If you had the chance to take a trip to Mars, would you go? Humanity, being what it is, will have no shortage of takers for such a venture (although I’m assuming that many of those will not actually be suitable for such a venture).

Until very recently such a question was the realm of science fiction, but no longer. In the next decade or so we will likely see the first human land on Mars and have the daunting task of saying something to rival Neil Armstrong when he took his first steps on the moon. Yet the ultimate goal is much bigger than that, and there are people with the requisite resources who want to settle Mars and establish a colony there fuelling dreams of humanity becoming a multi-planetary species.

In his book, The Future of Humanity physicist Michio Kaku explores the possibilities of such a thing. I have to tell you the odds are against us. And even if we do get to Mars then that’s about it. We simply don’t have the technologies, resources, power or know-how to send humans any further than that. There is only one planet that we could conceivably settle on and that’s Mars and it doesn’t have a breathable atmosphere. So it’s got that going for it.

If you’re longing for the days of Star Trek or Star Wars the only way that will ever happen is if they visit us. We will not be seeing them. Not in your lifetime anyway. Or the lifetime of any of your descendants for the next 50 generations. If we’re lucky.

There are a few reasons for this. Firstly the universe is really big (and getting bigger) and the planets that are most likely to be hospitable enough for terraforming (creating a sustainable ecology if not an actual atmosphere) are really far away. The nearest is around 4 light-years away which may not sound very far except that we’ve no idea how to travel anywhere close to the speed of light. And if we did, we’ve no idea how to stop once we do. That was something I hadn’t considered before (I had no reason to) but a spaceship doesn’t really have brakes and nothing to brake against.

Kaku explores all the potential ideas that have been suggested that could take us beyond our solar system but nothing is close. We don’t have nuclear fusion, laser sails, nanoships, or antimatter engines. In other words we simply do not know how to power a craft far enough fast enough carrying anything worth carrying. You’ll notice that many great future inventions are often 20-30 years away. This is to make it seem attainable and possible but not so far out of reach as to render it pointless. We’re not close to being able to say it’s “20 years away”.

Even if we could get beyond the solar system we don’t live long enough to enjoy it. So that means being able to extend human life, or as you might see in films, suspend life or send self-replicating fully automated robots. We can’t do anything of those things. And no we won’t be able to in 20 years either. So the only other option is to have multi-generational spacecraft so that people are born in space and raised to be settlers on a distant planet. But we don’t know how to get enough resources with enough people on a space craft for that kind of journey and get it into orbit.

It ain’t happening folks. Not now, not this century, and probably not the next one either. ‘Not ever’ shouldn’t be ruled out. Although Kaku is far more optimistic, after all, it would be a fairly pointless read if every time he speculated on a future technology he finished by saying, “but it will probably never happen.” But being a physicist, he can airily throw around millions of years as if they were but a drop in the cosmological ocean, which indeed they are.

Our technological and biological limits force the more interplanetary ambitious of us to therefore focus on our solar system and even there we’re a little short of options. We have two. The moon and Mars. I’m prepared to believe that we could see, more or less, permanent settlements on both of them in my lifetime. There are enough serious people taking it seriously enough for this to be possible. People are thinking about how to 3D print tools, and even develop a constitution and a legal system. Although I’d still put the odds of this succeeding being around 10% at best.

Unlike Elon Musk’s vision of a city of a million though I believe they will at most be a bit like the Antarctica research stations. So no more than say, 1000. Even on the moon.

The challenges are enormous with matching costs.

We don’t know how to keep people alive from an incredibly hostile environment (radiation for one thing) and would need to establish mining operations, agriculture and production to keep anyone there alive. The best place to live on Mars is probably underground but getting underground won’t be easy. Remember it costs around $500,000 for every kg that you send to Mars. So it would cost about $40,000,000 million for me to get there before I take my pneumatic drill to start digging in the rocks. Initially, all this would be sustained by earth and the costs remain prohibitive even for multi-billionaires. Not only that but because Mars doesn’t have the same gravity as Earth exercising and keeping muscles from atrophying is harder than you would think.

And here’s a problem, again one that I hadn’t considered, boredom. It would take around 9 months to get to Mars (although Space X says 6) and in that time there’s more or less nothing to do. Bored people in close proximity to each other with nowhere to go for long periods of time with a restricted diet, sounds like a lockdown many times harder than that endured by people in 2020. Radio messages to earth, for instance, will take about 24 minutes to get there and the same back, obviously – so there’s a significant adjustment to our instant communications society. On the moon, through satellite technology, you’d be able to surf the web quite freely, apparently.

There will be other considerable mental burdens to consider and mental health may be one of the biggest challenges for anyone considering a mission to Mars. As Bill Nye says in the video above, to practice you should go live in the Antarctic interior (bone dry, freezing cold, dark, inhospitable, lonely and with nothing eat and nothing to do) for a couple of years and see how you like it.

As a Christian, will a colony on Mars change our theology as Lucas Mix wonders?

We live in an age of wonder when the boundaries of the earth seem to be more porous than ever before. Our reach extends beyond the atmosphere. We speak of earth as the ground we trod but also as a planet, a specific place in the heavens. What does it mean for us to fill the earth when we walk on another planet?

Mars Mission: Filling the Earth and Beyond

My guess is no, it probably won’t. A large research station, even if it is one on another planet, is not sufficient to substantially change human destiny or theology.

The buzz about Mars is already considerable, given that people like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk are pouring their fortunes into it and that will only grow as missions begin to happen which they likely will. Yet even that is tied very much to the circumstances here. A significant global financial crash would likely see Mars missions as first casualties for example.

As I read Kaku’s enjoyable speculations about exploring the universe the one truth that came through louder than all the others was that our future is not in the stars. At least not for the majority of us. Even if Musk succeeds in putting one million people on earth there, by that time there could be ten billion here on Earth. No, you, me and all our descendants will do as all our ancestors did. Die and be buried here on earth.

I’ve nothing against the project or the investment in this wild and brilliant future in the stars. After all, as Christians, we have, generation by generation, over the last 2000 years slowly chipped away at taking the good news about Jesus to the whole earth and we will keep going until that task is done. So, if humanity invests in 2000 years of research into travelling further and living longer amongst the stars, then so be it. We should expect nothing less.

Yet our destiny, our travels through space as a species will all be carried out on this planet. The challenges that we face are earthbound ones. The future our children and our grandchildren have will not be determined on the Red Planet but the Blue one.