The Mars Delusion

LONDON — On the corner of a busy gyratory, a bus ride from my house in south London, sits an unremarkable yellow-brick building. Each day, thousands of commuters sweep past this corner on the way to Vauxhall Bridge. Chances are that few would give the building a second glance were it not for the diverting sign that runs between the windows of the lower floors: “BRITISH INTERPLANETARY SOCIETY.”

If the Kennedy Space Center is the gleaming capital of space exploration as a national endeavor, then this humble address, “Arthur C. Clarke House,” might be considered the enthusiasts’ spiritual home. Founded in 1933, the society headquartered here is the world’s oldest space advocacy organization. One friend, after learning I was going to visit, told me he’d always suspected it was the sanctum of “space wizards.” Inside its doors one morning in February, I found it occupied by Colin, John and Alistair, who were presently engaged in redecorating the lecture theatre. As his colleagues strained to lug a heavy model of the 1980s British HOTOL spaceplane into the lobby, Jerry Stone took a break to talk to me about settling Mars.

For Stone, a 71-year-old “space presenter” and BIS fellow, Mars has always been a fixation. He told me that landing a manned spacecraft on the Red Planet promised to be “a major step in the advancement of humanity,” unlocking any number of secrets about the workings of the universe. Aside from anything else, it was a tantalizing grail. All due respect to Columbus, Magellan and Cook, he told me, “but they didn’t cross millions of miles of space to land on the surface of another world. If that doesn’t excite you, then I don’t know what will.”

Upstairs, in the society library, Stone scoured the shelves for books on Mars. Soon, a pile was growing on the reading table — “Next Stop Mars,” “Why Mars,” “Marswalk One,” “Martian Outpost” — containing between them decades of speculation about propulsion systems, habitation blueprints and spacesuit designs. One of the tomes predated Sputnik and included photos depicting the Martian sphere as a nebulous grayscale blob. “Nowadays, people can get better views from telescopes in their back garden,” Stone said.

The reality is that people have been yearning to visit that blob for a long time. Men like Stone, who’d grown up with the Apollo missions, just want to reach it. But many of their fellow travelers covet bigger dreams: to establish a permanent human presence on Mars, and in so doing, usher in our interplanetary future. For decades, space evangelists have promoted Martian settlement as an insurance policy, a “lifeboat” should human folly or a planet-killing asteroid bring about Earth’s 6th great extinction event. Some have viewed the ambition in more hazy terms, as a logical next step in our species’ evolutionary impulse to expand into uncharted territories. Others have seemed content to echo the less philosophical sentiments of Jeff Bezos, who said, in 2016: “We should, because it’s cool.”

Such a mission isn’t short of its big-hitting advocates. In 2019, NASA announced plans to dispatch a first manned mission to Mars in 2033, when orbital paths are most conducive to the shortest round trip. Chinese rocketeers are said to be targeting the same launch window. In his inaugural address in January 2025, President Donald Trump declared that his new administration would “pursue our manifest destiny into the stars, launching American astronauts to plant the Stars and Stripes on the planet Mars.”

Meanwhile, the real boost for humanity’s Martian aspirations has come from the private sector and its new plutocratic space race. During the ill-fated shuttle missions of the 1980s, the cost of launching an object into space hovered above $54,000 per kilogram of mass. By streamlining production and pioneering reusable launch modules, SpaceX has slashed that cost to around $1,500 per kilogram. In time, this economic trajectory could see space entrepreneurs succeed where the shuttle program failed by making spaceflight routine.

Egged on by SpaceX founder Elon Musk’s conspicuous if zany advocacy, these advances have renewed optimism that humans will land on the Red Planet and potentially establish a permanent colony in the foreseeable future. In 2024, Musk, who has said he hopes to die on Mars, set out a timeline that seemed suspiciously aligned with his own probable lifespan: “Less than 5 years for uncrewed, less than 10 to land people, maybe a city in 20 years, but for sure in 30, civilization secured.”

“For decades, space evangelists have promoted Martian settlement as an insurance policy, a “lifeboat” should human folly or a planet-killing asteroid bring about Earth’s 6th great extinction event.”

But now the space community was reeling from an unforeseen volte-face. Two weeks earlier, Musk had turned his attention to a much nearer, and, it could be argued, less exciting celestial body. “The overriding priority is securing the future of civilization,” he posted, “and the Moon is faster.” The gray-hairs at the BIS were lamenting the pivot. “I had hoped we’d see humans on Mars in my lifetime,” said Colin Philp, the serving society president. “But it always seems to be 20 years down the line.”

I didn’t have the heart to compound their disappointment by revealing my own misgivings. After weeks of reading about the challenges of settling Mars, I was preoccupied with one glaring truth. Mars is an uncompromisingly hostile planet and a dreadful place to be a living organism. According to some critics, the process of establishing a human presence on its surface is likely to make any notional future pioneers who do so progressively irradiated, sick, mad and dead.

