In a thought experiment, Henry Wismayer imagines what might happen if Elon Musk, wearing an “Occupy Mars” T-shirt, stepped out onto the surface of the Red Planet. Would he die first from asphyxiation, or something like a total bodily implosion? Either way, it would not be pretty. Wismayer writes a smart, wide-ranging piece for Noēma on the dream of colonizing Mars—the physics, the biology, the politics, and the psychological toll of life on an extraordinarily hostile and profoundly boring planet. It’s clear Wismayer had a lot of fun writing this piece, and it’s just as entertaining for us to read.
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.
More stories by Henry Wismayer
The Unseen Fury of Solar Storms
“Lurking in every space weather forecaster’s mind is the hypothetical big one, a solar storm so huge it could bring our networked, planetary civilization to its knees.”
My Dad, the Demigod
“Henry Wismayer lost his dad to cancer at the age of four. He thinks through the ways it has shaped his life.”
The Lessons of Uzbekistan’s Lost Sea
“One of history’s worst environmental disasters is now a tourist attraction. What can it teach us about the fate of humankind?”
