Another Graveyard of Human Ambition

Mars is not a promise. It is a warning. And those who squander the wealth of nations to chase its sterile embrace are not visionaries but architects of despair.

The obsession with Mars colonization, an extropian¹ delusion masquerading as destiny, has taken root in the minds of billionaires, bureaucrats, and technophiles who, having exhausted earthly frontiers, now turn their gaze to the cold and airless void. They conjure visions of domed cities and terraformed landscapes, a second Eden carved from the desolation of a planet that has likely never known life and never will. Yet the brutal reality eludes them: Mars is not a refuge, not a frontier, not a promise of salvation, but an execution chamber drifting through space, awaiting those foolish enough to step inside. Still, the money flows, the rockets rise, and the dreamers, blinded by their own hubris, mistake a death sentence for a new beginning.

“I think fundamentally the future is vastly more exciting and interesting if we're a spacefaring civilization and a multiplanet species than if we're not. You want to be inspired by things. You want to wake up in the morning and think the future is going to be great. And that's what being a spacefaring civilization is all about.” (Elon Musk, Sept., 2017 | Source)

We are being told that this it is our destiny, that we must escape Earth’s gravitational shackles before we asphyxiate on the waste of our own industry. The pop extropians unfurl the banner of inevitability, mistaking their myopic lust for conquest as some immutable law of physics. But between the jargon-heavy TED Talks and sycophantic interviews with billionaire technocrats, one might detect their unspoken fear: that Mars will never be a home, that it is not a beginning but a tomb.

Consider the logistics of hurling soft-bodied, water-dependent humans across the chasm of space, crammed into a pressurized tin can, bombarded by radiation enough to curdle DNA (or worse), existing for years on rationed oxygen and stale exhalations. The journey alone is an existential torment, a slow exile from the only place in the universe that does not actively seek to bury them. And for what? To step, trembling and diminished, onto a surface so barren, so airless, so cold, so utterly inimical to life that any romance of exploration dissolves in the sheer, brutal arithmetic of survival.

Mars is not an adventure. It is not a sprawling frontier awaiting the civilizing hand of technophiles. It is a mirage of possibility that vanishes upon contact with reality. It boasts temperatures cold enough to shatter steel, an atmosphere so thin it might as well be void, and dust storms that rage for months in toxic iron oxide. To live there—no, to survive there—would be an endless exercise in engineering agony, a precarious, unspeakably expensive balancing act where any malfunction, any miscalculation, any stray piece of space debris means swift and merciless death.

And yet, the billions flow. The great coffers of industry and government are thrown open, untold sums funneled into the development of a fool’s errand, a fantasy of refuge in a place less hospitable than Antarctica or the bottom of the Pacific Ocean, or the vacuum of space itself. The specter of human extinction, whether by some imagined climate collapse, nuclear folly, or slow ecological erosion, has so thoroughly gripped the minds of these deluded futurists that they chase an escape hatch leading only into the abyss.

Courtesy European Space Agency

This is not the rallying cry of an ambitious species, but the panicked thrashings of one unwilling to confront its own failures. The dream of Mars is not about expansion, exploration, or even survival; it is about abdication. It is the ultimate flight from responsibility, a sleight of hand meant to distract from earthly realities. The money spent designing Martian habitations could rebuild entire cities. The intellectual effort wasted on algae-powered oxygen farms for some hermetic space colony could ensure clean drinking water for every last person on Earth. And yet, we reach for the unreachable, convinced that salvation lies in self-imposed exile rather than in tending to our own home.

There will be no great Martian civilization. No bustling domed Mars metropolises, no terraformed landscapes of green and blue, no second Earth blossoming beneath a foreign sun. There will only be the silence of dust-choked death, the slow and pitiful whimper of those who, having rejected the warmth of an oxygen-rich sky, must now stare up at an alien firmament and know, with grim finality, that they were fools to have come—if they even make it there alive in the first place. The red planet is a dead planet, and no act of technological hubris will bring it to life.

Mars is not a promise. It is a warning. And those who squander the wealth of nations to chase its sterile embrace are not visionaries but architects of despair.

Michael S. Rose, a leader in the classical education movement, is author of The Art of Being Human, Ugly As Sin and other books. His articles have appeared in dozens of publications including The Wall Street Journal, Epoch Times, New York Newsday, National Review, and The Dallas Morning News.

1. Extropian: one who embraces the transhumanist philosophy that promotes continuous progress, self-improvement, and the belief that science and technology—such as artificial intelligence, genetic engineering, and especially space colonization—can overcome entropy and enhance or save human existence.