EDITORIAL: The Fault in Our Mars

The views expressed herein represent the views of a majority of the members of the Caravel’s Editorial Board and are not reflective of the position of any individual member, the newsroom staff, or Georgetown University.

NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover team celebrates as the spacecraft successfully touches down on its destination on February 18, 2021. (NASA/Bill Ingalls) 

After traveling nearly 300 million miles for over six months, the NASA Perseverance rover landed safely on Mars on February 18. “The Mars 2020 Perseverance mission embodies our nation's spirit of persevering even in the most challenging of situations, inspiring and advancing science and exploration. The mission itself personifies the human ideal of persevering toward the future and will help us prepare for human exploration of the Red Planet in the 2030s,” said acting NASA Administrator Steve Jurczyk.

President Joe Biden echoed this optimism in a tweet: “Today proved once again that with the power of science and American ingenuity, nothing is beyond the realm of possibility.” However, while this historic event rightly deserves applause, it is not purely a cause for optimism about the future.

While the Mars rover landing is a historic achievement, advancements in space exploration have also opened a Pandora's box of asteroid mining, space colonization, and other “solutions” to climate change proposed by NASA and space profiteers like Elon Musk. However, moving extractive industries or even entire civilizations to space simply reproduces the same destructive ideologies that created problems like climate change in the first place.

The “human ideal of persevering toward the future,” as Jurczyk said, must keep in mind that humanity’s future is tied to our ecological health. Space exploration does not sanction planet exploitation.

In 2016 SpaceX founder Elon Musk explained his reasoning for pursuing space exploration: “History is going to bifurcate along two directions. One path is we stay on Earth forever, and then there will be some eventual extinction event. The alternative is to become a spacefaring civilization and a multi-planet species, which I hope you would agree is the right way to go.”

Debate continues over the normative value of spacefaring and multi-planetary habitation; however, a problem arises when they are seen, as Musk put it, as an “alternative” to escape some “eventual extinction event.” 

Humanity is facing that extinction event right now—it's called climate change.

Space Travel has its Head in the Clouds

There’s no doubt that we desperately need ingenious solutions to climate change in order to protect a rapidly growing human population. However, those banking on planetary colonization seem to ignore the fact that space travel is in no way sustainable, either fiscally or environmentally. NASA and other organizations funnel billions of dollars into a single launch. Without the coffer of the U.S. government or the ludicrous wealth of a select few, space exploration would stall immediately. It costs more than $500 million to launch a single space shuttle holding under a dozen people, and such costs will only increase with longer manned missions.

The risks of space exploration are also more significant than many would admit. There’s a reason that SpaceX, NASA’s private-sector competition, has only completed one manned mission, and only with professional astronauts with years of training and experience. The failures of the NASA shuttles Challenger and Columbia under the most controlled of circumstances, killing seven people each, are enough to make anyone hesitant to board Virgin Galactic’s failure-pocked upper atmosphere venture or strap into a SpaceX rocket with a three-for-three explosion record.

Virgin Galactic's Spaceport intends to send the ultra-wealthy to the stars. (Flickr)

Even with the inevitable creation of safety mechanisms, the ecological sustainability of space travel is questionable. A single space flight can emit as much carbon as do 73 cars in a full year, potentially condemning those who can’t afford a get-out-of-earth-free card to impending and accelerated climate change (Virgin Galactic’s tickets run around $400,000 for a single hour-long jaunt). And the indirect costs of mining the rare earth metals required for so-called green energy sources mean that even solar-powered spacecraft could have severely detrimental impacts on communities and environments near extraction sites.

Metalheads

In the words of Jeff Bezos, “Eventually it will be much cheaper and simpler to make really complicated things, like microprocessors and everything, in space.” By producing in space, we move pollution off-world—and it’ll save us a lot of money.

Maybe he’s got a point: the asteroid belt past Mars is full of metals necessary to make those microprocessors and other electronics. In comparison, mining on earth releases around 250 times the carbon than mining an asteroid would. Extraction and manufacturing off-world could be a future worth looking forward to.

