One Million Martians

The cult of personality isn’t new to human history, but lately it has reached new and more ludicrous heights. I’m not talking about Amazon Boi’s latest indulgence, because it is ultimately not very relevant. I’ve seen the memes, and shared a few myself, about billionaires petting their egos with their personal space races instead of helping humanity with their vast, Scrooge McDuckian fortunes. Here is a cold, hard truth we all need to face: they aren’t going to. Billionaires aren’t going to save us, and for a better elucidation on that topic I suggest you go to YouTube and search “Billionaires Aren’t Going To Save Us,” by Patriot Act with Hasan Minhaj. He does a much better job of breaking down what billionaire “charity” really means, and how much it’s really worth. Also, he’s a lot funnier than I am.

But of the billionaire narcissists fighting for our love and admiration, Elon Musk stands head and shoulders above the rest. And this essay only addresses his most grandiose and potentially catastrophic vanity project, his plan to establish a Martian colony of up to one million humans by 2050. According to his silver spoon-caressed mouth, he will begin establishing it around, get this, 2024. Buckle up, space cadets, we’re going to Mars!

Elon Musk is trying to sell us a new boondoggle that he claims will do no less than save the human race from eventual extinction and make us an “interplanetary species.” His fans proclaim him Genius Jesus.Elon Musk isn’t just going to get a crewed mission to Mars, he is going to establish a Martian colony, and, because narcissism only expands with success, it’s going to have ONE MILLION people. What he has going for him, he mixes real issues and aspirations with his muddled ideas, and this appeals to a wide range of science nerds, visionaries, so-called “futurists,” and a host of Musk fans eager to celebrate his “visionary genius.” But he isn’t a visionary genius, he is, like most others of his ilk, another narcissistic black hole sucking up your admiration and adulation. Don’t give him this mass.

Humanity will, someday, need to expand beyond Earth and the Sol system if we are to evade extinction. Our best guess is the Sun will keep burning for only another five billion years; however, each billion years past now, the Sun will expand, and Earth’s absorbed sunlight will increase roughly 10% each interval. So, we’ll have to deal with that. Eventually. And that assumes Earth’s core keeps turning, which keeps it molten and generating the magnetic field that is perhaps its most important contribution to our survival. As you may know, the Earth’s magnetic field is our primary shield against cosmic radiation, particularly that from the Sun, that big ball of hateful, life-giving light in the sky, that would otherwise kill all life on Earth. Except maybe water-bears. Put a pin in that.

We also have gamma ray bursts, wandering black holes, asteroid impacts, and Invader Zim to consider as our potential next mass extinction drivers. But, sooner or later, we have to leave the nest, or go extinct here. Again, EVENTUALLY. Like, within hundreds of millions of years. Or something. So going interplanetary isn’t absurd on its face, until you look at our current technological state. Popular opinion today is that humans have made amazing technologies and we’re really just the best. I won’t argue that iPhones aren’t cool (I prefer Android), and of course we’ve done some really cool shit. But that’s in comparison to fire, washing machines, mostly-safe nuclear power plants, and a space telescope that lasted 31 years before going into safe-mode, maybe forever. My point is, all of human history getting to this point has been the EASY part. Let that sink in.

Here are the massive obstacles facing interplanetary humanity, just considering Mars and nothing else, and the disturbing failures of Elon Musk to acknowledge them. I should also point out that I relied on numerous sources for this essay, from NASA to Scientific American, phys.org and a number of other established, professional, credible scientific sources. Elon Musk’s fans cite their source as “Dude, trust me!”

