Mars Hype

For a change of pace, I want to address another common misperception on Quora. These days there's a lot of hype about "going to Mars". A large fortune is being spent on this project. A certain prominent technologist-plutocrat is committing a good deal of his extraordinary hoard of wealth to "making humanity multiplanetary". Many people seem to imagine that colonizing Mars will be relatively easy.

We need to be clear that Mars is an extremely hostile environment; far less hospitable to life than Antarctica in winter. I think it's likely that a human will walk on mars in the medium term (say ~25 years), though I'm no longer sure I'll live to see this. It's very unlikely that humans will successfully colonise Mars and I'm sure no human will ever be born on Mars. 

There are three questions to consider when thinking about the project to "colonise Mars":

1. Was there ever life on Mars?
2. Is there life on Mars now?
3. Is there any prospect of Mars sustaining life in the future?

The answers (with come caveats) are probably no, no, and no. Let's look at why.

Past Life.

Mars’ geological (Areological?) history is divided into three main periods:

• Noachian (~4.1–3.7 billion years ago): Heavy bombardment, abundant surface water, widespread clay-rich sediments.
• Hesperian (~3.7–3.0 billion years ago): Declining water activity, formation of extensive volcanic plains, some outflow channels.
• Amazonian (~3.0 billion years ago–present): Cold, dry, low erosion rates, mostly wind-driven surface processes.

While we don't know exactly how life began on Earth, the highest likelihood is Michael Russell's theory that it got started around warm alkaline hydrothermal vents on the ocean floor (see The Rocky Origins of Life 15 April 2016). This process relies on plate tectonics and oceans.

Mars has no plate tectonics and probably never had any. The crust is not made up of mobile plates that converge and diverge creating volcanic and earthquake zones. The crust of Mars is all one big slab of rock although it still has some local deformations and fractures. 

Furthermore, Mars hasn't had liquid surface water for at least 3 billion years. So the processes that most likely drove the emergence of life on Earth are absent from Mars. While we cannot definitively rule out past life on Mars, we can confidently say that it is extremely unlikely. 

This also means that fossils on the surface will be extremely rare. Fossils are formed in layers of sediment. Mars is known to have some very old sedimentary rocks, generally older than 3 billion years (while Mars had water). For reference, the chalk bedrock under Cambridge (where I live) is only around 100 million years old. On earth, evidence for life in 3 billion year old rocks is rare and often ambiguous, partly because at that time life was bacterial and left few physical traces.

There is some limited geological activity on Mars that creates some localised faulting. Craters and erosion can expose lower layers of rock. The Curiosity rover, for example, has been exploring Hesperian-era sedimentary rocks in the Gale Crater (~3.8 to 3.0 billion years old).

However, once exposed, fossils on Mars would be subject to a variety of powerful degrading processes: including solar and cosmic radiation, chemical oxidation, temperature extremes, and erosion (by dust storms). Microbial fossils are extremely delicate. A fossil on the surface might survive for millions of years, but not billions.

The surface of Mars has been dry, frozen, irradiated, and dusty since the end of the Hesperian, around 3 billion years ago. If life ever existed on Mars, it must have died out at that time. And it will have left few if any traces on the surface.

Present Life

The prospects for present life are considerably less optimistic. Life, as least as we know it, requires favourable conditions. And conditions on Mars have been decidedly unfavourable for at least 3 billion years.

The state of the mantle and core mean that Mars lost its magnetic field about 4 billion years ago (ya). This means that the surface of Mars has been subject to unfiltered cosmic and solar radiation for 4 billion years. Radiation levels on Mars today are ~200 times greater than those on Earth. 

This might not be immediately fatal to life, but for Earth-based living things it would cause very high levels of mutations, most of which would be deleterious.

