The Trouble With Mars

There are a lot of people lately, talking about going to Mars.
Elon, this one’s for you, I guess.

Maybe it’s because people are finally becoming slightly aware that the Earth ship is going down?
Or perhaps it’s because of a marketing agenda being pushed by some corporation?
I’m not really sure, that’s why I thought it would be good to dig in to a bit of the Martian soil and see what’s up.

Strap yourself in tightly, because this rocket’s going to blast off right in the face of the popular notion that going to Mars is a perfect idea!

Why going to Mars is a bad idea:
You may notice that whenever there’s something in the news about Mars, pretty much whenever anyone is talking about going to Mars, even those with well laid plans and the best of intentions…
They refer to building a colony on Mars.
Not visiting Mars, or flying to Mars, not even usually sending a scientific mission to Mars…
The preferred term is “Colonizing Mars.”

Maybe the problem there isn’t obvious, so I’ll spell it out for you:
S-P-A-C-E C-O-L-O-N-I-A-L-I-S-M!

Think about all the great things colonialism has done for Earth,
Then apply that to a whole new planet! Whoopee!

Granted, there aren’t any indigenous natives to enslave or genocide,
So that’s a big plus compared to the usual methodology,
But the idea is essentially the same:
WE’RE GONNA CLAIM MARS, FOR EARTH!

Except, Earth isn’t exactly a unified front, not yet.
Before I go on, it’s important to clarify there is a HUGE difference between
“Globalism”
And
“Global Corporatism.”

A unified Earth sounds like a pretty big improvement over hundreds of feudal nation states warring over lines on maps, but there's no idea so good that greedy corporations can't bend it over and fuck it to death.

Corporate globalists want to reap the rewards of currently existing nation states’ resources without having to deal with all those pesky little hurdles like local laws, paying fair wages, or people that already live where the water, forests, poppies, or oil is located, complaining about being enslaved and murdered.
Those sorts of things really cut into the bottom line.
They can’t have human life fucking up their profit margins.

The biggest problem for them is that human beings on Earth have all these ecosystems around them, that enable them to survive, and typically you have to knock those down in order to get at the sweet, sweet crude underneath.

Guess what?
Not a problem on Mars.
Mars has no ecosystem to obstruct the extraction of minerals,
Mars has no natives to bitch about being slaughtered like livestock,
Mars has no nations or laws to slow down “progress.”

Mmm, “progress.”
That word leaves a funny taste in your mouth, doesn’t it?
Like sucking on a quarter you found on the pavement at a bus stop,
On a freeway overpass,
In New Delhi,
During a world cup finals celebration.

Related: Mars ain’t cheap.
Getting there is quite technically challenging, and you could count the number of people with the financial resources to make an independent trip on one hand.

Corporations on the other hand…
Have a great deal of profit they’re not reinvesting in something stupid and un-profitable like,
Their workers.
Or stable infrastructure.
Or their home countries.

For whatever reason, the CEOs of fortune 500 type companies prefer to sit on their giant piles of money, or swim around giant vaults full of gold coin like Scrooge Fucking McDuck.
And of course, thanks to huge tax cuts, deregulation, and absolute zero oversight by IRS and similar agencies of offshore holdings, they can just hang on to all that money until the bottom drops out… OR…

They could spend it on a trip to Mars.
So why would they do that?
If you want to live on Mars, you gotta incentivize a corporation.
They need a motive.
What usually motivates these folks?

"Methane is quickly destroyed in the Martian atmosphere in a variety of ways, so our discovery of substantial plumes of methane in the northern hemisphere of Mars in 2003 indicates some ongoing process is releasing the gas," said Dr. Michael Mumma of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. "At northern mid-summer, methane is released at a rate comparable to that of the massive hydrocarbon seep at Coal Oil Point in Santa Barbara, Calif."

PAYDIRT!

“In its quest to find molecules that could point to life on Mars, NASA's Curiosity rover has struck a gusher. Since Curiosity landed in 2012, it has sifted samples of soil and ground-up rock for signs of organic molecules—the complex carbon chains that on Earth form the building blocks of life. Past detections have been so faint that they could be just contamination. Now, samples taken from two different drill sites on an ancient lakebed have yielded complex organic macromolecules that look strikingly similar to the goopy fossilized building blocks of oil and gas on Earth. At a few dozen parts per million, the detected levels are 100 times higher than previous finds.”

“Because 30% of the roughly 180 impact craters on Earth contain minerals or oil and gas, it seems that the cratering promotes the development of natural resources. Some of the ores produced from impact related effects on Earth include ores of iron, uranium, gold, copper, and nickel. It is estimated that the value of materials mined from impact structures is 5 billion dollars/year just for North America.”

Recent expeditions,
(taxpayer funded expeditions financed by NASA, of course)
Have found evidence of valuable ores and gases on the red planet.
Now, ALL OF A SUDDEN, there’s corporate interest!
Whodathunkit?

Is my "pretending to look shocked" face wearing out yet?

So let’s hypothesize a bit:
Corporations here on Earth have this nasty habit of enslaving people by the millions, by putting them in a position where they have to work miserable jobs with long hours and meager if not outright pathetic pay, barely able to scratch by with a roof over their head and food on the table.

But EARTH has all sorts of ecosystems, fertile soil, and rain;
Which enable many members of society (particularly in rural areas,) and indigenous peoples to live off the land, earning their survival by the sweat of their brow and the toil of their own two hands.
Hunting and gathering does not require complex laws, reams of red tape, accountants, lawyers, stock market speculators, and other hominid equivalents to ticks on a dog’s ass.
It also does not lend itself neatly to oligarchies, monarchies, or fascism.
Earth’s kinda great that way.

MARS has none of those advantages.
To live on Mars, you’ll have to sign a contract with a corporation,
Become a directly indentured servant,
And cater to the whim of shareholders back on the blue planet.

Mars is also lacking in due process of law, or any form of enforceable order by governing bodies back home. So the only ones capable of ensuring the stipulations of the contract are adhered to, and that your human rights are not excessively and repeatedly violated, are the very same corporate overlords who will profit the most from working you to death.
I don’t mean metaphorically, I mean literally, to death.
Because there’s plenty of frozen martian soil to dispose of corpses.
Dead laborers are much less likely to strike than union laborers.

It’s not like the corporatocracy has never gotten away with it on Earth.
It will be SO MUCH EASIER to get away with it on Mars.

All that being said, I think going to Mars could be really neat.
It would be a great adventure, and a great achievement for humanity.
The pinnacle of our tenacious instinct to explore.

But we must put our own house in order first.
If we can terraform Mars, we can terraform Earth, too.
The only thing stopping us is greed, egomania, megalomania, and bad programming.
Gotta solve those problems before we venture out, or we’ll just end up repeating the mistakes of the past.

Do you want space AIDS?
Cuz’ that’s how you get space AIDS.

Sources:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ore_resources_on_Mars
http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/06/nasa-rover-hits-organic-pay-dirt-mars
https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/mars/news/marsmethane.html