DISTANCE/TRAVEL TIME: Since both planets are in constant motion, and a Mars year is 1.9 Earth years, lining up our planets like a pool shot is critical to making the journey as short as possible. There are several reasons why we need to keep the trip short. First, every current design for a Mars mission has a crew of four to eight people crammed into a space about the size of, at most, a Winnebago. Cue ‘Spaceballs’ music. Consider that the endurance record for space habitation, Scott Kelley of the USA, spent a year on the ISS. He described his feat as a grueling ordeal, and promptly retired on his return. The best projections for a Mars mission are a total of around two years. In a box, with three to seven other monkeys, the SAME monkeys, while working harrowing, grueling “days” on a knife-edge of death. Then there’s radiation exposure. Elon says he can get a crew to Mars in 80 days without ever explaining, or even giving a clue, how he aims to achieve this. In other words, he is bullshitting. Remember that pin? Radiation is the primary physical threat to a human crew, so long as there’s no catastrophic meteorite impact or critical mechanical failure or computer malfunction. Radiation, from the Sun and, to a lesser extent, the rest of the cosmos, will be our astronautic pioneers’ constant companion. Now, put that pin back in. Elon Musk wants you to forget about it, but don’t!

MASS/GRAVITY: Mars’ mass and resultant gravity is about 37.5% of Earth’s, which means a 200-pound (90.7 kg) person weighs 75 lb. (34 kg), rounded. We don’t know what the effects of this will mean to future colonists, but we know that astronauts in microgravity, like on the ISS, experience significant loss of bone density, muscle atrophy, and what else, we are still studying. Life-long colonists may adapt just fine, or not, but there is the very real possibility that they will be, like the Belters in ‘The Expanse,’ unable to return to Earth without mechanical exoskeletons to keep them from being crushed. So, Earth: 1, Mars: 0.

ATMOSPHERE: Mars has an atmosphere that is roughly 100 times less dense than Earth’s. The barometer on Mars is 5% of that here. Add to that this comparison: Earth’s life-giving atmosphere is 78% nitrogen, 21% oxygen, and 1% trace gases (including carbon dioxide, CO2, of which you may have heard something about of late); this is what you breathe through your flimsy mask each day. Mars: 96% carbon dioxide, <2% argon, <2% nitrogen, <1% trace gases; this will kill you in a minute or three. So, obviously, voyagers to Mars have to wear space-type suits, we’ve known that. The larger problem comes when those “visionary futurists” start babbling about “terraforming” Mars, or converting it to an Earth-like habitat we could live on without a Pillsbury Dough-Boy suit. We’re talking about re-engineering the atmospheric chemistry of a planet, something we can’t even do here, where we don’t have to lift the tools into orbit and across 34+ million miles of interplanetary space.

SOIL: Mars has dirt, or “soil,” but in my research I learned that planetary astrophysicists have wrangled with terrestrial geologists over the definition of “soil.” Soil on Earth means dirt with organic decomposition components, but on Mars it just means eroded rock without the breakdown components of decaying organic lifeforms. So “soil” on Mars either needs a new name, or we keep the scare quotes. Mars dirt appears to come in a range of sizes and textures, like Earth’s, so that’s good. Uh-oh, what’s not good? Our robotic pathfinders have detected perchlorates in Martian dirt in numerous widely-scattered places, lending credence to the fear that Martian dirt is largely contaminated with these salts. Perchlorates are salts that contain chlorine, which is a toxin used to make chlorine gas, bleach, and–mixed with sodium–table salt. In its perchlorate form on Mars, it is toxic to plant life. The TL;DR is MARS’ SOIL IS TOXIC. So, no green grass and nutritious crops on Mars without some massive chemical conversion. Short of a global surface re-chemistration of Mars (whose surface area roughly equals the total land area of Earth, i.e., the surface area of every continent and land area on Earth), any colonists will either need to rely on sequestered greenhouses of treated soil, or bring Earth soil, which they keep free of exposure to Mars’ toxic dirt. Elon Musk has not, as far as I have found, said one fucking word about Martian soil chemistry. Perhaps his self-designation as SpaceX’s “Chief Engineer” doesn’t include expertise in Mars Soil Chemistry. Or else he’s just full of shit.

DUST STORMS: Mars’ largely fine-grained regolith lends itself to being swept up in the high-powered winds that sweep the planet regularly. The light atmosphere should make for low suspended dust content, but the large volume of fine-grained dust said “fuck that” to that calculus, and as a result, Mars experiences massive dust storms that regularly COVER THE ENTIRE PLANET FOR A YEAR OR MORE. The dust cloud is so thick it blocks 90% or more of sunlight. Over the whole planet. For a year. Or longer. Solar energy enthusiasts are like “Ummm, we assumed there was sunlight.”

