One of the most interesting passages in Donald Trump's Second Inaugural Address was his expansion of America's "manifest destiny" to include not only conquering the Panama Canal, the Gulf of America, Canada, and Greenland, but also colonizing Mars. This passage comes near the end of the speech:
The United States will once again consider itself a growing nation--one that increases our wealth, expands our territory, builds our cities, raises our expectations, and carries our flag into new and beautiful horizons.
And we will pursue our manifest destiny into the stars, launching American astronauts to plant the Stars and Stripes on the planet Mars.
Ambition is the lifeblood of a great nation, and, right now, our nation is more ambitious than any other. There's no nation like our nation.
Americans are explorers, builders, innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneers. The spirit of the frontier is written into our hearts. The call of the next great adventure resounds from within our souls.
Our American ancestors turned a small group of colonies on the edge of a vast continent into a mighty republic of the most extraordinary citizens on Earth. No one comes close.
Americans pushed thousands of miles through rugged land of untamed wilderness. . . .
Anyone who knows anything about Elon Musk and his SpaceX will immediately recognize that Trump here was reading language suggested by Musk. Indeed, those watching Trump read this part of the speech saw Musk cheering this part of the speech.
In recent years, I have written as many as ten posts on the possibility of colonizing Mars, and I have pointed out the many problems with such a project. I see no evidence that either Trump or anyone else in the White House has thought about these problems, with the exception of Musk. If you go to the White House website, and search for "Mars," you will be directed to the Inaugural Address, but nothing else. Since most of Trump's policies are coming from the Heritage Foundation's "Project 2025," you might think his proposal for colonizing Mars is there. But if you search the "Project 2025" text (almost 1,000 pages) for "Mars," nothing comes up.
In the 1960s, NASA had planned to extend the Apollo Program, so that after landing on the Moon in 1969, we could go on to land on Mars in the 1980s. Those plans were thrown out during the Nixon Administration.
But then, in 1996, Robert Zubrin published his book The Case for Mars. The book was so successful that it created a popular fascination with Zubrin's plans for travelling to and settling Mars. Zubrin founded The Mars Society in 1998 to promote his ideas.
Elon Musk read The Case for Mars, and he was persuaded by Zubrin's argument. As one of the cofounders of PayPal, Musk was on his way to becoming a multibillionaire; and he was looking for ambitious new projects. In 2001, he met Zubrin, and he began contributing to the Mars Society. Following Zubrin's advice, Musk set up SpaceX in 2002, which became the most amazing aerospace company, doing things that NASA thought impossible.
Today, SpaceX has over 6,000 Starlink satellites in low-Earth orbit, providing satellite internet service to over 70 countries. SpaceX launches hundreds of new satellites into orbit every year.
In recent years, SpaceX has been testing Starship, the biggest and most powerful space rocket ever built. Musk predicts that an uncrewed Starship will test land on Mars in 3 to 4 years. Then, Starship will begin taking people to Mars and establishing permanent settlements on the planet within the next two decades.
Is this a good idea? In my posts, I have tried to answer that question by considering both the case for Mars (best stated by Zubrin and the astrobiologist Charles Cockell) and the case against Mars (best stated by Kelly and Zach Weinersmith). There are some easy problems and some hard problems.
THE EASY PROBLEMS
The easy problems are the technological problems with developing space rockets that could transport lots of cargo, including lots of human beings, to and from Mars in such a way as to establish and sustain a large Mars colony of thousands or perhaps a million human beings. NASA has already sent landers and rovers to Mars that are exploring the planet and sending back information. But this is very expensive--as measured by dollars per pound of cargo--and the main reason for the great expense is that the rockets delivering payloads into space are not reusable. It would be like a Boeing 747 airliner that could be used for only one flight. No one could afford the airline tickets.
Musk's SpaceX has been solving this problem by building rockets that are reusable, so that the expense per pound of cargo drops dramatically. When Starship is fully operational, both the Starship and its SuperHeavy Booster will return to their base after launch so that they can be launched again. Trump has talked about how exciting it was to see the SuperHeavy Booster return to base for the first time.
THE HARD PROBLEMS
And then there are the really hard problems. The first one is that the universe wants to kill us. The universe does not seem to be hospitable to life--particularly, human intelligent life. We have not found life anywhere beyond the Earth. And even on the Earth, we know that the Earth has been lifeless for most of its history. The conditions in the Earth's biosphere for sustaining human life have arisen only for a few million years.
And once we leave the Earth's biosphere, the lack of a breathable atmosphere, food, water, and protection from deadly cosmic radiation make the extraterrestrial universe a constant threat to human life. As I have indicated in my previous posts, no one knows how to create an artificial biosphere in deep space that would sustain human life for prolonged periods.
