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. […]

Let’s discuss the breathable-air problem. Earth’s atmosphere is rich with oxygen due in large part to all of the green plants photosynthesizing here. We got green plants out the ass. 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.

Even with all the profound advantages the South Pole enjoys compared to Mars, even on a planet where living things have spent billions and billions of years figuring out how to adapt to and thrive within an incredibly diverse array of biomes – on a planet where giant tubeworms the size of NBA basket stanchions have colonized lightless ocean depths at which a human would be crushed like a grape under a piano – the South Pole simply cannot support complex life. It is too cold, and its relationship with sunlight too erratic, for living things to sustain themselves there. On astronomical scales it is for all practical purposes in the exact same spot as some of the most life-rich and biodiverse places in the known universe, and yet no species has established a permanent self-sustaining population there. Ever. […]

This doofus’s birdbrained space-colony takes are important to know; that alone is a very awful and embarrassing true thing to say about the state of things. Capitalist society permits such profound inequalities of wealth and power, and the U.S. has allowed its public sector to lapse into such abysmal decay, that a guy like Musk exerts a terrible gravity on the world around him: What he is interested in seeing done, some number of other people will work on doing, because that work pays better than nearly all others. Whatever pit he wants to throw his money into, some appalling volume of the world’s resources and human labors will follow it down. […]

The fantasy – and it is a fantasy – isn’t one of space travel and exploration and some bright Star Trek future for humanity, but one of winnowing and eugenics, of cold actuarial lifeboat logic, of ever greater reallocation from the dwindling many to the thriving few. That’s the world as Elon Musk and his cohort want it; Mars colonization is just a pretext.

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Reference:

  1. Neither Elon Musk Nor Anybody Else Will Ever Colonize Mars