Mars has almost no atmosphere and, thus, no greenhouse effect to speak of. The average surface pressure is 0.006 atmospheres (i.e. 0.6% of Earth standard). Mars' atmosphere is composed of 95% CO₂ and contains less than 1% oxygen, and less than 0.1% water vapour. All life that we know of requires liquid water to survive. While it is true that some tardigrades have survived brief exposure to vacuum, they cannot remain active in those circumstances, they cannot move around, feed, or reproduce in space or on Mars. Surviving is not thriving. 

The absence of greenhouse effect and distance from Sol means the average surface temp of Mars is around -65 °C, compared to the Earth average of +15 °C. The average temperature in the interior of Antarctica is -43.5 °C. While some lichens survive in coastal regions of Antarctica, nothing grows in the interior. No life as we know it can survive at -65 °C or below. 

There is no liquid water anywhere on Mars and has not been for billions of years. The minimal amounts of water that exist at the Martian poles are solid and have been for billions of years.

What kind of life can survive 3 billion years of extreme radiation and extreme cold, without air or water, and under harsh chemical conditions? None that we know of. None that I can conceive of. And even NASA do not expect to find life anymore. They are looking for fossils. 

These are non-trivial barriers to the existence of life on Mars in the present. No one should expect to find life—or fossils of past life—on Mars. Not after 3 billion years of the present conditions. The fact is that the surface of Mars is inimical to life. Which already raises doubts about trying to live on Mars. 

Future Life

Despite the very dim prospects of finding life or even signs of past life, plutocrats and their technologist lackeys seem enamoured of the idea that humans can "colonise" Mars or even can "terraform" it. Indeed, this is presented as an imperative (since capitalists are apparently not planning to stop destroying the Earth's biosphere before it ceases to be able to sustain human life).

The European practice of colonising, privatising, and exploiting resources has given rise to a history of brutality and extreme avarice. I grew up in a British colony and my strongest association with "colonisation" is violence. Invoking the trope of colonisation ought to ring alarm bells. No good ever came from the urge to colonise. 

The problem for human colonisation of Mars ought to be obvious by now: the surface of Mars is totally inimical to life as we know it. A human exposed to the surface conditions on Mars would die more or less instantly. So the main task on Mars would be to prevent any such exposure. This would mean permanently living inside, probably underground. 

Being exposed to the high levels of ionising radiation on Mars would cause very high rates of DNA damage, leading to many deleterious mutations. As much as anything it is radiation that would force humans underground on Mars. 

The low gravity would prevent normal development of fetuses and infants. Problems like muscle atrophy, bone demineralisation, reduced blood volume, and impaired balance (low g syndrome) would affect everyone. And if your bones never mineralise properly they cannot support your mass. This raises another problem.

A trip to Mars is going to take 6-9 months and 99.9% of that time will be spent in free-fall (microgravity). Which means astronauts travelling to Mars will suffer moderate-to-severe low g syndrome. By the time they get to Mars and 0.38 g, they’ll be seriously ill. Even with an ISS-style exercise regime (+2 hours of exercise daily) they will be severely impaired and liable to broken bones and other health problems. What's more it is not clear that 0.38 g would enough to halt this problem, let alone reverse it. We have zero data on humans living in 0.38 g. And at present, we have no way to get any data short of actually going to Mars. 

Nothing we can actually do by way of "terraforming" will address any of these problems.

Terraforming is a science-fiction idea. For example, we see colonisation enthusiasts saying that all we need to do is "drop some comets on Mars" to replace the air and water lost billions of years ago. The obvious problem with this is that the impact of comet-sized objects would throw vast amounts of Martian dust into the thin atmosphere and the low gravity would mean that it took a long time to settle. We have no idea what it would do the Martian crust. 

It's all very well casually talking about "dropping comets" but it's another thing being able to accelerate trillions of kgs of ice so that it impacts on Mars. We can just about lob 100,000 kgs into orbit. How are we going to handle a load that's at least a billion times more massive?