The Siren’s Call Of The Red Planet

If there is a starting point to humanity’s dream of settling Mars, it could be said to begin with a consequential mistranslation. In 1877, a Milanese astronomer named Giovanni Schiaparelli trained his telescope on our distant neighbor and produced a hand-drawn map depicting a latticework of linear features crisscrossing the planet’s surface. Unsure what they signified, Schiaparelli called them “canali,” meaning “channels.” As news of his discovery reached the Anglosphere, the word was transliterated as “canals,” connoting artificiality, fueling speculation that they must have been engineered by some hitherto invisible hand.

In America, Schiaparelli’s schema soon captured the imagination of Percival Lowell, the scion of a Boston textile dynasty, who subsequently established an eponymous observatory on the outskirts of Flagstaff, Arizona. As he and his team of Harvard astronomers expanded Schiaparelli’s map, Lowell, a Barnum-esque character prone to monomania, became convinced that the lines he was observing revealed a planet-wide irrigation system carrying water from the polar ice caps down to vegetated equatorial oases. For Lowell, the canals — 20-30 miles wide and averaging 1,500 miles in length — were not just signs of life, but incontrovertible evidence of a peaceable and productive extra-terrestrial civilization. In a series of lectures in 1895, he speculated that Mars must be a realm of titans. Unencumbered by Earthly gravity, “a Martian would be, physically, fifty-fold more efficient than a man,” he claimed.

Lowell’s theories were eagerly promulgated by a sensationalist media, which hailed him as a visionary. But by the early 20th century, his notions had been dismissed as illusory, a product of his own wishful thinking as much as the era’s limited telescopic range. More recent commentators have wondered whether the Bostonian, in his obsessive shifts at the eyepiece, may have been recording nothing more than reflections of the capillaries in his own eyes.

At the height of the Space Race, in July 1965, NASA launched its first successful Mars probe, Mariner IV, which passed within 6,118 miles of the planet’s surface. The 22 grainy, black-and-white images it beamed back to Earth revealed a barren, cratered husk — presumed near-conclusive proof that Mars was lifeless. For the inheritors of Lowell’s fever-dreams, however, it wouldn’t take long for ideas of pre-existing Martian lifeforms to morph into an alternative vision, already a recurrent theme in science fiction: If Mars was vacant, perhaps it could host a human colony, a first stepping-stone in our species’ interplanetary expansion.

How To Settle Mars

In his 2024 book, “The New World on Mars,” Robert Zubrin, an aerospace engineer and president of The Mars Society, provides a definitive how-to guide for establishing a human presence on the Red Planet.

Zubrin predicts that the first Martian homesteaders will set out from Earth on some future generation of SpaceX’s “Starship,” scheduling the outward journey to coincide with the moment when orbital mechanics offer the shortest possible trajectory between the two planets. After a voyage of six months, the homesteaders will set down at a predetermined point of settlement, possibly planting their flag somewhere in the vicinity of the Karolev or Milankovic Craters, in the planet’s northern hemisphere, close to its expansive layer of subsurface permafrost. Upon arrival, they will erect a habitable outpost, fabricating living quarters from cannibalized spaceship parts.

Their beachhead established, this pioneer colony of 50 to 100 dogged individuals “will then go to work,” Zubrin writes. They will extract Mars’ abundance of raw materials: grinding cement from gypsum; firing bricks from claylike deposits; smelting iron from the rust-red ferric oxide that carpets the entire planet. They will wash and process the Martian scree, or “regolith,” turning it into an aggregate conducive to growing crops. Exhibiting the grit and stolid appetite that will doubtless be inherent to the Martian pioneer, they will derive protein from worms, insects and spirulina algae.

“If there is a starting point to humanity’s dream of settling Mars, it could be said to begin with a consequential mistranslation.”

Energy will be supplied by small fission reactors, though it is likely that these will eventually be supplanted by a more prolific nuclear technology: “If fusion is not developed on Earth, it certainly will be on Mars. Necessity is the mother of invention,” Zubrin writes. Ample water can be siphoned from that northern permafrost, which is believed to extend from Mars’ glacial pole down to the 38th parallel in volumes estimated to exceed that of America’s Great Lakes. From these rugged beginnings, the settlement will grow, reinforced by new immigrants every couple of years when the biannual launch window returns.

Permitting himself a momentary skepticism, Zubrin admits that Musk’s prediction of a million-strong metropolis is not “a realistic scenario.” Instead, he visualizes a first Martian city of some 50,000 inhabitants, requiring around 800 soccer fields of pressurized living space, and more than three times that amount of farmland.

