Illustrations by Michelle Garcia.
“Now I’m a scientific expert; that means I know nothing about absolutely everything”
–– Arthur C. Clarke, _2001: A Space Odyssey_
Since the epoch-defining Apollo 11 moon landing of 1969—with proverbial rose tinted glasses and much conviction—futurists and space-enthusiasts have predicted a time when interplanetary human settlements will no longer be just a thing of our imagination.
If man can traverse the frosted craters of the lunar surface, then the possibilities are surely endless. Fast forward some five decades—beating NASA to the galactic punch—we have tech billionaires Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos to thank for bestowing upon us not just one, but two seemingly promising blueprints for pioneering outer solar system colonization at long last.
Alas, as meticulous as each of the respective plans appear at first blush, the reality is that they are far from fail-proof, and—to our collective dismay—more-or-less unattainable. So despite our progressive foray into the 21st century space race, we must ask ourselves: is a multi-planet human civilization truly underway? Or is it nothing more than delusions of grandeur?
As a society not-so-secretly shackled by technology-lust—subject to a reality that more often than not resembles the trappings of a computer simulation no less—our obsession with space as the final frontier is hardly a new one. It runs so deep in fact that it is the single most prevalent theme in our most touted science fiction cultural staples (read: literature, cinema, music, art, et al) that act as time-transcending testaments to it.
Whether on the heels of wanting to save humanity from the perils of nuclear war, endemic viruses, and exponential ecological decay that will lead to our eventual extinction, or to hedonically quell our innate biological yearning to conquer uncharted territories, we as a species will never cease to stop looking to the cosmos as a home away from home. But will we actually get there?
Tesla and SpaceX CEO Musk (FKA Mr. Grimes) is adamant in swaying the masses to believe that he will send people off to Martian colonies by as early as the fast-approaching year 2024. That’s in less than five year’s time, folks. How could this be for certain when the extremely precise planetary alignment required for a successful launch to the Red Planet only occurs biannually and Musk’s plan dictates deploying multiple rockets during separate two-year-apart alignments to ensure that all of the necessary bases covered and settlers have the resources they need to subsist? Goes without saying, it’s not remotely unlikely that Musk’s crew can miss one of the one-off alignments by a long shot (which would set us back by two years). Worse, they can miss it—each time—and that would be four years down the drain. But in the event that all launches do end up proving successful, let’s not turn a blind eye to, perhaps, the largest conundrum at hand: Mars is not habitable.
Here’s a water-cooler version of what his crew is slated to accomplish upon landing: convert CO2 from the highly radioactive and ultra-thin atmosphere into energy-producing propellant, terraform the high-chlorine toxic Martian soil (which is deadly to all forms of life) with vegetation indigenous to Earth mirroring an Earth-like habitat, and build out cities incrementally, expanding overtime. And here is how the extraterrestrial planet will impact humans: microgravity will cause bones to thin out, muscles to weaken, and heart shapes to alter (this is if we can secure an endless supply of oxygen). To boot, we are likely to either produce excess melanin to shield ourselves from poisonous levels of radiation (thus developing garishly carrot-like red skin-tone). Or we could lose pigmentation altogether and become a race of albinos in the below freezing climates. Rest assured, it’s not just my inner disgruntled New Yorker skeptic jumping out—pundits too can’t get past the glaring holes in the overall plan, and have rendered the mission more-or-less impossible in our lifetime, let alone within the next decade.
“Mars has more gravity than the ISS \[International Space Station\] but not a lot, it’s still about a sixth of Earth’s. So you’ve got a serious issue there as to whether people can live there for any serious length of time at all. That doubles down if you want to try raising children and anything that approaches an actual colony,” Dr. David Armstrong, an astrophysics professor at the University of Warwick, told Business Insider in an interview published on August 17th, 2019.
On the other hand, Bezos—the richest man on earth (with a net-worth of over $100 billion) and CEO of Amazon and Blue Origin—envisions a different galactic future for mankind that reads more space tourism centric. Unlike Musk’s fixation on the Red Planet, Bezos is hellbent on transporting a trillion people to self-supporting space habitats that will potentially orbit the Earth’s moon, also deriving water from its surface through electrolysis. He calls them “O’Neill cylinders”—eponymously named after the late American physicist and futurist, Gerard Kitchen O’Neill, who generated the original blueprint of the colonies that Bezos wishes to replicate. Much like O’Neill’s prototype, Bezos’ cylinder(s) will comprise of an artificial biosphere running on a giant mechanical centrifuge that mimics earthly climate and gravity. Except you can be sure it won’t feature dated terrestrial nuisances like rain, snow, and natural disasters. Despite its bewitching allure, pundits state that Bezos’ ostentatious plan will likely never come to fruition due to its unfathomably high expenses (even with the whopping $2 billion donation he reportedly makes to his campaign yearly and his penchant for using reusable rockets).
“You need a huge amount of shielding material, way more than you need to build the actual structure, just to stop people getting essentially sterilized quite quickly. Some of the estimates I’ve seen of shielding material are essentially beyond economically feasible,” Dr. Armstrong also confirmed with Business Insider.
In a later conversation, Dr. Armstrong added, “Choosing who goes is a hard ethical problem, and one which would functionally be led by a handful of US billionaires.”
And he is undoubtedly on the nose with his assertion, as even in the far reaches of the cosmos, the mere notion of colonialism is no less rife with ethical and moral dilemmas than our centuries-spanning colonial past here on Earth. For this reason, deciding who gets to live in interplanetary colonies and travel to supremely opulent space habitats engenders relentless scrutiny within scientific communities.
For instance, if Musk were to successfully carry out his mission to the Red Planet, would settlers have to succumb to gene editing to withstand the harsh weather conditions and grow immunity to the poisonous radiation in order to survive? If so, what will the future of genetically altered humanoids on Mars look like overtime? And how far will we allow gene editing to go before we transform our DNA into that of designer Martian babies and we are no longer humans?
By the same token, if Bezos’ cylindric paradise did secure the funding and resources needed to sustain itself, what echelon of humans could realistically afford to sojourn its cosmically luxe terrains? With the state of our current socio-economic disparity here on Earth, this begs the question of what the future of one-percenters and the mega-privileged would look like in a world where space tourism is on the table and highly covetable. Will we live in a vastly dichotomous society divided by impoverished Earth-dwelling subhumans that will never get to relish space travel, and the genetically engineered ultra-rich resembling German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche’s Übermensch who will sit in the lap of celestial luxury in their outer space Shangri-La looking down at the plebeians back on Earth?
At the 2018 World Government Summit, American Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson astutely pointed out that futurists have historically been rather embarrassingly off when connecting the dots for innovations yet-to-be born.Take the illustration from a cheeky postcard he showcased from the 1900s, which predicts a group of bourgeoise neighbors flying about using solo artificial wing contraptions, entirely miscalculating the function of flight and fully discounting the dangers of falling flat on the ground, which would lead to fatality.
Analogously, perhaps ostensible Mars settlements and boujee self-supporting space habitats don’t accurately elucidate what’s ahead in the realm of space exploration. In fact, many astrophysicists argue that the most habitable place in our solar system, aside from Earth, is not actually a planet, but rather Saturn’s largest moon, Titan.
While there’s no doubt that space should be at the forefront of our zeitgeist now more than ever, we shouldn’t become tethered simply to what’s in the public eye, but rather come to terms with the fact that what’s ahead has yet to be conceived—it’s sure to be out of this world.
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