The fact is that we have no way to alter the trajectory of a comet such that it would precisely impact on Mars. It's not just that it's too expensive (which it would be). It's not that we fall just short of the technology required. Even if we could spare the trillions of dollars it would cost, there's no way we can change the trajectory of any comet. As a rule of thumb, the rocket fuel required to substantially change the orbit of a comet would have the same order of magnitude of mass as the comet. 

If we tried to use nukes, the water we delivered would be highly radioactive.

In practice, there's no way to do it; and even if there was, we couldn't afford it.

People talk about seeding Mars with genetically engineered superbugs that will somehow flood the atmosphere with Oxygen. But even if Frankenstein's algae could convert all the Martian CO₂, it would take a very long time because of the cold, and it would still only amount to a partial pressure of ~0.0000013 atmospheres of oxygen. Which is effectively zero and still instant death for a human trying to breath on the surface. 

Worse, there's nothing on Mars that would make the expenditure of trillions of dollars worthwhile. There is nothing on Mars that we could not obtain on Earth for a fraction of the cost. Or from robotic mining of asteroids. Those trillions of dollars would go a long way to solving the existential threats we face on Earth that plutocrats are currently in denial about.

Conclusion

The conditions on the surface of Mars—low g, high radiation, near-zero air and water—are inimical to life and have been for around 3 billion years. Dating back to the time of the last universal common ancestor of life on earth. 

The geological processes that gave rise to life on Earth are conspicuously absent from Mars. Because of the lack of plate tectonics, the surface we see on Mars is billions of years old. 

There's little or no reason to believe that Mars ever supported life. And even if we stipulate that it might have existed, there's little or no reason to believe we will find fossils of past microbial life since these are either deeply buried or severely degraded.  

The idea of terraforming is quite entertaining in speculative fiction and, at a stretch we might allow that it is possible. In practice, terraforming is not remotely technologically or economically feasible. 

I can imagine visitors to Mars. I'd love to live to see this. But I cannot imagine colonies on Mars ever being viable. The problems involved are fatal and practically insurmountable. 

Earth is unique in being the only planet we know of that supports life. There is no planet B. 

Capitalists appear to think that they can shit where they eat with impunity. They appear to believe that destroying the Earth is a fair price to pay so that a few men can be pampered as though they were gods.  They seem to believe that they can simply go and live in space once the earth is destroyed. But these fantasies are not remotely realistic. Without Earth, we are all dead. 

Here's a radical idea: 

Let's not destroy the only planet that we know can sustain life. 

~~Φ~~

Some Thoughts on Colonialism

I was born in a small town in the central North Island of New Zealand, child of 3rd and 4th generation settlers. About half my neighbourhood were Māori. New Zealand is a relatively young country, having been formally recognised as such in 1840 with the signing of a treaty between Queen Victoria of the United Kingdom, and several influential Māori chiefs (this is symbolised on our coat of arms, left). The Māori themselves are one arm of a vast colonising movement that settled most of the habitable islands of the Pacific Ocean, arriving in New Zealand around 1000 years ago. People in the UK like to joke about the Antipodes being populated by criminals - this is not in particularly good taste. We don't laugh about concentration camps or slavery, and the British transportation of convicts to Australia was hardly any more humane. But as any New Zealander will be quick to tell you our country was not populated convicts. However our country was founded by white-collar criminals.

At the heart of the original fraud were the two versions of the Treaty of Waitangi. In the Māori language version the locals ceded kawanatanga 'governorship' to the British, but crucially maintained tino rangatiratanga 'full chieftainship' over their people, lands and possessions. In return the British would establish a government to help protect everyone from the rapacious and violent foreign visitors who had begun arriving in the late 1700's, and to act as an intermediary in land sales. Māori gained all the rights of British subjects. The chiefs had been prompted, partly by the arrival of a French Catholic mission and a significant American presence in the form of whalers, to chose the English as the lesser of three evils. In the English version of the Treaty the chiefs ceded sovereignty to the Queen. This opened the door for exploitation because although they gained rights and protections as British subjects, the chief's right to rule their own people was effectively removed. And in any case the British were loath to treat the Māori as British subjects on a par with themselves, because they had brown skin and a non-European culture. While some attempt was made to take copies of the Treaty around the country, not all of the chiefs would sign, and not everyone had an opportunity.