Perhaps they will live beneath domes or conjoined cylinders made of transparent Spectra, or use lightweight boring machines to excavate living space from the bedrock. One school of off-planet urban design foresees a picturesque, roofed settlement spilling down the opposing walls of a linear canyon, “giving the Mars city a look remarkably like many charming, steep hillside Mediterranean towns such as Sedona, Mykonos, and Cinque Terre,” Zubrin writes.

Then they will look to the stars. Harnessing Direct Air Capture technology to extract carbon dioxide, which constitutes 95% of Martian air, the pioneers will utilize the time-tested Sabatier reaction, using a nickel catalyst to combine CO2 with hydrogen electrolyzed from water to produce methane (CH4):

CO2 + 4H2 → CH4 + 2H2O

In liquid form, this methane will serve as the raw ingredient for powerful rocket propellant, fueling further space exploration and return trips to Earth.

To facilitate interplanetary mobility, Zubrin proposes a “Phobos skyhook,” a 3,600-mile-long Kevlar tether dangled from Mars’ innermost moon. Such an apparatus could snag spacecraft just above the Martian equator, then exploit Phobos’ rapid rotational speed to slingshot them out into the wider cosmos.

Initially bankrolled by Earth-bound governments and private enterprise, the Martian settlement will eventually become economically self-sufficient. Having solved the puzzle of nuclear fusion, they will export its fuel, deuterium, which proliferates in Martian water. Meanwhile, their main source of income will derive from “the sale and licensing of intellectual property.” Zubrin envisages “an inventors colony,” where this precocious, self-selecting elite will patent their myriad innovations and sell them back to Earth.

There will be tourism, and prestige luxury merchandise (Zubrin submits that the settlers might export artificial Martian diamonds tinted with a regolith hue). Perhaps they could sell the broadcast rights to low-gravity spectator sports like rover racing or something “comparable to the exhilarating Quidditch games” in Harry Potter; on Mars, Zubrin points out, “basketball players will be able to jump three times as high.” Eventually, the Red Planet will evolve into a galactic entrepôt, making and selling goods to the miners quarrying platinum ore in the asteroid belt located between Mars and Jupiter.

It is an audacious, Promethean imaginary. Certainly, there is no denying the rhetorical appeal to horizonless aspiration. Yet for all Zubrin’s enumeration of thrust-to-weight ratios and chemical formulae, the defining currency of this notional colony, and the keystone of its author’s unwavering faith in its feasibility, is human genius. In Zubrin’s telling, the first Martians will face a proposition not dissimilar to that which confronted early humans as they expanded out of Africa, a migration enabled less by Earth’s benevolence than the force of our species’ ineluctable resolve. Atavistic allusions to the colonization of North America, shorn of any ethical or genocidal wrinkles, crop up in almost every chapter.

Inevitably, there is a strong libertarian tenor to this strain of techno-futurism. “Ultimately,” Zubrin writes, “I believe the case for Mars is liberty.” By forging an off-planet frontier, he contends that Martian settlement will reinvigorate a human project that has become conformist and decadent, hostage to the stifling democracy and bureaucracies of Earth. This hypothetical colony would thrive primarily because “the people would be much better. … They would be men and women with a cause.”

Critics argue that such imaginative terraforming elides the true technological challenges of settling Mars, not to mention the incalculable psychological and physical toll it will exert on its practitioners. Short of finding some way to remake the Martian environment (Musk has proposed immolating the planet with thermonuclear warheads to catalyze a runaway greenhouse effect), the actual experience of life on Mars is likely to be more complicated, and not in any way that could be described as good.

“The actual experience of life on Mars is likely to be more complicated, and not in any way that could be described as good.”

The Harsh Reality Of Planet B

Like Earth, Mars was born from a disc of stellar gas and dust swirling around a newborn star. Across eons of collisions and centripetal gravity, some of this cosmic material coalesced into a sphere 4,200 miles in diameter, delineating an elliptical orbit at an average of 142 million miles from the sun.

The outermost of the solar system’s four terrestrial planets (the other four being gaseous), this distant rock is universally accepted to be the only viable option for human colonization. Our other neighbor, Venus, has an average surface temperature of 860°F, an air pressure 90 times that of Earth, and clouds composed of 80% sulfuric acid. Planet-wise, it’s Mars or bust. It is nevertheless an environment for which our fragile species did not evolve.

Detractors might scoff at Musk’s ambition to die on Mars, but at least the dying part would be easy. The Martian air is 95% carbon dioxide. Breathing this air would suffocate the average human in a few seconds. The surface air pressure is six millibars, roughly equivalent to the pressure 22 miles above Earth. Were Musk to very inadvisably step out onto the Martian surface in his “Occupy Mars” T-shirt and sandals, all the water in his body would vaporize in an instant, making it difficult to predict what would kill him faster: asphyxiation or a kind of total bodily implosion. Either way, the near-vacuum conditions would soon desiccate his corpse, leaving behind a freeze-dried mummy that — owing to the lack of moisture and putrefying bacteria — would never decompose.

