"Because it's there!"
-George Mallory, English mountaineer
Mars is a barren wasteland devoid of life. There's nothing there, even less than in the average Earth desert. There is no air to breathe, no water, no arable soil on which to grow crops. It's just a big empty ball of dust and rock.
A lot of people ask (and with good reason): Instead of wasting massive amounts of valuable resources on some dream project with no apparent value, dumping tons of CO2 into the atmosphere in the process, why not instead spend the money improving life here on Earth?
Those of us who love science fiction, immersing ourselves regularly in tales of the stars and galactic empires are so used to the inevitability of interstellar travel that we might have trouble even understanding the question, or for that matter the kind of mindset that would even let a person seriously consider it. "Because it's there!" would do just fine for most of us, and the rest would be content with "scientific discovery" as sufficient cause all its own.
A lot of other people, however, demand value for their money, and nebulous claims about the value of discovery don't go far with the prosaically-minded.
(Mind you, it's worth observing that, even if we took all that money, let's be honest — there's almost no chance it'd be used to improve life on Earth, politicians being what they are.)
As to the initial question, I have four reasons to offer, each compelling:
Solves the "One Basket" problem.
Provides an outer-system mining and foundry base.
Creates a jumping-off point to support Belt exploration and exploitation.
Creates an off-world agricultural environment.
We'll deal with each of those in turn.
Why Colonize Mars: The One Basket Problem
"Don't carry all your eggs in one basket."
It's old wisdom, but it applies to humanity's future, on the large scale as well as the small. We all live on the same world, and it's one that's suffered multiple mass extinction events -- half a dozen major ones that we know of, perhaps more. Ever since the Great Oxygenation Event that followed the development of photosynthesis, and on through meteor impacts, vulcanism, supernovae, and ice ages, every succeeding age of the Earth has ended with mass extinction.
We are by no means immune to such events today, though we may not like to think it. We have no defense against massive meteor impacts or major volcanic eruptions. Even leaving aside over-hunting, the threat of nuclear war, new plagues, and anthropogenic climate change, it's still just a matter of time before something catastrophic happens that wipes out most of the life on Earth.
To be clear: It isn't a question of "if", but rather "when". Every couple of million years, like clockwork, the world blows up and almost everything dies. As it happens, most paleo-biologists agree that we're in the middle of a mass extinction event right now — and many of them blame humanity for this.
Mind you, these are major events that I'm talking about here. Minor events include:
- the "Little Ice Age", which plunged the Dark Ages into four centuries of perpetual famine
- the Black Death raging across China and then Europe
- the so-called "Spanish Flu" of 1918
These were barely blips, hardly noticeable against the general background.
"But what does this have to do with colonizing Mars?"
If we believe humanity is worth saving and ought not be abandoned to extinction, we need to leave this planet as soon as practicable. We will have to establish viable, self-sufficient colonies elsewhere, first on other worlds in our own solar system and then beyond.
And Mars is the most Earthlike planet of them all.
Why Colonize Mars: Fuel
Now that we've figured out how, it's actually pretty simple to get into orbit. There are companies that specialize in supplying do-it-yourself satellite kits to classrooms. Fifth-graders can manage it.
But that's just launching a chunk of electronics weighing a couple of pounds. It gets harder once you're moving people. Oh, shifting a bunch of passengers is fairly easy, but once they're up there they also need air to breathe, an enclosed place to stay, and, ideally, something useful to do. Every pound costs two pounds in fuel, and moving two pounds of fuel costs four.
Right now, they're working on methods to move non-living cargo using flywheel slingshots to save on costs. It's far more efficient than launching everything inside a single one-use capsule. Instead, we can send up big cans of air, construction materials, and so on using methods that, while fuel-efficient, would kill passengers. Then, your passenger ship will (hopefully) be able to rendezvous with its supplies in orbit.
That's just common sense, right? But consider: after seventy years of organized space exploration, we're only now reaching the point where we can give it a try.
Now: Imagine instead you can manufacture both fuel and breathable air in bulk and ship it to Earth orbit for a fraction of the fuel cost that would be required to send it up from the surface. Picture off-world production of space station facilities and high-end electronics. Again, doing it that way is just plain common sense.
Mind you, we'd set up lunar production for much of what we'd need in Earth orbit. It's a lot closer than Mars, has a lower gravity, that sort of thing.
A Mars base, however, would offer a hundred times the mineral wealth, all located conveniently closer to the asteroid belt and, after that, to Jupiter and its moons. If we're going any distance at all, a viable Mars colony will be essential.
Why Colonize Mars: Pollution
For some strange reason, people continually insist on mining more and more gold. Looking at it objectively, though, it makes zero sense to do so.
Gold is useless for most industrial purposes and you can't eat it. Extracting it from ore requires some of the nastiest, most toxic chemicals imaginable, which are then stored forever in nearby artificial ponds — until a hundred-year storm comes along and washes the contents into the nearest river system, wiping out wildlife and civilization both for decades to come. Right now, there's a proposal to build a gold mine in Alaska just upstream of the most valuable salmon fishery in the world.
Mine just one metallic asteroid and suddenly we've got more gold than we'll ever need or want, and without the industrial waste problem. Most of the chemical byproducts are due to efficiency, energy constraints, and so on, but in outer space it's actually far more efficient to simply smelt the rock. Power is limited only by the number of solar panels you've got, and space — let's face it — is pretty big.
And that's just gold. There are also rare earth metals in abundance, which is nice because people are forever starting brushfires and proxy wars over the right to mine those. We could smelt steel without burning megatons of coal and extrude plastics without generating cyanogens.
So yes, let's go out and mine asteroids, most of which are in the belt just past Mars orbit. How do we get there? Gas station on Mars.
Why Colonize Mars: All of the Above
"Off-world agriculture?! You're out of your mind! Even if you could solve the 'how' of it, WHY?"
Right; this sort of objection does make sense on the surface of things. Earth has things like topsoil, rain, and atmosphere. Outer space is famous for having none of these things, and the surface of Mars differs only in that there's a place to stand. We'd be better off trying to farm in Antarctica.
However, there are three factors that apply — the same three factors I've discussed in the preceding sections:
The "One Basket" problem
Fuel savings
Pollution
Considering these in order, we start with "One Basket". Remember how I told you that paleo-biologists agree we're in the middle of a mass extinction event? We're losing plant species all the time. The bananas I ate as a kid are now gone forever. The American chestnut tree, which provided tons of free food all across the continent, was wiped out by blight. Ireland's potato famine is famous.
Thus, it only makes sense to preserve essential crops in isolated environments.
In similar fashion, the fuel argument also applies. A pound of food weighs exactly as much as a pound of air, fuel, or equipment, and the average person eats approximately one ton every year. If we can raise crops in orbit, it would be a tremendous savings, but there are obstacles. It would be far simpler to farm on the surface of Mars, or the moon.
And then there's pollution to consider. Right now, at the mouth of the Mississippi River, there's a dead zone extending miles out into the Caribbean where fish simply can't live. All the organic runoff, mainly agricultural byproducts, sucks all the oxygen out of the water, and any fish incautious enough to enter suffocates. Thus, every kernel of corn we can raise off-world would represent a tremendous boon to the environment. Even if we can't import off-world crops, the least we can do is keep from exporting them.
It's a funny thing: Raising crops on Mars, where there's no rain, could be a benefit to the Earth's environment. Go figure.
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