Life on Mars” is a playful but unsettling article in New Scientist (16 November, 2024). The authors, a biologist and a cartoonist, Kelly and Zach Weinersmith, are commenting on the aspiration of Elon Musk to start establishing a million person colony on Mars by 2030. “Has anyone thought this through?” they ask with a skepticism that summarizes the tragic-comic history of humanity on this planet.
“Mars sucks,” they suggest. Going there would be the equivalent of “moving to a toxic waste dump because your neighbours aren’t mowing their lawn often enough.” As they point out, launching rockets and performing antics in zero gravity is fun, but Mars would not be. The temperature varies from a chilly –153°C to only brief periods of a comfortable 20°C at high noon. And the air, which is mostly carbon dioxide and only 1% the density on Earth, would be fatal to anyone attempting to breathe it.
And then there’s cosmic radiation. Without a substantial atmosphere or a magnetic field, exposure would likely cause various kinds of cancer. “Forget,” they suggest, “those gleaming glass domes under which happy dinner-party guests drink win and count stars.” The safest place to live would be lava tunnels or under the Martian dirt.
That, unfortunately, presents another problem. The soil is regolith, a fine sand which has not been weathered to smoothness. “It’s truly horrendous stuff,” they write. The jagged surface of each grain is a destroyer of mechanical equipment, and happens to cause silicosis when breathed. It’s also laced with “nasty chemicals” called perchlorates that cause thyroid problems, and happen to be unhealthy for developing infants and children. Plants will grow in the perchlorates, but their tissue would have to be decontaminated before use. And don’t breathe the dust.
On the subject of food, getting to Mars would take about six months, so considerable quantities would have to be grown in the Starship. And after arriving, the colonists would have to wait at least another year before Mars and Earth would be favourably aligned for a return journey. As the writers point out, we have had some experimental evidence of how this would work. Biosphere 2 was a 12,000 m2 facility built in Arizona to conduct experiments on just this challenge—Biosphere 1, incidentally, was Earth. During a two-year experiment with 8 people, no one died. But the participants were often hungry, had to labour 8 to 10 hours for 6 days of the week to survive, and often suffered headaches and nausea from high levels of carbon dioxide. A similar experiment in China had a similarly questionable success, highlighted by a diet high in crickets, mealworms, beetles, termites and flies.
And on the subject of flying, Mars has only 40% the gravity of Earth. We know from experience that astronauts lose about 1% of their bone mass per month in zero gravity, so we can assume a proportionate response on the Red Planet. As for replenishing the population with children, we only have the remotest idea of what kind of a human being would be produced in this low-gravity environment.
With regard to the excitement of rockets blasting into space with adventurous explorers and colonists, we did something similar starting in 1492. The results were, at best, mixed. The Europeans who arrived were quick to decimate the cultures that were once alive and thriving in the New World. Some, such as the Caribs and the Beothuk, were totally obliterated. Now we are working on destroying the biophysical ecology. The Prairie grasslands are nearly all gone, as are the Eastern elm forests. The passenger pigeons, flocks of billions, are now extinct. We almost accomplished the same feat with the buffalo. The list of the many other species whose precarious existence is now dependent on our behaviour is getting longer.
Besides extinctions, every place on the planet is experiencing human-induced traumas: higher temperatures, desertification, soil depletion and intensified weather that bring droughts, fires and floods.
The possibility is that we couldn’t do this much damage on Mars. But who knows what we’re likely to do? We started out here with the best of all possible planets, and we’re leaving it in ruins. If we want to rent space on Mars for a colony, our references need to be improved. So before getting too excited about colonizing Mars, perhaps we should do a little housekeeping at home. We could start almost anywhere.
Ray Grigg for Sierra Quadra
Top image credit: The Mars Rover’s tracks on Mars – Photo by NASA/JPL-Caltech