Even within the confines of a pressurized spacesuit, experts fear that Mars would also kill you slowly. The absence of a magnetosphere, which on Earth channels cosmic rays around the planet, exposes the Martian surface to a continual hail of charged subatomic particles, originating from stars, supernovae and our own sun. Average radiation levels on Mars are 50 times higher than on Earth, and many researchers fear that prolonged exposure could induce brain damage, all manner of cognitive impairment, and abnormal rates of cancer (though Zubrin asserts that “this is not a showstopper.”)

Mars is cold. The average surface temperature hovers around -80°F, fluctuating by as much as 100 degrees from day to night, and dipping to -225°F at the poles. (“It’s a little cold, but we can warm it up,” reassures the SpaceX website without much elaboration.)

Mars is also dusty. Martian regolith is a reddish-brown pulverized rock laced with perchlorates, chemical compounds that can disrupt human thyroid function. Intermittently, strengthening winds whip this dust into colossal, continent-sized haboobs. Every three Mars years, equivalent to around five-and-a-half Earth years, these dust storms go global, encircling the entire planet for months on end.

All of which is to say that, barring some unforeseeable evolutions in fundamental human biology, living on Mars would be a totally hermetic existence, confined to a landscape more Hades than Elysium. Far from Zubrin’s vision of fusion reactors and vertiginous games of basketball, doubters might be apt to wonder whether the true physical toll of life on Mars is better encapsulated by the opening line of “The Martian” (2011) by Andy Weir, in which the protagonist, Mark Watney, freshly marooned on the Red Planet, states baldly: “I’m pretty much fucked.” (Watney subsequently unfucks himself through a combination of superhuman pluck and potatoes fertilized by his own excrement.)

The Human Body On Mars

Seeking some illumination on this apparent gulf between space settlement boosterism and on-the-ground realities, I spoke to the ecologist and pop-science writer Kelly Weinersmith. In 2023, Weinersmith published “A City on Mars,” co-authored with her illustrator husband Zach Weinersmith, which purports to be a “sociological roadmap” to space settlement.

The couple didn’t initially set out to write a skeptical book, Kelly explained, talking to me over a video call from Charlottesville, Virginia. As SpaceX’s cost-cutting revolution gathered momentum, Weinersmith, a self-confessed “space geek,” intended to lay out how “space settlement was just around the corner.” The conventions she attended during her research were generally serious-minded affairs, she told me, though one did culminate in a “Space Cowboys Ball” where one or two attendees dressed up as Chewbacca. Speakers laid out the technological workarounds and gave inspirational speeches high on techno-optimism. But while Zubrin and other advocates presented Mars as a land of limitless opportunity, Weinersmith found that many of the thornier problems of human flourishing and societal organization were being overlooked.

“Barring some unforeseeable evolutions in fundamental human biology, living on Mars would be a totally hermetic existence, confined to a landscape more Hades than Elysium.”

Several of these under-examined obstacles have more to do with problems of biological and sociological adaptation than technological innovation. “The one that scares me the most is reproduction,” Weinersmith told me. “To have a self-sustaining settlement means you need to have women giving birth on Mars. And we absolutely do not know if that’s safe.”

Aside from the increased risk of birth defects arising from radiation exposure, Weinersmith is also concerned about the impacts of microgravity during spaceflight, which redistributes blood flow, deconditions the muscles, and reduces bone density. Carrying a baby in microgravity would almost certainly exacerbate the rigors of labor. It could also disrupt a newborn’s vestibular system, which controls balance and coordination.

In the book, the Weinersmiths propose a tongue-in-cheek solution, the “pregnodrome,” a giant spinning donut-shaped centrifuge that mimics Earth’s gravity, in which a pregnant woman could remain strapped for the entire nine months of gestation.

Mars evangelists don’t much like hearing about this stuff, Weinersmith said. When she raised the issue of childbirth with that milieu, her interlocutors were dismissive, arguing that “women give birth in harsh conditions on Earth all the time,” she said. Later, it occurred to her that she had never seen a queue outside a women’s restroom at a space convention.

Reproduction is just one stubborn puzzle in a litany of biological unknowns. What effect would the Martian “sol,” 38 minutes longer than an Earth day, have on a human’s circadian rhythms? How might the physical and cognitive deterioration inherent to space travel accelerate during the long interplanetary journey between Earth and Mars? How would living in Martian gravity, 38% of Earth’s, affect human physiology?

Nathalie A. Cabrol, an astrobiologist and director of the SETI Institute’s Carl Sagan Center for Research, in California, told me that the fewer than 700 people who have been to space make for a tiny sample from which to extrapolate firm universals. Their experiences have nevertheless demonstrated that space travel causes numerous acute and chronic infirmities. “These people have tended to be the very fittest of us,” Cabrol said. “They’ve still taken a beating up there.” Many astronauts, especially those returning from lengthy sorties on space stations like Mir and the ISS, have reported experiencing profound fatigue, nausea and even episodic blindness. On their return, medical tests have shown evidence of premature aging, flaring inflammatory biomarkers and impaired executive function.

