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Mars is Earth’s Destiny
Elon Musk is many things: mega-billionaire, electric car mogul, meme poster. With such a tsunami of descriptors, it can be easy to overlook a simple question: What does Mr. X want?
The answer, anticlimactic as it is, is hiding in plain sight. The stated goal of Musk’s primary venture SpaceX is, according to their website, “to build the technologies necessary to make life multiplanetary.” And “the best destination to begin” that endeavor, they contend, is Mars. But how, exactly? Robert Zubrin, a friend of Musk and the President of the Mars Society, answers that question and many more in his new book The New World on Mars: What We Can Create on the Red Planet. Zubrin lays out in painstaking, thorough, and scientific detail the hows, the whys, and the whens of colonizing Mars. (READ MORE: The Human Disappearing Act: Why Are We Not Reproducing?)
At first glance, one might be forgiven for being skeptical of the idea of living on Mars. After all, the red planet appears to be little more than a freeze-dried desert. The Martian atmosphere is just 0.6 percent of the thickness of Earth’s, making the surface effectively a vacuum for human purposes. What air is present is nearly all toxic carbon dioxide. Liquid water (mostly) can’t exist under those circumstances, even in the rare event that it gets warm enough. While a hot summer day can reach nearly seventy degrees, the average temperature on Mars is a frigid -80 degrees, with nights regularly dipping below -150 or even -200.
Why even bother with such a place, unfit for human habitation and devoid of natural resources? Zubrin disputes the premise of the question. Strictly speaking, the Earth is not fit for human habitation either. It is much too cold for people to survive across most of our planet; we’ve only managed to do so with the help of technologies like clothing and fire. Earth has massive amounts of arable land, but before the discovery of agriculture, it produced hardly any food. “There is no such thing as a natural resource,” Zubrin concludes. “There are only natural raw materials.” Human ingenuity is what transformed the former into the latter on Earth.
Mars, then, presents a challenge that is different in degree but not in kind.
Of course, getting to Mars is the first problem. The primary obstacle, and the one currently being worked on by SpaceX, is the ruinously expensive costs of getting things into space. Musk’s introduction of rockets with mostly reusable components has already begun to bear fruit, cutting the cost of shipping material into orbit from about $10,000 per kilogram to about $2,000 over the last decade.
But SpaceX has plans to go even further with its Starship project. It’s easy to understand why space travel is so costly when you consider that the rockets are single-use only. Imagine how expensive airfare would be if a new Boeing 747 had to be built for each flight (to say nothing of the safety concerns). The advent of reusable rockets will massively reduce the cost of getting things into low Earth orbit; Zubrin estimates that a fully realized Starship could get material into space for as little as $100 per kilogram. The potential for such cheap space travel would have terrestrial applications to be sure, but it would also put getting to Mars firmly within the price range of the western middle class. Zubrin calculates that under such circumstances, a one-way ticket to the red planet would cost $300,000. That’s hardly pocket change, but it’s also roughly comparable to the cost of a ticket to the American colonies from Europe in the 1600s. If you were willing to sell off your Earthly possessions for the promise of Marsly ones, it could be done. (READ MORE: Elon Musk, Enemy of the Managers)
But what is to keep humans on Mars once we send them there? It is one thing to send people to another planet for the sake of human greatness, it is another for them to build something beyond a monument to human vanity, dependent on subsidies from back home. While “[t]he fundamental reason” to colonize Mars is to expand human civilization, Zubrin emphatically assures us that Mars can and will pull its own weight.
First and foremost, Zubrin argues that Mars will produce inventions. Those who are the first to travel to Mars will be the best of the best entrepreneurs, and circumstances will force them to innovate their way out of an array of problems. Zubrin says that this would be more productive than a similarly situated community of terrestrial inventors because the people involved will have extreme difficulty in backing out of their situation and will be forced to stick around and make things work. “If it’s wise to invest in people who have skin in the game,” he writes, “the Martians will be very investable.”
There may be something to that, but I would wager there are likely cheaper, less logistically challenging ways of stimulating human innovation. Zubrin is more convincing when he argues for tourism as a preeminent Martian industry. Mars also possesses or is likely to possess raw materials that, under the same cost assumptions used for travel to Mars, could be shipped to Earth for profit.
Mars’s primary resource, though, maybe what it lacks rather than what it possesses. With only 30 percent of the gravity of Earth, it is much easier for a rocket to take off on Mars than it is on Earth. Fuel requirements put a limit on how large a rocket can be: the more fuel a rocket carries the heavier it is, the heavier the rocket is the more fuel it needs, etc. For that reason, space travel from Mars will be much more efficient and cost-effective than space travel from Earth. Because of these factors, Zubrin estimates that it will be “about two orders of magnitude cheaper” to send supplies to the asteroid belt from Mars compared to Earth. In the interplanetary space trade, “[a]nything… that can be produced on Mars will be produced on Mars.”
This would facilitate a sort of interplanetary triangle trade. Earth would export to Mars lightweight, technically difficult-to-produce components such as semiconductors. Mars would export more basic goods such as food and clothing to asteroid mining colonies. Asteroid miners would send rare earth materials such as platinum back to Earth.
As one would expect from an author who has previously designed serious proposals for Mars missions, The New World on Mars is nothing if not thorough. It contains a dizzying array of physics equations and chemical reactions that explain how Mars settlers will be able to do everything from making methane/oxygen rocket fuel to manufacturing plastics. Want to know how to make bricks, aluminum, or graphite on Mars? Curious about how to make cheap carbon dioxide rocket fuel? This is certainly the book for you.
Zubrin’s work is at its weakest when he gets into more ancillary arguments. For example, the author’s palpable disdain for and invective against lawyers, while perhaps understandable and expressed in a dryly humorous way, is at times distracting. (READ MORE: A Step in the Right Direction for Elon Musk’s Free Speech Agenda)
More troublingly, he says that because Mars will make humanity richer, it will also make us more peaceful. The idea that resource scarcity is a factor behind human suffering, he says, is a false belief that can be blamed for everything from the Holocaust to Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. But Putin did not invade Ukraine because he needed more of resource X or compound Y or Z amount of new territory. He did it because he believed the idea that Russia was once an empire that incorporated Ukraine and that it should be an empire again. Humans do sometimes kill each other over resources, but it doesn’t take long watching a nature documentary to see two predators fighting over a carcass.
Human interactions are often complicated and particular. Zubrin rightly decries the anti-humanism that has become a moral fad as of late, but to this writer, it seems that slaughtering each other over ideas like to whom a particular piece of land belongs is one of the most human things there is.
As a result, in assessing human success Zubrin perhaps places too much of a premium on freedom and associated government forms, rather than geographic constraints. It is tempting to think that we can supersede tyranny through material wealth. But we tried this experiment with China here on Earth, and all we succeeded in doing was turning a poor autocracy into a rich one.
America’s own history in the space race belies this argument. Many of the scientists critical in getting us to the Moon, such as Werner Von Braun, were previously in the employ of a certain Austrian painter and his unsavory companions. If one believes that freedom is a more moral form of government than tyranny, it does one no favors to delude himself about the capabilities of others.
Rather than discourage and chasten, that fear should inspire us to get our act together. Zubrin concurs with America’s founders that their project was a “noble experiment,” and sees Mars as the laboratory for its next phase. In that case, we should better hurry, because if the United States isn’t the first to get to Mars, somebody else will.
The post Mars is Earth’s Destiny appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.
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