Terraforming Mars: a matter of dream, not science

My own vision of terraformed Mars... but only in your dreams, young Cathy.

Painting by Isaac Fryxelius for Young's article

(This piece of mine originally published on Quillette was directly intended as an answer to the very upbeat article of Cathy Young. Please, take a look at her essay over here and dream for a moment about such wonders before reading my short and quick comeback.)

 

Well, it seems that Santa Claus is gone, I can become horrible and nasty again. Poor young Cathy, I’m going to ruin your sweet dream.

All this nice stories of red, green or blue Mars is just fine if you’re ten years old or less. So I supposed, Cathy, you are about ten. But I have to tell you this, young Cathy: your article is pure fiction, Walt Disney stuff, Hollywood fantasies, perfect for an Elon Musk’s rave party. Even the painting looks like California or maybe Colorado. There are not a chance in a billion, no, a trillion, that you can see this bucolic picture on your martian TV by 2050, 2100 (the end of Earth, I remind you, according to the best of our great scientists), 2200, 220000, 220000000. At best, you’ll have a couple or two of poor chaps (not even a girl, alas for them) send by the most modern flying casket to the most depressive place for one year or more, plus the travelling time, in order to collect some ashes to prove that life, that is, some sort of fossilized blob, is appeared on another planet. And they’ll go back home… in the best-case scenario. Naturally, the hypothesis in which they find some interesting discoveries is the most optimistic. More likely, as usual, as for the moon missions for instance, they’ll find nothing valuable to bring back. Because if there is something of interest on Mars—why not?—automatic missions with robots will find it long before and for a much cheaper price. Terraformation, you say, young Cathy? What a joke! If you want to terraform something, terraform the Antarctic first: that’s nearer, cheaper, a little bit hotter and infinitely more fit for human life or any blob-like form. And why on earth should you spend billions of billions, no trillions of trillions, to establish a colony in the most depressive place? A colony like you are dreaming of, dear Cathy, is not an easy task: it takes huge quantities of liquid water, materials of all sorts, energy, preferably petroleum : that’s the best compromise you can imagine, by far, as a handy, powerful and space-saving form of energy. And you know what? There’s not a single drop of petroleum in this place. Because there never were forests full of life, no green, red, black or white men over there. To have a colony like you want, you must have local plants, factories, many factories, roads and power-lines to rely plants and factories and colonies (I suppose you don’t want to put dangerous plants and factories within the sweet and clean but fragile domes of your colony). And you must have green plants too, many many plants, not to produce oxygen (silly idea) but to eat and give to cattle if you want have some meat, sometimes, in your menu. Bad luck, plants don’t grow without bacteria or/and fungi, mushrooms, etc. And guess what, there is not a single living bacteria or mushroom in the martian soil. So, in short, you’ll have to transfer all the wealth of Earth to Mars to have only a couple of domes like you dream of and you’ll still not be able to have a good Belgian beer after work.

To conclude, if terraforming the red planet is only a dream, don’t bother too much with martian politics, economics or education systems: as a matter of fact, that will be just a very sad story of a small band of castaways on a desert and depressive island with no happy ending.

D'autres merveilles (en français).