The second hard problem is that the analogy of Mars as the "new frontier" is dubious. Zubrin and Musk have promoted this analogy, which is assumed in Trump's speech. Just as "Americans pushed thousands of miles through a rugged land of untamed wilderness" in the American West, Trump proclaims, now Americans will push to explore and settle the wilderness of Mars.
The problem with this analogy, as the Weinersmiths have argued, is that it's a false analogy in that while the American settlers in the West were moving through the biosphere of the Earth, the American Martians will have to enter the "necrosphere" of Mars where "the ground is poison, there is no air, and cascades of radiation are fired at the inhabitants on a perpetual basis."
Zubrin's analogy between America and Mars could become a true analogy once we learn how to artificially recreate the Earth's biosphere on Mars--perhaps by terraforming Mars. The Weinersmiths think that's a possibility that we should strive for, but it will require a century or more of research and development: it would be wise to wait and then go big.
People like Musk and Zubrin will have to persuade us that waiting is foolish and that it would be wise for us to go now.
The third hard problem is the problem of liberty on Mars. This is a problem because of what Cockell calls "the problem of oxygen": the concentration of power in a centralized Martian government (Muskow ruled by Elon Musk?) that controls the artificial life support systems that provide oxygen and other resources necessary for life will exercise absolute power over the people, whose obedience will be enforced by the threat of withdrawing their life support.
Cockell has argued that Mars could be "engineered for liberty" by devising a Martian system of limited government with checks and balances that would secure individual rights--something like the Lockean liberal democracy of America. But it's not clear whether that would work on Mars.
Zubrin has argued, however, that the only successful human settlements in space will have to be inclined towards liberty. He sees two reasons for this. The first reason is that any successful extraterrestrial society will have to respect individual liberty because only free people with freedom of thought and action can provide the inventive innovation that creates and sustains the technology of artificial life support required for extraterrestrial environments.
The second reason is that only free societies will attract immigrants, and Martian societies will need immigrants to overcome their severe labor shortage. "From a Darwinian point of view," Zubrin insists, "an extraterrestrial tyranny is an impossibility because that colony would not be able to grow, it would not be able to blossom. It would be outcompeted for immigrants by ones that offer greater liberty."
I see this as an extension to Mars of Lockean liberal symbolic niche construction and the evolution of cultural group selection with a Lockean open borders policy.
But this assumes that we could figure out how to create a Lockean liberal society within an artificial biosphere on Mars.
The fourth hard problem is the most profound one--the problem of figuring out the meaning of our place in the universe. Will travel in deep space constantly remind us that the whole universe wants to kill us? And if that is so, does that teach us that the universe does not care for or about us? Or can human beings find their purpose inherent in human life itself--in pursuing their natural human desires as shaped in the environment of evolutionary adaptation on the Earth--even though human life is only a momentary emergence in the history of a cosmos that has no eternal purpose?
Or will exploring and colonizing deep space induce a sense of awe before the mysteries of the cosmos that suggests some divine or transcendent cause of the cosmos?
LET THE PEOPLE DECIDE FOR THEMSELVES?
If we agree with the Declaration of Independence that human beings have a natural right to consent to a government to secure their rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, then we can foresee that people settling on Mars will want to establish such a government. But will they succeed in doing that?
Kelly and Zach Weinersmith, Robert Zubrin, and Charles Cockell give us a wide range of answers to that question. The Weinersmiths say no: this cannot be done, at least not within the next 100 years, because we don't know how to keep people alive on Mars, and we're not going to be securing their liberty or their pursuit of happiness if they're dead. That's why Mars sucks.
Although Cockell agrees with the Weinersmiths that Mars sucks, he believes we can develop the technology for securing at least the minimal conditions for some people to live on Mars. Since Mars is so awful, however, he foresees that few people will want to live there. He thinks a few adventurous scientists (like himself) will go there to study Mars in searching for answers about the origins, development, and diversity of life in the universe. And yet, even these few scientists will not want to stay on Mars for long.
If the Weinersmiths are right, this won't happen anytime soon because the death rate for these Mars-bound scientists will be so great that most scientists will decide it's not worth the risk.
But even if the Weinersmiths are wrong, so that eventually a large number of people go to Mars to establish permanent settlements, Cockell worries that their governments on Mars will tend to be tyrannical because of the "problem of oxygen": the concentration of power in a centralized government that controls the artificial life support systems that provide oxygen and other resources necessary for life will exercise absolute power over the people, whose obedience will be enforced by the threat of withdrawing their life support.
