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COLONIZING MARS IS A REALLY, REALLY TERRIBLE IDEA  
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Stuart Jeffries
December 14, 2023
The Guardian
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_ Woah! say Kelly and Zach Weinersmith in this romp through the many
rooms of a space folly. “Leaving 2C warmer Earth for Mars would be
like leaving a messy room so you can live in a toxic waste dump.” _

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_A CITY ON MARS: CAN WE SETTLE SPACE, SHOULD WE SETTLE SPACE, AND HAVE
WE REALLY THOUGHT THIS THROUGH? _Kelly Weinersmith and Zach
Weinersmith, authors. Penguin Press. Paperback edition: July 29, 2025.
448 pp. [This review was published after the hard cover edition
appeared in December 2023 – moderator.]

Unless it is stopped,” tweeted Elon Musk
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“the woke mind virus will destroy civilisation and humanity will
never reached Mars.” A compelling point, even if it does show that
genius boy needs grammar lessons. Would the 18th-century pioneers have
managed to ethnically cleanse the indigenous population, exterminate
all those buffalo and pave the way for that stupid dome in Las Vegas
if they were a bunch of pearl-clutching wuss bags? Think about it.

The basic argument is that the human race is doomed if it doesn’t
revive that frontier spirit, and will remain confined to this
increasingly useless planet. If we don’t boldly go, then we must
surely stagnate. As Carl Sagan wrote: “Even after 400 generations in
villages and cities, we haven’t forgotten. The open road still
softly calls, like a nearly forgotten song of childhood.” We need to
chisel our jaws and put on space boots.

Woah! say Kelly and Zach Weinersmith in this romp through the many
rooms of a space folly. “Leaving 2C warmer Earth for Mars
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messy room so you can live in a toxic waste dump.”

The Weinersmiths – Kelly a biologist specialising in parasitic
worms, Zack a cartoonist with a beard – consider that Musk’s dream
of populating Mars by 2050 has become plausible essentially because
tech costs have fallen in inverse proportion to the man-baby hubris of
Musk and his coevals.

Personally, I can imagine only one thing worse than a six-month,
140m-mile one-way trip in a small capsule eating slop and defecating
into baggies. And that’s spending the journey with a really annoying
co-passenger, namely Musk, showing me blueprints for his new Martian
company settlement, which the authors chillingly dub Muskow.

But if that’s the worst I can imagine, then I need to try harder.
Unpleasantness will escalate on arrival according to this amusingly
literal and impeccably scientific war-gaming of what would actually
happen. The average surface temperature is -60C (-76F). There’s no
breathable air, but plenty of dust storms that blot out the sun for
weeks at a time. On the plus side, radiation is plentiful. There’s
no soil, but lots of regolith – gravel, basically – which is so
useless for agriculture that, if you’ve seen Matt Damon in The
Martian, you’ll know this would mean developing a taste for space
potatoes with a faecal tang. It’s like an off-planet Death Valley
with fewer services and no coffee shops. Not even a Costa.

What’s more, we have negligible experience of the kind of
closed-loop ecosystems that we would need to survive on Mars. Yes
there have been experiments, such as Biosphere 2
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a 3.14-acre airtight greenhouse in Arizona where half-feral chickens
refused to lay eggs and were often eaten by pigs. After a year, the
humans, who’d been surviving on half-ripe bananas and unpalatable
beans used for growing animal feed, emerged gaunt and starving. And
neither Biosphere 2 nor the International Space Station are big enough
to tell us enough about how we would live on Mars.

In any case, the most likely Martian settlements will not be glass
domes but underground lava tunnels repurposed and supplied with
breathable air and drinkable water. Ideal for those who want to pull
back the curtains every morning for a view of walls made of volcanic
rock.

“Mars,” Elton John told us on Rocket Man, “ain’t the kind of
place to raise your kids. In fact it’s cold as hell.” What he
didn’t say is that it ain’t no place to conceive a kid, neither.
As the Weinersmiths explain, producing offspring to settle this toxic
hellscape will prove a fascinatingly risky business. Sex on
low-gravity Mars seems to be impeded by fluids not flowing in the
right direction. On page 76, there’s a cartoon of a
“pregnodrome”, a kind of birthing tilt-a-whirl designed to
simulate Earth-like gravity. Prospective mothers, like test tubes,
will have to be strapped into this cosmic centrifuge if they are to
breed successfully. That’s before you even consider how tiny the
settler gene pool would be.

Which is what leads us to this chilling quote from a specialist in
extraterrestrial ethics: “We assume that the Martian colony
environment would favour … liberal abortion policy because the birth
of a disabled child would be highly detrimental to the colony.” We
haven’t even set foot there and they’re already talking space
eugenics.

The book reminds us that exploration is predicated on the suffering of
pioneers. The first dog
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space, Laika, jetted off with no means to return to Earth, proving
once and for all how evil the Soviets were. Astronaut John Glenn spent
four hours in orbit on board Friendship 7 in 1962 wearing a probe
(depicted in a scale model in the book) placed where the sun doesn’t
shine, though whether that was essential to the mission or some kind
of pervy quirk is uncertain. Big picture: Laika, we salute you for
your sacrifice.

But, of course, the cold war no longer provides a spur to national
space programmes. Instead, a private space “bastardocracy”
consisting of Bezos, Musk and Branson will be monopolising Martian
real estate long before today’s superpowers set up shop there –
and decades after Britain has sourced enough rubber bands to launch
its Neasden Explorer.

In another reversal of cold war certainties, even though the
Weinersmiths are – there’s no easy way to say this – Americans,
they write like communists. They disdain John Locke’s thesis that
anyone who mixes their labour with the land then owns it (the basis of
centuries of justification for the rapacious acquisition of property)
and prefer Elinor Ostrom’s philosophy of the commons
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the moment, after all, space is inspiringly unclaimed. It is one big
commons, among the few places in the universe not zoned to become a
strip mall or luxury flats.

Sadly, once China and the US get their acts together and join the tech
bros on Mars, the authors calculate that the risk of nuclear war in
space to settle interplanetary disputes will be non-trivial. That
brings a glimmer of good news, though: as far as I understand the
science, we remaining Earthlings will be able to kick back over pink
gins and enjoy the light show, safe behind our magnetosphere. Which is
just one more reason to stay at home.

_More articles [[link removed]] by
Stuart Jeffries._

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* Space exploration
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* Elon Musk
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* Jeff Bezos
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* Mars
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* Science
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