To you, this asteroid may look like just a rock floating through space. But to Jeff Bezos, this asteroid is a profit source waiting to be tapped. (Flickr)

But that’s a long way away. The planet currently has none of the planetary-scale spaceflight coordination systems required to manage frequent spacecraft launch and reentry, to say nothing of building mines and factories and outposts in space. Even if we solved all our launch and reentry logistics problems, it’s hard to imagine that we’ll instantly be able to land large spacecraft on asteroids (we barely landed a probe in October). The alternative—dragging asteroids into Earth’s orbit—would endanger people on the planet.

Even if we surmount these challenges, an Expanse-style future of colonizing and mining asteroids for the planet’s economy presents serious questions about the human costs of resource exploitation. If that TV show is any guide, we should probably deal with those questions on this planet, first. 

The investment, machinery, technology, and tools needed to profit from the earth are useless without labor, human beings, to serve them. Considering that hundreds of millions of humans on earth are already exploited in service of these constructions of capital, why take that to space, too?

When Earth and $100 Billion Just Aren’t Enough

Part of the problem is that those at the forefront of space exploration are the capitalist billionaires currently destroying our planet’s climate right now—people we really should not trust to ever have our best interests in mind.

Chief among them is Elon Musk, billionaire and founder of SpaceX, who, despite his production of Tesla’s electric cars and speeches about the threat of climate change, recently made the move into lithium mining. His recent fame comes from two directions: being one of the two richest men in the world and planning to send humans to Mars by 2026. His goal? To colonize Mars.

Musk’s plans for colonizing Mars seem, just as colonialism often has, to benefit only the extremely wealthy. He and his company plan for the ticket to Mars to cost around $500,000—well out of range for even those in the U.S. middle class. So what is Musk’s grand plan for making these tickets more affordable? He’s said that people can take out loans to afford the ticket that they will eventually pay back via their work on Mars.

As many have pointed out, Musk’s plans sound virtually identical to that of indentured servitude. 

Right now, people like Elon Musk are poised to take all the flaws of our current capitalist society and transfer them off Earth and into space. We need to be careful to take steps to confront that—as it will only perpetuate the same destructive tendencies that caused climate change in the first place. 

You’re Not Going to Like This Part

The mining of lithium, which is vital to the construction of solar batteries, exerts a heavy toll on the environment. (Wikimedia Commons) 

The real issue, though, lies not with the unsustainable nature of long-term space travel, nor in the detriments of those promoting these ideas. Rather, it’s a sign that climate thinking continues to revolve around the expectation of future innovation whose ability to actually provide a solution remains questionable, rather than focus on the real issue: overconsumption.

Every human action has a price. Sometimes, such as with the emission of CFCs, the price is close to immediate and demands swift address before consequences rise to unsustainable rates. With global warming, however, the fact that the consequences of repeated and extensive emissions span decades into the future creates a sense that there’s time left to deal with the problem we’ve created. The so-called tipping point at which global warming becomes irreversible edges closer and closer to the present, yet our conception of its impending reality seems to be pinned far beyond our current crises.

As we continually ignore the way our actions actively contribute to a problem, we consistently grasp onto far-fetched solutions that require as little deviation as possible from life as it is now. Sure, we may destroy our first planet—so why not just move to a wifi-equipped colony on Mars? Yes, cars are literally driving the world to become a terrifying menagerie of extreme weather events—can’t we just make them electric and be done with it, regardless of the environmental impact that mining the rare earth minerals in utilized electric vehicles entails? Realizing that we have dug ourselves into a hole, our instinct is to try to find a solution. Good luck doing that when all we have are shovels.

That said, there is a solution to the climate crisis: swift and immediate reduction in consumption. Rather than shift consumption habits to sectors that, while less detrimental than the mainstream, are still objectively harmful to the climate, we must instead cease those habits altogether.

Frugality is not glamorous, nor is it a particularly politically expedient solution when entire industries are sacrificed at the altar of GDP growth. If we are to “solve climate change,” however, there are no shortcuts. Whether on Earth or Mars, material culture will be the death of humanity unless we make changes—now.