In case you haven’t noticed, our planet is in chaos environmentally, geo-politically, and socially. Also, you may have noticed that the world’s most famous billionares are trying to move us to outer space. Mars seems to be the destination of choice for our new home. It’s not very far (only 33 million miles away), you can get there in 7 months (which is like going to the corner store by Milky Way galaxy standards, and it looks a lot like Sedona, Arizona; which is always a lovely place for a family vacation. But is moving to the Red Planet a good idea? No, but let’s at least look at the neighborhood.
Most people view Mars as not that much different than Planet Earth. It’s round like Earth, is half the size and our blue planet, there seems to be water there (although not Perriere), and the dust and rocks there are familiar materials that we can walk on, drive on, and throw at other humans–which I’m sure we will want to do. It looks like we could at least build a casino, a McDonald’s, and start a cool rock climbing business there. There is a grand canyon on Mars called Valles Marineris which is 3,000 miles long–or the length of the entire United States! You couldn’t ride a donkey down into the canyon like the Brady Bunch did, and you would want to make sure to take a map, but it would be an amazing tourist site. There’s also a mountain called Olympus Mons that is a volcano the size of Arizona that is 84,000 ft. high (or almost 3 times as high as Mt. Everest). Last, there are some enormous sand dunes which would be great for dune bugging tourists. Unfortunately, the average temperature on Mars is -51 degrees Farenheit. True that the poles on Mars can get up to a crispy 95 degrees Farenheit, but the winter would be -225 degrees Farenheit (or the same temperature that my wife keeps our house’s thermostat at during the winter).
For those that struggle with allergies on Planet Earth, Martian dust storms could make breathing extremely difficult. There’s not much gravity on Mars which means only the Kardashians would feel comfortable there. Another small factor would be that due to the weak air pressure, your blood would literally boil more than it does when you read people’s political posts on Facebook. In fact, your blood would boil you to death. Sadly, building the first Starbucks or Pizza Hut will probably have to wait. The first Earth ex-pats will need to live in something even more uncomfortable than the martian atmosphere: a small enclosed spaceship filled with other human beings. That will probably be a bigger challenge than Mars’ inhospitable atmosphere. If you think the Covid lockdowns were bad…
Perhaps the weirdest thing that would happen is that humans would start to evolve into a different form of human due to the lack of gravity. Humans would grow taller, they would have weaker hearts and circulation, and would lose a lot of body hair. The size of people’s teeth wouuld probably shrink as well due to a controlled diet. That might be a deal-breaker for the health fanatics and the vain. Is it worth living on Mars if we end up looking like the lovechild of Steve Buscemi and Ratboy?
To make Mars’ atmosphere more hospitable, Elon Musk has suggested nuking the planet. This would be an attempt to “terraform” Mars and quickly alter the atmosphere. Somehow, Musk misses the irony of that idea. Ridiculous moonshots like…well, going to the moon or Mars, often end up creating a lot of useful technology. A lot of what is in our mobile phones was invented due to the space race of the 1960’s (as well as the Gulf Wars). Experiments in Space do lead a lot of useful information. The efforts to reach Mars, colonize it, and create space tourism will yield some amazingly helpful inventions. But as with everything humands do, we are also good at creating messes. Currently, there are 900,000 pieces of discarded space junk floating around our planet. Any one of these pieces of metal orbiting the world could puncture a hole in any spaceship we ever send into Space. In other words, the environmental degredation of Space is already long underway before we’ve even opened one In-N-Out Burger on the Moon. Maybe that’s why the Martians have stayed away all these years.