Mars does not have a magnetosphere
You might as well unpack your suitcase for that trip to Mars.
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.
But surely we can pack enough breathable air in that suitcase? Can’t we?
Some people have the idea that making Mars’s atmosphere breathable is as simple as introducing some green plants to it: They will eat up sunlight and produce oxygen, and then people can breathe it. That is uhhhhh the circle of life (?) or whatever. They call this idea “terraforming.”
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.
Well…maybe they just haven’t tried hard enough. The people who go to Mars will try harder.
One thing he alludes to, but doesn’t really get into, is the fact that life as know it could not have existed on earth for most of its existence. There just wasn’t enough oxygen in the atmosphere, or sometimes too much, for any kind of animal form of life. Animals have been around for less than a billion years; land animals about half a billion years. Vertebrates didn’t make it to land till about 400 million years ago. If you traveled back in time to earth more than a few hundred million years ago, you’d probably suffocate.
We happen to be living in a time and place which is perfectly suited to our form of life, which of course is no surprise. But we’re actively working to destroy the conditions that make our form of life possible. And even if we manage to stop and to some extent reverse the damage that we’ve done, at some point the conditions that make humanity possible will change, and we’ll die out, even if life finds new ways to continue.
Sooner or later, we’re doomed.
I highly recommend the book “A City On Mars: Can We Settle Space, Should We Settle Space, and Have We Really Thought This Through?“, by Kelly and Zach Weinersmith. It is a delightful and detailed investigation of many issues involved in space colonization, with a lot of “This is never going to work, but let’s ignore that and see if this next thing dependent on it might work”. Among the biggest issues that I had never considered are the legal and diplomatic problems, things that Elon Musk just handwaves away, because he’s rich and thinks he can do anything he wants. The authors more or less come down on the side that there are so many technical and biological and procedural problems that this is almost certainly never going to happen, appealing as it may be. But the devil is in the details, and the book is about exploring the problems, not defending a position.
That article is similar to the lecture I gave my students during our section on solutions to the problems. They didn’t like to hear it, but they accepted it. Perhaps if Musk ever took my class…
I doubt he’d listen to me, though. I am not a billionaire, or even a millionaire.
One would think at that level of wealth, one could afford to be less stupid.
Nope.
I’d like to see more articles like this. Maybe some of Musk’s groupies are still teachable.
Mars is ~ 1.5x the distance to the sun as earth, so right off the top it gets less than 1/4 the sunlight. It has a little over 1/4 the earth’s surface area, but–bonus!–it’s all land (no oceans).
No air…no water…it really doesn’t have much to offer us.
Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy (red, blue, and green) is worth a read. He sets the base criteria to enable viable colonisation by assuming that the countries and corporations of Earth unite for decades to massively support the effort. He also assumes significant technological breakthroughs on an ongoing basis.
That aside, he does a good job in each of the books of explaining the difficulties and complexities of achieving the outcome of survival, let alone terraforming. The enormous amounts of heat (moholes, nuclear reactors, and solar reflectors) and volatiles (ice caps and comets) that must be added to the ecosystem over decades to create a poisonous atmosphere. The decades of using generations of heavily modified plants, algae, and bacteria to increase oxygen. The need to remove peroxide from martian dirt to enable anything to grow in it. The difficulty of bootstrapping stable ecosystems from scratch. And more than anything, the need to keep people mentally healthy and functional, and a united Earth destroying itself to support them.
KSR is an optimist in those books. Even if we had/developed the technology (much is possible given will and time), try uniting every significant economic and political unit on the planet for decades for the benefit of others rather than self. I don’t have that much faith in humanity.
That Defector article by Albert Burneko is a good read. Thanks for that, OB.
Musk through all his enriching activities, (nb: strictly in the economic sense) including his plans for Mars and space, is doing his level best to increase the entropy of the Earth, ie to move it towards being a huge junk yard and garbage tip. Only by getting all the elements necessary for life into cycles (as in the well-known carbon, nitrogen and water cycles) can this be possibly avoided. Peak phosphorus will likely be first, even sooner than Peak oil.
My money, however, is on Peak Musk.
And yet he’s backing a movement inimical to his futurism; MAGA can’t set-up a Martian outpost, let alone get you there. It’s hostile to knowledge and expertise, stuck on burning exceedingly rare carbon compounds (you need life plus tectonics, and that exists nowhere else in the solar system) that are essential to manufacturing, and envisions a future of doing things the same way some imagined pre-internet ancestors did. If the Martian thing is important to him then he’s going in the exact wrong direction to achieve it.
Calling him a eugenicist isn’t the slam dunk insult the article writer thinks it is though.