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Why There Will Be No Mars Colony
When we peel back the Star Trek fantasy layer, we find… nothing good
If you are of a charming, sweet, and irredeemably naïve disposition you may find the superficial ramblings of billionaires like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos not merely amusing but compelling. You may, like them, have spent a significant portion of your life staring at entertainments purporting to show humans whizzing around in space as though it were as normal as going off on a supermarket shopping trip.
Perhaps, like our aforementioned billionaires, you think the answer to chronic human self-destructiveness is to ship humans from Earth to a whole new planet on which to be equally self-destructive — only this time without the atmosphere, gravity, water, and protective magnetic field we enjoy here on our little blue planet. Perhaps you’re so terrified by the fear of a huge asteroid slamming into Earth that you believe, as they claim, the only “answer” is to create vast artificial colonies off-world. Even though the probability of our species surviving long enough to intersect with an ultra-rare asteroid collision is effectively zero (most species come and go in the space of less than one million years; ours almost certainly will self-exterminate within the next few centuries).