To overcome this tendency to Martian tyranny, Cockell insists that we will need to design economic, social, and political institutions that limit, divide, and decentralize power to protect liberty; and in doing that, we can draw lessons from the liberal institutions for promoting liberty on Earth, particularly in the history of the United States.
Zubrin insists that the Weinersmiths refuse to take seriously the ways in which the technology of supporting life in space can reduce the risks to human life that come from space travel and living on a planet like Mars.
And just as the Weinersmiths exaggerate the threats to life in space, Zubrin argues, Cockell exaggerates the threats to liberty. Actually, Zubrin claims, "the case for Mars is liberty." "Whether they wish to or not, Martian cities will compete for immigrants. The ones with the best ideas will draw the most people. This is why dystopian totalitarian space colonies controlled by villains who tyrannize their subjects by threatening to cut off their air will remain mere fictions. A successful extraterrestrial tyranny is impossible because no one would move there" (Zubrin 2024: 11-12, 187).
On Mars, Zubrin argues, there will be a Darwinian cultural evolution by natural selection that favors liberty. "The evolution of Martian cities, like that of biological species on Earth, will be governed by natural selection. The cities that attract the most immigrants will grow" (Zubrin 2024: 12-13, 152). And those cities that attract the most immigrants will be those that secure liberty--the liberty that fosters the innovative inventiveness in technology necessary for human surviving and thriving on Mars.
Although Zubrin does not cite Locke, he is restating Locke's argument for immigration as cultural group selection that favors free societies.
I don't know how to resolve this debate. But then perhaps we don't need to. Ultimately, people will decide this for themselves.
Now that Elon Musk and other space entrepreneurs have shown that it's possible and even likely that privately organized space travel with little or no dependence on governmental space agencies can send a crewed spaceship to land on Mars in ten or twenty years, we can expect that this is going to happen. Then people will decide whether to go to Mars or not.
If Mars really is as awful as the Weinersmiths and Cockell say it is, then Cockell is probably right in predicting that only a few scientists and professional astronauts will be willing to go. They will voluntarily agree to face the dangers of space. And as they spend years in space travel and on the surface of Mars, they will provide the best test of whether life and liberty on Mars is possible. Over the years, people will learn from their experience and decide whether it's worth going.
As long as this is all voluntary and based on informed consent, I don't see anything wrong with it.
Now, I know that the Weinersmiths have warned that we know very little about the possibility of "space babies": we don't know whether people in space will be able to safely reproduce and rear their young without damaging effects from space on the children. And surely even if the adults have voluntarily assumed the risks of space travel, the fetuses and the children will not have consented to this.
But don't we rightly allow people a lot of freedom in trying out experimental reproductive technology--in vitro fertilization for example? This imposes a risk on the offspring to which the offspring cannot consent. Would this also apply to reproduction in space or on Mars as risky experimentation chosen by the parents?
The Weinersmiths say that before we do this, we should experiment with sending mice, or preferably primate animals, into space to see if they can safely reproduce offspring that can grow to healthy adulthood.
I can see the argument for doing that. But I can also see that if we allow men and women to voluntarily go to Mars, they will eventually engage in their own sexual and reproductive experiments in space.
I can also imagine that if people are free to decide whether to go to Mars, they will decide what this means for their place in the universe. Some people might decide that human beings were created by God live on the Earth until they die, and only in the afterlife will they achieve an extraterrestrial eternal life of happiness in Heaven or torment in Hell. Others might decide that going to Mars is a way of exploring the mystery of the Universe that God has created for us: these colonists on Mars will want to satisfy their natural desires for spiritual transcendence and religious understanding.
Others will feel no need to find a sacred meaning to the universe because they will be satisfied to explore that universe for the pleasure of understanding it, and even if they decide human travel in deep space is too dangerous right now, they will be happy to explore the deepest reaches of the universe through telescopes, unmanned spacecraft, and robotic explorers.
These philosophic explorers can still hope to solve the problem of how human beings can travel in extraterrestrial space for prolonged periods without suffering disabling and deadly damage to their bodies and brains. They might consider at least three ways to solve this problem. We could bioengineer human beings to be better adapted for living in space. Or we could overcome the physiological limitations of the human body by replacing some biological organs and limbs with mechanical or electronic parts to create cyborgs that could live well in space. Or we could create superhuman entities with artificial intelligence designed for life in space. But then we might wonder whether this is technologically possible. And if it is possible, could this engineering include engineering these beings for liberty? Or would these bioengineered, cybernetic, or transhuman entities be inclined to tyranny?
I see no indications that Trump and his people have thought about these questions. But the rest of us should.
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