Summary
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People have long been fascinated with Mars as a second home.
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Terraforming Mars is a significant challenge due to a lost atmosphere.
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Developing tech for Mars may result in helpful innovations for Earth.
As famous scientist Dr. A. Schwarzenegger once said: “Get your [redacted] to Mars.” and this is just the perfect way to convey the energy of people who have been fascinated with the idea of living on the red planet, but there’s a paradox involved in trying to make this dream come true.
Mars Has Been in Our Sights as a Second Home Forever
The idea that Mars is relatively similar to Earth predates scientific evidence to support that idea by a long shot. In the late 1800s, as telescopes became powerful enough, Giovanni Virginio Schiaparelli observed what he called “canali” or channels on the surface of Mars using a telescope that was almost not powerful enough to make out the surface of the red planet.
“Today, we know the ‘canali’ are an optical illusion. However, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the idea of artificial structures on Mars fueled fascination with the possibility of intelligent life next door.”
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I remember reading Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy in high school, and just marveling at the idea of slowly turning the red planet green and blue over the course of centuries. Likewise, in Anthony Weir’s The Martian a stranded astronaut tries to survive for months on the surface of Mars with very few resources, as he awaits rescue.
One of my favorite books is Frederik Pohl’s Man Plus, a 1976 novel about an astronaut who undergoes an augmentation process to transform him into what’s essentially a Martian—someone designed to live in Martian conditions, as they work to make the planet habitable for regular humans.
But—and this is a key point—these are just dreams and stories, which may only have the thinnest connections to reality. So how hard would it actually be to terraform Mars so that humans could live on it like we do on Earth?
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The Real-World Incentives Are Weak
Having a whole second planet to call home is literally priceless, and on the grand scale of history it’s worth it in principle. However, we don’t live and allocate resources on timelines that span centuries or millennia. Leaders are in power for four or five years at a time, there are pressing problems on Earth that make it hard to justify significant investment in something like a small Mars base, much less a (very) long-term plan to convert an alien planet to be livable.
It’s not so much about technological, engineering, scientific, or even energy obstacles. Our entire economic and global political regime would have to change to take on a real-deal terraforming project. Like the people who built the pyramids, there would have to be a strong external motivator to tackle something extraordinarily difficult, involving lots of sacrifice.
Just as the Apollo program was driven by Cold War competition rather than pure scientific curiosity, a Mars colonization project would likely need a similar geopolitical or economic incentive.
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