Neither Elon Musk Nor Anybody Else Will Ever Colonize Mars
https://defector.com/neither-elon-musk-nor-anybody-else-will-ever-colonize-mars
Mars does not have a magnetosphere. Any discussion of humans ever settling the red planet can stop right there, but of course it never does. Do you have a low-cost plan for, uh, creating a gigantic active dynamo at Mars's dead core? No? Well. It's fine. I'm sure you have some other workable, sustainable plan for shielding live Mars inhabitants from deadly solar and cosmic radiation, forever. No? Huh. Well then let's discuss something else equally realistic, like your plan to build a condo complex in Middle Earth.
OK, so you still want to talk about Mars. Fine. Let's imagine that Mars's lack of a magnetic field somehow is not an issue. Would you like to try to simulate what life on Mars would be like? Step one is to clear out your freezer. Step two is to lock yourself inside of it. (You can bring your phone, if you like!) When you get desperately hungry, your loved ones on the outside may deliver some food to you no sooner than nine months after you ask for it. This nine-month wait will also apply when you start banging on the inside of the freezer, begging to be let out.
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Life on earth writ large, the grand network of life, is a greater and more dynamic terraforming engine than any person could ever conceive. It has been operating ceaselessly for several billions of years. It has not yet terraformed the South Pole or the summit of Mount Everest. On what type of timeframe were you imagining that the shoebox of lichen you send to Mars was going to transform Frozen Airless Radioactive Desert Hell into a place where people could grow wheat?
People have this idea that life is like some kind of magical force; that the reason Mars does not have life is that life has not yet gone there; that once life goes to a place, then it just figures out how to go on living there. This, I think, is a consequence of more people having gotten their science education from the movie character Ian Malcolm than from actual science classes. More generously, it is a testament to humans having formulated nearly all of their ideas about the nature of life from the absolute easiest (and only known) place to have life.
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Much, much more at the link.
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