has no breathable air. Mars will never have breathable air. Mars cannot be terraformed, it has no magnetic field, and air will be blown away by solar wind as fast as it could be liberated from native minerals. Anyone who goes there as a colonist will spend the rest of their life either in a spacesuit or in a set of large tin cans. No one who goes to Mars will ever walk outside and breathe fresh air, will ever swim in an lake or ocean, ski down a mountain, or hike along a mountain stream. Terraforming is a pipe dream…and if it isn’t, why aren’t we terraforming Earth to fix global warming?
Colonizing Mars would be enormously expensive. The cost would dwarf what the ISS has cost over 20 years. NASA is spending about $100 billion through 2025 on the Artemis lunar program, which will assemble an orbital station and send 4 missions with probably 4 people each to the moon for a few days. Multiply that by the cost of sending dozens of people much farther away on missions that will take a minimum of 8 months to reach a barren planet where they will have to be supplied with everything they need for years, if not decades to come. Each person will require tons of supplies, each ship will require dozens of support missions. Contrary to fantasies about a self-sustaining colony, the reality is that this colony will need supplies indefinitely, supplies that will cost tens of thousands of dollars a kilo to get to Mars. Even the most optimistic proposals for mining, water extraction, oxygen extraction, robotic factories, etc., do not allow for the myriad items needed for humans to live there, everything from medicines, electronics, machinery, to foods, clothing, etc., etc. Many of the things we take for granted, things as mundane as a cellphone, or laptop, or even a tampon, require sophisticated manufacturing techniques, complex supply chains, and huge factory infrastructure. This will never exist on Mars, because there is no way to take it there, and no way for a few dozen or a few hundred, or even a few thousand people to build it.
Elon Musk, among others, has made a number of proposals for colonizing Mars. They’re all nonsense. The numbers don’t add up. They’ll never add up. It’s all for publicity. Musk does not have a rocket that can take off from Earth and even get 3 people to the moon and back. His lunar lander plan requires at least 13 supply flights just to orbit enough fuel for a lunar mission. Taking hundreds of people to Mars is as out of his reach as taking them to Alpha Centauri…and he knows it. If he doesn’t, he’s delusional. If he does, he’s being disingenuous for the sake of inflating SpaceX stock.
Mars has low gravity, no atmosphere, and is bathed in UV radiation and cosmic rays. The long-term effects of low gravity are known to be harmful. Humans lose muscle and bone mass, as well as red blood cells. How this would affect the health of people over decades is unknown. While Mars does have some gravity, anyone living there for a long time would still lose a significant amount of physical strength…exactly how much is impossible to know. Anyone who lived on Mars for more than a few years might not be able to survive on Earth, if they returned, or would be an invalid. The long-term effects of cosmic radiation are much more uncertain, but it’s safe to assume that long-term cell damage is unhealthy, to say the least. Anyone living on Mars for more than a couple years might well deteriorate so rapidly physically as to be unable to contribute to any colony and will become a liability.
Human society in the developed world (and even in the so-called third world) depends on a highly complex and heavily interdependent social and economic infrastructure based on the cumulative skills and effort of millions of people, that creates a safety net for everyone. Things like health care systems, educational systems, food, fuel, and consumer goods production and distribution systems, not to mention social, legal, educational, and cultural support systems as well. None of this will exist on Mars, and these things can’t be created from a group of a few dozen or a few hundred people. Here on Earth, we have a surplus of talent, knowledge, and material. In a small colony everyone will have to be an expert, probably in multiple fields, and each person will be indispensable in some respect. What happens if your doctor is killed? Do you have two doctors? Three? Ten? How many engineers? How many computer experts? How many pilots? Without a surplus of skill, which will never exist in a small colony, you can never have an optimum safety net, and the group as a whole is always at risk.
Then there is the question of net value. A Mars colony would cost hundreds of billions, likely trillions of dollars, and require a permanent commitment of financial and material resources, resources that could be used far more cost-efficiently here on Earth, to build green energy, to rectify the worst poverty, to improve our educational systems, to improve our health care, and to fix some of the damage we’ve caused to planet Earth over the last couple centuries.
I am not opposed to space exploration, in fact I think it’s underfunded. But exploration and colonization are two different things. Our goal for the future should be a clean, healthy environment here on Earth, with adequate food, housing, and quality of life for the population of this planet, before we start another.
