should be organized, and who were therefore not popular back on Earth, would have a chance to build societies around their ideas. Many would fail, he said, but some would surely succeed, and they would show the way for the rest of us. So if we did what we could do in our time, he said—disperse the fog, spread the vision, establish humanity on Mars—then five hundred years from now there would be human civilizations on thousands of worlds in our solar system and others, and they would be as grand compared with what we are today as we are to our distant ancestors on the African savannah. Because we were not native to this Earth, he said. We were native to Kenya, which was why we had these thin arms with no fur. We could not have settled in North America or Asia if we had not developed technology. But we had, he said, because we were creative, and we were resilient, and that was why we were going to inherit the stars.
There was a long interlude of enthusiastic applause, during which I considered anew how intimately this rhetoric—Zubrin’s talk of asteroid settlements, Musk’s talk of the spirit of exploration—was entangled with the rhetoric on which America itself was founded: the apocalyptic invocation of the passing of an old world, the birth of a new. To speak of nonconforming people building new societies, of the entrepreneurial spirit of nation-building, was to explicitly appeal to an American mythology of pilgrims, founders, pioneers. Zubrin’s Mars struck me as a futurist vision of the “city on a hill” invoked by the Puritan preacher John Winthrop in his famous speech to the passengers of the Arabella as they set out for the New World. Mars was America, I thought. The future was the past.
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In his book How We’ll Live on Mars, Stephen L. Petranek writes that “Mars will become the new frontier, the new hope, and the new destiny for millions of earthlings who will do almost anything to seize the opportunities waiting on the Red Planet.” Like the first European colonists in America, the first humans on Mars, he says, will need to be extremely resilient and determined. This new New World, like its predecessor, will be profoundly hostile to settlement. They will need to find ways to make the air breathable, and to extract sufficient ice from the regolith, the Martian surface soil, to provide water. They will need to construct shelters, perhaps from regolith bricks, to protect them from the extreme cold and from the sun’s radiation, which passes unfiltered through the planet’s thin atmosphere. The example set by these pioneers, he writes, “will create a wave of fortune seekers to rival those of the California gold rush.”
And just as the first European settlers in America saw themselves as ensuring the survival of Christendom, these first settlers on Mars will represent an insurance policy for civilization, for humanity itself. “There are real threats to the continuation of the human race on Earth,” writes Petranek, “including our failure to save the home planet from ecological destruction and the possibility of nuclear war. Collision with a single asteroid could eliminate most life, and eventually our own sun will enlarge and destroy Earth. Long before that happens, we must become a spacefaring species, capable of living not only on another planet but ultimately in other solar systems. The first humans who emigrate to Mars are our best hope for the survival of our species.”
Mars, as Musk once put it, is the “backup” planet for humanity, “just in case something goes wrong with Earth.” But it represents something else, too, an idea much deeper and stranger and more difficult to sell. It is a means by which we—or certain of us, at any rate, with the will and financial means to do so—might leave behind our planet of origin, transcend the human world entirely. As with the imagined collapse scenarios of the doomsday preppers, Mars colonization is apocalyptic scenario as escapist fantasy. In her prologue to The Human Condition, Hannah Arendt writes about the response in the American press to the 1957 launch of the Soviet space satellite Sputnik, the first human object ever to leave the planet and enter outer space. Notwithstanding the Cold War complexities of the launch, she observes, the immediate reaction was one of joy. But it was less a triumphant than a relieved joy—a “relief about the first ‘step toward escape from men’s imprisonment to