SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has long promised to make humanity interplanetary by establishing a permanent outpost on Mars.
With the help of his space company’s gigantic Starship rocket, the mercurial entrepreneur wants to ensure the “long-term survival of consciousness” by ferrying a million settlers to permanent residency on the Red Planet by 2050.
But his lofty plans for a highly risky space colony over 100 million miles away from home could be doomed from the start.
As biologist and author Kelly Weinersmith and her husband, cartoon artist Zach Weinersmith, detail in their painstakingly researched 2023 book “A City on Mars: Can We Settle Space, Should We Settle Space, and Have We Really Thought This Through?” the planet is a terrible choice for a settlement.
In fact, they predict, the effort could rapidly devolve into a drawn-out and extremely expensive humanitarian disaster of epic proportions.
In a new interview with CNN, the pair elaborated on their newfound skepticism.
“The more we got into it — by year two out of the four-year research process, we were like, OK, there’s a lot of stuff we don’t know that we still need to figure out,” Kelly told the broadcaster. “And if we do this soon, it could be an ethical catastrophe.”
“No way that you could scale up to a million people on Mars without something catastrophic happening,” she continued, “either in terms of it turns out we can’t have babies up there, and moms and babies are dying or getting cancer.”
“If you want to do this, it’s got to be the slow work of generations to build up to a point where we could be self-sustaining on Mars,” she added.
In the short-term, however, the Red Planet could prove a great place for “lots of research,” according to Kelly.
“Maybe in our lifetime, we’ll see people land on Mars, do some exploration and come home, that could happen, but I don’t think we’re going to have babies on Mars,” she said.
Reproduction in particular could be a major problem due to the planet’s immense amount of space radiation exposure. The effects of microgravity in space — or just 38 percent of Earth’s gravity on the surface of Mars — could also be a major complicating factor.
“We were just surprised by how many problems we thought we had a handle on,” Kelly told CNN. “But it turns out that we have very little relevant data for how adults will do, let alone how having babies would work out.”
The authors’ concerns closely echo other experts who have criticized Musk’s plans for colonizing Mars.
Beyond political, technological, and ethical questions, it could end up being prohibitively expensive, even for the richest man in the world.
Then there are the existential threats we’re facing back on Earth, like an environmental crisis that’s being actively worsened by Musk’s many businesses.
During a March event, former president Barack Obama slammed the plans of Silicon Valley “tycoons, many of whom are building spaceships” that could get humans to Mars,” as quoted by Agence France-Presse.
“But when I hear some of the people talk about the plan to colonize Mars because the Earth environment may become so degraded that it becomes unliveable, I look at them like, what are you talking about?” he said at the time.
“Even after a nuclear war, Earth would be more liveable than Mars, even if we didn’t do anything about [climate change] it would still have oxygen — as far as we can tell, Mars does not,” Obama added.
In short, is Mars really the best place to call our next home away from home?
To Musk, it’s about the “excitement and adventure,” as he said during a virtual Mars conference in 2020.
And those willing to turn a blind eye to his deeply twisted worldview will have to literally put their lives on the line to see his vision for a Mars colony through.
“Not for the faint of heart,” he added at the time. “Good chance you’ll die. And it’s going to be tough, tough going, but it’ll be pretty glorious if it works out.”
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