In studies carried out by the University of California, Irvine, mice subjected to space-relevant doses of radiation underwent permanent changes to the central nervous system “that showed little or no overt signs of recovery, regeneration, or repair.” The brain matter of the same hapless rodents displayed abnormalities consistent with those seen in people with Alzheimer’s.

The trials of transit may be nothing compared to those of being on Mars itself, Cabrol explained. “We have co-evolved with our planet for four billion years,” she said. “We see in a specific range; we hear in a specific range; our posture has been shaped through our interactions with this biosphere.” Dwelling on the Martian surface for any protracted period would inevitably modify the human body. These adaptations might mitigate some of the hardships of being on Mars. “It also means that returning to Earth is going to become very difficult very fast,” Cabrol said. Speculating on the effect of prolonged exposure to Martian gravity, some researchers have forecast that the future settler, after generations of evolutionary conditioning, will look less like an Übermensch and more like E.T.

Then there’s the dangers posed by extra-terrestrial lifeforms. If microbes exist beneath the Martian surface — and most astrobiologists still see this as an open question — sending people to Mars could precipitate cross-contamination, even alien viral infection. In short, Cabrol surmised, we’d need to “make sure that life on Mars doesn’t find us before we find it.”

Liberty Or Death?

The latter portion of the Weinersmiths’ book unpacks the equally knotty question of governance. How will the Martian colony organize itself? Here, again, the advocacy is vague, characterized by a gauzy, overarching faith that the transcendence of space travel will magic away the avarice and cruelty that have always been the dark shadow of human expansion.

The international covenant governing off-Earth human activity is the Outer Space Treaty (OST). First inscribed in 1967, the OST enshrines space as an international commons and “the province of all mankind.” At just 2,500 words, the document is necessarily sparse on detail. “Countries are supposed to act in good faith, but there is no way to enforce cooperation,” Weinersmith writes.

“If microbes exist beneath the Martian surface … sending people to Mars could precipitate cross-contamination, even alien viral infection.”

In 2020, American legislators drafted the Artemis Accords, a framework for NASA’s forthcoming Artemis mission to the Moon. The Accords reiterated many of the OST’s fundamental principles of “open skies” transparency and multilateral cooperation, albeit with a potentially far-reaching sub-clause: “The Signatories affirm that the extraction of space resources does not inherently constitute national appropriation.” Some observers have warned that this emergent loophole could enable land grabs and resource scrambles under the pretext of commerce. China, a rising space power, is a notable non-signatory.

Daniel Deudney, a professor of political science at John Hopkin’s University, told me that the race to colonize Mars, far from being the panacea advertised by proponents, is a vector of profound existential risk. In “Dark Skies” (2020), an exhaustive survey of the hopes and hazards inherent in what he terms “space expansionism,” Deudney argues that space travel has forever been inextricable from its weaponization. The first men in space, he reminds us, were launched into orbit by intercontinental ballistic missile technology as instruments of superpower competition. For all its persistent connotations of liberty, the net effect of stuffing near-Earth space with military and communications satellites in the decades since has been to accelerate Earth’s “closure,” tightening the cultural and political straitjacket that space settlement advocates are so eager to escape.

Deudney demonstrates that the enthusiasts’ propensity for optimistic imaginative whimsy can just as easily be marshaled to pick holes in their vision. If space engineers succeed in their professed aim to manipulate asteroid trajectories in the service of planetary defense, what is to stop malign actors from redirecting them toward Earth and turning them into “planetoid bombs”? If future Martians carve out new branches of humanity through evolutionary speciation or bioengineering, isn’t there a risk we will come to perceive them as “menacing monstrosities”? The future Deudney describes, in which nuclear-powered polities and predatory capitalists hold absolute aerial hegemony over Earth, amounts to a geopolitical “perfect storm” that would be “perfectly primed for conflict.”

Deudney is equally skeptical about Zubrin’s conviction that space settlement will be emancipatory. On Mars, the vulnerability of life support systems would create “a situation where any one person can bring the whole thing down,” Deudney said. In seeking to neutralize such a threat, an off-planet city, in which even the very air you breathe will need to be centrally controlled, and where exit options will be nonexistent, would be uniquely predisposed to totalitarianism.

None of these potentially catastrophic scenarios tend to figure in the visions advanced by the space settlement community, Deudney told me. Instead, their programs often exhibit all the partiality of “a real estate promotional scheme” inflected with quasi-religious fanaticism. Their case for settling Mars invariably redacts what Deudney described as the most important practical discovery of the Space Age: “that for trillions and trillions of miles in all directions, space is a harshly inhospitable wilderness.” Revealingly, little in the tone or substance of their advocacy has shifted in response to the recent deterioration in the stability of the global order. “You couldn’t get [the OST treaty] through the United States Senate now,” Deudney noted.