The New Zealand Company, crucial to the early development of New Zealand as a colony, was the brainchild of the devious and unscrupulous Edwin Gibbon Wakefield, a convicted felon himself (having been found guilty of abduction). This company sold land to settlers before providing one-way transport out. The land they sold was not legally theirs, and indeed they sold more land than the whole surface area of the islands. Initially they could only buy land which had been purchased on their behalf by the Queen - through her representative in the form of a Governor. The first Governor, William Hobson, embezzled most of the money, then died. His temporary replacement Willoughby Shortland misappropriated the rest, leaving the fledgling country more or less bankrupt. This meant that very little land was being purchased while thousands of settlers were arriving each year. The settlers began to take land against the wishes of the Māori, which caused tension and bloodshed.

For a brief period the tragic figure of Robert Fitzroy (ex Captain of the famous HMS Beagle) became Governor and tried to be fair to both locals and settlers. But he was unpopular with the settlers because of this. The lack of income from selling land also prevented any kind of public works program. In addition New Zealand Company executives owned the local press and published stories which suited their purpose both in New Zealand and in London. Fitzroy was soon deposed and the land grab was prosecuted with increasing vigour under his replacement George Grey. By around 1860 the Māori had drawn a line in the sand and warned the settlers that no more land would be sold, or allowed to be taken. But thousands of settlers continued arrive, many of whom had already purchased land in the UK.

An excuse was invented and war was prosecuted during which some 4 million acres were seized, and many of the defenders killed, or imprisoned. Those fighting for their land were deemed by Act of Parliament to be rebels who could be detained indefinitely without trial. They were often shipped far to the south where the conditions were very poor and cold - our very own Guantánamo Bay. When I was young we called this period of conflict "the Land Wars" but the current PC term is "the New Zealand Wars". However the reason for, and the object of, the wars was taking land from Māori. Again it is possible to draw parallels with the war in Iraq and American and British concerns over the flow of oil. With the destruction of their civilisation and the introduction of European diseases, the Māori population plummeted and it was thought that they would quietly die out. Fortunately they did not.

During this period a number of great Māori leaders emerged, but one hero stands out for me. Te Whiti o Rongomai established a village called Parihaka in Taranaki. Here he preached the bible in the manner of an old testament prophet - for despite the capriciousness of the British, many Māori enthusiastically embraced Christianity. Indeed many of his followers saw Te Whiti as a prophet. After the war which saw all of the Māori land confiscated, he preached a course of non-violent resistance almost a century before Gandhi. They pulled up survey pegs and ploughed up roads to plant potatoes. When the army came for him they were met by women and children singing songs. Te Whiti was arrested and imprisoned for a year as a rebel in 1881. He never struck back. Probably because the news did not reach the rest of the world Te Whiti's struggle against injustice did not result in a loss of moral authority, as did Gandhi's.

But this is not what we learned as children. Our schooling painted the British as intrepid explorers and colonisers, heroic and noble; the Māori as backward, cowardly and savage. The truth is not quite diametrically opposed to this, but the portrayal is deeply wrong. The British were convinced of their racial and cultural superiority and determined to crush any resistance to their "civilising influence". They saw themselves as pre-ordained to rule over "the lower races", especially those who skin was not white. So while they were intrepid, their values were abhorrent by today's standards. The Māori were using stone age technology at the time of contact with Europeans. They could indeed be savage, but perhaps no more so than the British. Environmental pressures had forced them into a pattern of almost continuous small scale warfare as they competed for scarce resources. However they were quick to learn from Europeans, many converted to Christianity, and they initially prospered from their contact. But the settlers, lead by (and lead astray by) the New Zealand Company were greedy and would not settle for less than all of New Zealand. The Māori fought a successful guerrilla campaign against the invaders and usurpers. Although London had not sanctioned the war for land, and had asked the colonial government not to start it as they could ill afford to be involved in another foreign war, in the end they had to bail the colony out. Thousands of troops were sent, with the latest weaponry. The Māori were defeated by overwhelming force.

