Haemimont Games’ 2018 city-builder Surviving Mars inadvertently proves a thing or two about plans for colonising the Red Planet.
Firstly, there is nothing to do there, not specifically. You have your colonists grow food, which they eat at diners. Then they go to work in the mines, the metal from which other colonists, working in factories, turn into printed circuit boards, etc, etc…
I hope someone told them they can do those things on Earth before they got on those shuttles.
The only legitimate purpose for humans on Mars is to conduct some very niche scientific research, the same kind of thing people do in Antarctica. Notice no one is keen to colonise that particular wasteland because it is so obviously uneconomical. There are still plenty of minerals and profits to be found in places with poor workers and weak governments.
And so a question follows from this, for certain billionaires thinking about quitting a devastated, climate-changed Earth:
If we don’t have the capability of surviving on Earth, how is it we are supposed to survive on Mars?
If we could build geodesic domes that maintain a nice climate when it’s -150 degrees outside, why couldn’t we make a dome on earth to handle 50 degrees?
If we could generate enough electricity on Mars – where there are no fossil fuels and where the sun shines with half the intensity – why couldn’t we generate enough, cleanly, here?
The project of actually terraforming Mars requires much more. We would need somehow to get the planet a new atmosphere from elsewhere in the solar system. We’re talking perhaps quadrillions of kilograms of gases. For reference, it is estimated SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy rocket could carry about sixteen thousand kilograms to Mars.
But even should we manage the trillions of rocket trips, we would need to stop this new atmosphere from being blown off into space by the solar winds, as its old atmosphere did. Don’t worry, we can just build a planet-wide network of giant superconducting electromagnets.
The thing is, our own planet already has a large breathable atmosphere, protected by a magnetosphere, which emanates from the rotating iron planetary core. We have liquid water – the surface area of our oceans covers twice the total surface area of Mars. We have soil and plants and solar panels and people.
We do not lack technology. We do not lack a planet. We lack only, at the moment, a collective conviction to make the most of it.