Unlike Deudney, who believes the risks should deter all but the most incremental “Earth-focused” space expansion, Weinersmith maintains that a societally beneficial Martian settlement could still be realized on a circumspect timescale. This approach, which Weinersmith summarizes as “wait-and-go-big,” would first require establishing an international research station on the Moon where astronauts could conduct lengthy biological and technological trials before attempting to establish a similar outpost on Mars. “But I’m not optimistic that [this] is how it’s going to go down,” she told me.

Although “A City on Mars” received widespread critical praise, the space settlement community’s response has been more tepid. Some even saw it as an act of heresy. At one conference in the wake of publication, Weinersmith found herself cornered by an agitated attendee, exclaiming, “You can’t stop me!” Detractors decried the book as the work of “communist misanthropes”; one social media commenter compared it to “Mein Kampf.” For Weinersmith, these splenetic criticisms betrayed a disquieting impatience. “I think there are a lot of people who really want this to happen in their lifetime,” she said.

But let’s suppose, for a moment, that all these riddles are unpicked, and the first Martian settlers succeed in building a habitable colony protected by impenetrable shielding and a watertight legal regime. As I looked deeper into the realities of the Red Planet, I was increasingly nagged by another consideration. Aside from being comprehensively lethal to human health and well-being, Mars is catatonically boring.

“Aside from being comprehensively lethal to human health and well-being, Mars is catatonically boring.”

Planet Boring

In 2021, NASA landed the Perseverance Rover on the rim of a northerly depression known as the Jezero Crater, a 28-mile-wide former lakebed where orbiter images showed the shadow of an ancient river delta, a potential wellspring of microbial life.

Among its extensive suite of analytical instruments, Perseverance carries 23 cameras, most of which are employed for navigation and hazard avoidance. But its most powerful imaging technology comprises a pair of zoomable stereoscopic cameras mounted on a retractable mast; according to its designers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the “mastcam-Z” can resolve “features the size of a softball from more than a mile away.” By stitching multiple images together, NASA’s technicians can produce pin-sharp panoramas of the Martian surface.

At the time of writing, the total number of Perseverance photos uploaded onto NASA’s website stands at almost one million. I spent a couple of hours going through the gallery, and I hesitate to report that it was hard to feel inspired. Most of the images show empty tracts of sand and rubble beneath a brownish, miasmic sky. Even the Mastcam-Z photos seemed hazy and monochromatic, as if taken through a sepia filter.

Mars wasn’t always this way. These vistas of unearthly stasis conceal a tumultuous deep history. Around 3.7 billion years ago, Mars’ liquid core cooled to a solid and stopped rotating, shutting off its planetary dynamo and with it the magnetic shield. As the atmosphere dissipated into the cosmos and temperatures plummeted, the infant planet’s oceans, thought to have once spread across 17-30% of the northern basins, retreated to the frozen poles.

Mars’ middle period, the Hesperian, is thought to have been a time of geological upheaval. Colossal meteors, vestigial debris from the planets’ formation, pummeled the surface, leaving behind colossal impact craters like the Hellas Basin, which is around half the size of Brazil. Viscous lava oozed from the planet’s mantle, accumulating into vast, smooth-sided salients. Located around 15 degrees north of the equator, the shield volcano Olympus Mons is the largest mountain in the solar system, topping out at 72,000 feet above the Martian “datum” — the equivalent of sea level — or 2-½-times the height of Everest.

But whatever bygone sturm and drang once made and reworked the Martian landscape in the deep past has long since fallen silent. Absent plate tectonics, oceans and running water, Mars’ solitary erosive force today is the wind, which has weathered much of its rocky ground into an abrasive, umber sand.

The legacy, topographically, is a planet of two halves, bifurcated by a boundary between its two hemispheres known as the “Martian dichotomy.” The southern hemisphere is more rugged, punctuated by features like the Valles Marineris, a titanic canyon system up to four miles deep that cuts 2,480 miles across the planet’s southwest quadrant.

But the northern hemisphere, favored for human settlement, is mostly low-lying, dominated by the Vastitas Borealis, literally “northern wastes.” If Perseverance’s camerawork is anything to go by, future space settlers will be confronted with a landscape of maddening monotony. Even Olympus Mons, with a footprint the size of France, is aesthetically tedious, its contours so gradual that a Martian mountaineer would scarcely be able to distinguish the base from the summit. The russet mesas that encircle Mark Watney’s habitation dome in the film adaptation of “The Martian” are Hollywood license. In the book, more faithful to reality, the abandoned astronaut describes his environs as “a featureless wasteland.”