Although the first nation people dwindled they did not die out. Before my generation efforts were made to extinguish the Māori language - it was forbidden in schools for instance. By contrast I was able to formally study the language in secondary school. Now the Māori people and Māori language are having a renaissance. Children once again have Māori as a first language and receive primary and secondary education in Māori. Māori is an official language of New Zealand. In 1975 the Waitangi Tribunal was set up to begin to address grievances over land seizures and other breaches of the Treaty. This has helped to reaffirm the place of the Treaty in our legislature, though the two versions continue to cause distension. Reparation payments began to be made in the 1980's, and Māori have become more confident in pursuing claims through this court.

We are left with nation founded on deceit, which one side is only now owning up to. New Zealand is also home to other immigrants. Amongst the British (mostly English and Scots), were always a few Dutch and other Europeans. Former residents of Pacific Islands such as Samoa and Tonga are free to emigrate partly because New Zealand took over the British governance of them. More recently many East Asians have begun to arrive in substantial numbers. Multiculturalism is blooming even before we have come to terms with the history and consequences of colonialism. There is no question of returning New Zealand to the Māori, though no doubt they are still owed more in compensation than they have so far received. This is not a popular sentiment amongst many New Zealanders who cannot see why the grievances of a century ago continue to haunt us. Perhaps because we benefited so much from the cheating, and now have so much to lose. People of that view who visited England in 2010 might be surprised just how much feeling the invasion of 1066 can stir up amongst the English.

Until World War I (white) New Zealanders thought of themselves as British. The disastrous Gallipoli campaign began the process of separation, New Zealanders realised that the British didn't see us as British, but as 'colonials', and as such ideal as canon fodder. However it was the British themselves who effectively ended the connection between the two countries by joining the European Common Market in 1973. Until that time 80% of New Zealand exports were to Britain. After that the French blocked most of those exports, since New Zealand was in direct competition with France (and beat them on both quality and price), and today the figure is just 5%. These days the UK is looking to limit immigration from outside the European Union and this will certainly include former colonies. Although the Queen is still nominally the head of state, this seems less and less meaningful, and it seems only a matter of time before New Zealand becomes a republic - at which point the Treaty of Waitangi must be renegotiated which may prove interesting. Kiwis need to be clear that the British don't feel sentimental about New Zealand - it is a foreign country to them. During the 2007 rugby world cup I witnessed a pub full of English people cheering for France to beat New Zealand in the quarter-finals. They cheered for France!

For the children of settlers identity is a vexed issue. We are not tangata whenua or first nation people, and yet our home has cut us off and disowned us - so we are not people of the British Isles either. To make life more complicated many of us are adding a new religion to the mix. My friend Sally McAra has written about the issue of identity amongst New Zealand Buddhists in her book: Land of Beautiful Vision: Making a Buddhist Sacred Space in New Zealand (University of Hawai'i Press, 2007). Part of coming to terms with that identity must be reviewing the nature of our relationship with the Māori, who seem now to be stuck with us, and indeed very often share ancestors with us as well.

I suppose the stories of the many indigenous people who fell under the trampling boots of the Euro crowd as they swarmed across the globe gives us some insight into what a loss of culture and sense of identity looks like. People who do not know who they are, and do not belong anywhere seldom prosper. Having grown up amongst a dispossessed people I see that the Western Buddhist discourse on identity and belonging can be glib and superficial... we discount the notion that identity has any value. But it clearly does. Paraphrasing Sangharakshita I think we can say that before transcending one's identity, one must first have an identity.