WATER: Sure, there’s SOME water on Mars. Hell, we found water ice on the Moon, and it’s a Stygian hell compared to Mars’ relatively pleasant Pandemonium. This is the wild card. We COULD discover vast reservoirs of water ice anywhere, or everywhere. Some findings from landers have led experts to think water ice is sprinkled all throughout the regolith. But how much water could be harvested by human colonists, and how efficiently, will have to be discovered later. As it stands now, it looks like not much, slowly, and with great difficulty. And yet, Elon thinks it will be a cinch to just use the water there to live on, grow crops, generate power, and cure autism, without ever explaining how. As usual.

RADIATION: OK, you can take that pin out now. We’re here, we’ve reached Mars. During our journey of about 290 days (or, Musk fans, somehow 80 days), we have absorbed quite a bit of radiation, even with the best case scenario. I won’t go into how many milli-Sieverts per day/week/year are safe or not safe for humans; in my research, I found that NASA and US radiation workers have different standards of the safe level, and the EU has much different standards as well. What every physicist and medical doctor agrees on, the amount of radiation and the time of exposure are the two main factors in determining what is “safe” and what is not. Complicating this calculus is what is defined as safe, as in “killed someone in an hour” or “caused a cancer that killed me within X number of years.” Eight Sieverts at once is universally considered immediately fatal, but eight Sieverts over decades might constitute an increased fatal cancer risk of 5-10%. Both are fatal, but one is “Oh god, my skin is melting!” fatal. You decide, I guess.

Another problem is that much of this is possible, even probable, but unknown. NASA assumes a 290-day Mars transit might experience two solar flare or coronal mass ejection events that could expose the crew to massively increased radiation loads. The typical radiation exposure is the normal, ho-hum exposure level, but every so often, the Sun burps and solar flares throw a shitload of energetic particles–mostly protons–into space, and if a Mars spacecraft is in the cone of that burp, its crew will be exposed to a crap-ton of milli-Sieverts above normal. Even more ominous than that, coronal mass ejections are massive, Taco Bell farts from our primary fusion furnace, and those push an imperial fuck-ton of nasty radiation out of its stellar butthole. NASA and other agencies, who have been studying, planning, researching, and designing things to address these very real dangers, have a variety of solutions and mitigating processes to protect our vulnerable astronauts. Elon Musk, disturbingly, has continuously downplayed this risk. The “Chief Engineer” of SpaceX has been asked about his plans to protect mission crews against the brutal radiation they are likely to encounter, and he has said things like this: “There’s going to be some risk of radiation, but it’s not deadly,” said Musk. “There will be some slightly increased risk of cancer, but I think it’s relatively minor.” (Guadalajara, 2016, The Verge). And if that’s too old a quote for you, I say: 1) you don’t know how massive technological projects work, and 2) ok, how about this one from 2019, only TWO years ago; this, regarding general life support for the Mars crew: “I don’t think it’s actually super hard to do that, relative to the spacecraft itself,” Musk said. “The life support system is pretty straightforward.” Last note on radiation, consider this: our Sun, Sol, is now entering the “active” phase of its long-observed 11-year activity cycles. Expect solar flares and coronal mass ejections more regularly for the next 11 years. Argonauts beware. Elon, meh.

I’m cutting myself off now. I hope it is clear, just from the reality vs. Elon’s “visionary genius,” that Elon Musk is not only NOT going to put people on Mars by 2026 or whatever, or establish a sustainable colony there by 2050, he is not even going to really try. He may be uneducated and ignorant, but he has a bunch of scientists and engineers around him, telling him the radiation is real. He has, it should be noted, backed away from “his” Mars colony, back-pedaling to a place where he will transport colonists to Mars, but it’s just up to them to build the actual colony. So, I’m the visionary, you be the sacrificial dumbasses. And THAT should be the headline. It won’t be, because “Billionaire Says Crazy Thing” makes way better headlines than “Systematic Analysis of Musk’s Plan Yields Serious Questions” is not nearly as sexy a headline.

Live long and prosper.