Overarching this barren prospect is the Martian sky. On Earth, the sky’s blue color results from “Rayleigh scattering,” where small atmospheric molecules disperse sunlight at shorter wavelengths. On Mars, by contrast, the preponderance of airborne iron oxide particles scatters light at the lower end of the spectrum. It is this effect, known instead as “Mie scattering,” which generates the butterscotch firmament visible throughout Perseverance’s image gallery. (Of life on Mars, extant or extinct, the rover has to date found no definitive sign.)

It is speculative to foresee what impacts this combination of environmental hostility and aesthetic sterility might have on the human psyche. That hasn’t stopped people from trying. In seeking to model how the Martian experience would play out, students of space settlement have looked at analogs of humans operating for long periods in isolated Earth environments — for example, an Antarctic research station and in simulations — experiments that artificialize off-planet living conditions.

“If Perseverance’s camerawork is anything to go by, future space settlers will be confronted with a landscape of maddening monotony.”

At the time of writing, several off-planet simulations are operational, including China’s “Lunar Palace” at Beihang University in Beijing, NASA’s “HI-SEAS” project on the flanks of Mauna Loa, Hawaii, and the “Mars Desert Research Station” run by the Mars Society in Utah. Crewmembers at these facilities conduct science experiments, eat food from sachets and communicate with external mission controllers with long transmission delays. Some occasionally don spacesuits to venture outside to perform “Extravehicular activities” (EVAs), collecting rock samples for geochemical testing.

However, the question remains as to how much can be inferred about the harsh realities of off-planet living from an extravagant cosplay in which participants are only ever a phone call away from salvation. No amount of Earth-bound experimentation can come close to replicating the totalizing sensory vacuum of Mars. The Martian atmosphere is too thin to carry sound. Sunlight intensity on the surface is only half of that on Earth. One has only to imagine a lonely astronaut on an EVA, kicking over rocks on a gravel plain several million miles from home, accompanied by nothing more than the hum of their life support apparatus and the beat of their own heart, to recognize that Mars won’t be a place for those of fragile mind.

Space research psychiatrist Nick Kanas contends that even our species’ history of space travel to date falls well short of approximating the Martian ordeal. “On-orbit and lunar astronauts can see the beauty of the Earth in all its glory,” he told me. “On Mars, it’s just an insignificant dot in the heavens.” In contrast to the “overview effect,” the awestruck emotions astronauts have reported upon looking down at Earth, progressing into deep space will be more characterized by what Kanas has dubbed the “Earth-disconnect phenomenon,” an enervating sense of dislocation and despair. To properly assess the emotional toll of such profound solitude, Kanas believes mission planners should establish a more extreme simulation “on the dark side of the Moon, where the Earth is out of view.”

The Mars Evangelist

Zubrin, arguably the world’s most prolific Mars evangelist, appeared on my laptop screen, sitting behind the desk at his office in Boulder, Colorado. His Mars obsession had begun as you might expect for a man in his 8th decade. He was 5 years old when the Soviets launched Sputnik. But while the adults around him seemed terrified by its implications, a young Zubrin saw only opportunity. “We were going to be on the Moon by 1970, Mars by 1980, Saturn by 1990, Alpha Centauri by the year 2000. This is what the future looked like,” he told me.

In the late 1980s, Zubrin was working as an engineer for the defense and aerospace contractor Martin Marietta when his bosses asked him to draw up a proposal for getting humans to Mars. By then, NASA had become a bloated enterprise. As part of the George H.W. Bush administration’s “Space Exploration Initiative,” its planners had come up with a Mars mission architecture so complicated that it seemed like they were “rewriting a play in order to give a part to every kid in the room,” Zubrin told me. Zubrin proposed a more streamlined plan called “Mars Direct,” in which an unmanned “Earth return vehicle” would land on Mars and automatically refine propellant to fuel a subsequent manned mission’s journey home.

When Zubrin presented his ideas at the Marshall and Johnson space centers, the proposal made waves. But it soon got bogged down in bureaucracy, stymied, as Zubrin put it, by the paralysis of a “senile political establishment.” As his “blitzkrieg turned into trench warfare,” a publisher approached Zubrin about writing a book. The first edition of “The Case for Mars” (1996) sold out in three weeks; its more enthusiastic readers formed the core membership of the Mars Society, which Zubrin founded in Boulder in 1998. But much of his later writing and advocacy continued to bang the drum for this one grand thwarted dream. An artist’s impression of Mars Direct, depicting a habitat module on the Martian surface beside an inflatable greenhouse and a bullet-shaped return vehicle, was hanging behind Zubrin’s chair.

Zubrin wasn’t shy about admitting that at least part of his fixation stemmed from the fact that reaching Mars was “a very attractive creative engineering problem.” Calculating optimal launch trajectories and conceptualizing off-world habitats, all with the objective of reaching “the place where we might find out the truth about life and the universe,” had always felt like an epochal quest, providing Zubrin with a lifetime of intellectual invigoration.

“No amount of Earth-bound experimentation can come close to replicating the totalizing sensory vacuum of Mars.”

But getting to Mars was moreover a matter of existential survival. If Zubrin’s philosophy could be boiled down to a central conceit, it was the ennoblement of the frontier. He often ruminated that the seed of all human conflict was one big, pervasive idea: “The idea that there isn’t enough for everyone.” If Mars could become the proving ground to refute this notion, its settlement had the potential to end wars, catalyze a new Enlightenment, and smooth the jagged edges of the human condition. Set against this redemptive narrative of cosmic destiny, naysayers like Weinersmith and Deudney were refusing to see the big picture, Zubrin explained.

Some of this conviction, Zubrin admitted, was “a question of belief.” But as he continued to summarize his justifications, I found myself thinking back to Percival Lowell at his eyepiece, seeing only what he wanted to see. Zubrin’s framing of Martian settlement as a civilizational imperative gave him the latitude to gloss over its irreducible complexities and dangers in the service of essentially questionable abstractions: that human genius knows no bounds; that our Lebensraum is infinite; that freedom will always prevail against tyranny.

I suggested that forging new frontiers has not always been universally beneficial; the bloodstained history of colonization betrays that it has usually been the opposite. What was it about Mars, specifically, that promised to break the mold? “Is it a foolproof guarantee against folly? No,” Zubrin conceded.

It was hard to get beyond what seemed to be a fundamental contradiction in Zubrin’s intellectual posture — of the avowed futurist so nostalgic for the past. He liked to valorize the frontiersmen of America’s westward expansion, and the heroes who beat the Nazis, whose sons went to the Moon. He grew misty-eyed as he talked about the speech Kennedy was due to give in Dallas on the day he was assassinated, which contained a line describing America’s obligation to be “watchmen on the walls of world freedom.” Perhaps what Zubrin yearned for more than anything was to see the Mars pioneers, and himself, in that same romantic cast.

A couple of days before our video call, Zubrin had published an op-ed describing Musk’s decision to focus SpaceX’s resources on the Moon as “the biggest mistake of his life.” For Zubrin, the Moon wouldn’t cut it. We’d been there before and, besides he told me, it lacked raw materials like carbon and hydrogen that were “necessary to supply the resources for life.”

Musk, whose own planetary ambitions Zubrin credited to his attendance at a Mars Society fundraiser in 2001, embodied the spirit of private enterprise that had supplanted the grinding bureaucracy of national governments as the vehicle for future space expansion. But Zubrin couldn’t pretend his most prominent bedfellow was still a reliable companion. He disavowed Musk’s “morally repellent” misanthropy, which often seemed to depict Earth as a place broken beyond repair. “Power has clearly gone to his head,” Zubrin said.

The dream endures nonetheless. The two men still share a dismay that the freedom they both professed to cherish has given rise to so much they abhor. Both pine for a tabula rasa, a place to start over. In a 2020 essay for National Review, Zubrin excoriated the “wokeists” seeking to derail space exploration in the name of “planetary protection.” I suspected that Zubrin would forgive Musk any amount of calumny and caprice if only he would fulfill the vision. “With luck, in my lifetime, I’ll hear the cry of the first baby born on Mars,” he said.

A Beguiling Fiction

In chapter 6 of “The Martian Chronicles,” Ray Bradbury fictionalized a third expedition to Mars. Set in April 2000, the story follows a team of 16 astronauts who, upon arriving on the Red Planet, are bewildered to set down on a grassy lawn beside a bucolic Midwestern town. The air is thin but breathable, and the crew goes tentatively outside. Nostalgic music emanates from an unseen phonograph.

Then one of the astronauts spots his grandparents’ house. Soon, all the crew members are weeping with joy as they find themselves reunited with long-dead relatives. The mission leader, Captain John Black, remains cautious, chastising his men for letting down their guard, until his own blue-eyed brother runs down the street to embrace him.

That night, ensconced in his childhood bedroom, Black wonders whether they have arrived in Heaven by the grace of some divine intervention. But then he is seized by a nightmarish thought: “What would the best weapon be that a Martian could use against Earthmen with atom weapons?” Suddenly, Black apprehends that he and the crew have been hoodwinked by a hostile alien race, which, using some unearthly telepathy, has plundered their memories to generate a bewitching hallucination.

The next morning, the town’s inhabitants, “their faces shifting like wax,” emerge from the houses to lower 16 coffins into the ground while a brass band plays “a mournful dirge.” Perhaps there is an allegory of modern Martian dreams in that old tale. For today’s planetary adventurers risk pursuing Mars to humanity’s detriment, imperiled less by the limits of their genius than by the fertility of their imaginations.