Martian Chronicle

Mars may well be the next great frontier. But what kind of world should we make there?

John Tierney from the February 1999 issue

(Page 3 of 4)

Just as Henry Morton Stanley charged the expenses of his African journeys to the New York Herald, just as Sir Ernest Shackleton paid for his Antarctic voyages with best-selling books and international lecture tours, the Mars explorers could tap into the global appetite for adventure stories. And just as Shackleton exploited the new media of his day--at his lectures in 1910 he showed the first movies from the Antarctic--the Mars explorers could reach a paying audience through new cable channels and Web sites. The media coverage of the mission would attract the same kind of sponsors who pay to be part of the Olympics. Outdoor gear makers and high-technology firms would have a special incentive to have their logos and products associated with the adventure.

Although some sponsors would be reluctant to get involved with a project that could fail spectacularly and fatally, others (especially those selling products to young males) would be attracted by the aura of danger. But the dangers must seem worthwhile; the mission shouldn't come off as a pointless stunt. If the trip appeared to be just a longer version of Apollo 11, another enterprise that left nothing but flags and footprints, it would be less appealing to the audience--and therefore to potential sponsors. That's one reason that Zubrin and his disciples focus on analogies with Columbus instead of Neil Armstrong. The vision of Mars as the New World lends the first trip gravitas.

But why would anyone, especially a libertarian devoted to free markets, believe that a Mars colony would be a good investment? The first humans on Mars will encounter horrific dust storms, temperatures of minus 70 degrees Fahrenheit, and an unbreathable atmosphere. If they stood on the Martian surface without a pressurized suit, their blood would expand and burst out of their veins. Why would it pay to stick around?

At first glance, Mars has none of the commercial opportunities that drew the first Europeans to America. Columbus, who was financed by merchants as well as by Queen Isabella, crossed the Atlantic with the intention of making money. Even after his first goal, a trade route to the Orient, proved unattainable, there were other attractions for investors. The Spanish conquered the natives and took home gold; the French and Dutch set up trading posts in North America to acquire furs.

Mars offers no such inducements, unless you count the souvenir value of its rocks. Otherwise the minerals in its crust appear to be of little value. Science fiction writers like to imagine humans profitably mining asteroids and other planets, but there's no looming scarcity of minerals on Earth. The prices of metals and most other natural resources have been falling for millennia. Unless the prices here rise dramatically, or the cost of interplanetary shipping plummets, space miners won't be able to profitably export Mars' resources in the foreseeable future.

But Mars does have some resources of local value: water, carbon dioxide, and real estate. It contains as much dry land as all the continents on Earth, and the leaders of the Mars Society have big plans for it. They want to "terraform" Mars by injecting chlorofluorocarbons into its atmosphere and setting off a runaway greenhouse effect. As the planet thawed, the atmosphere would thicken with carbon dioxide released from melting
ice caps and soil. Add some trees and plants to convert the
carbon dioxide into oxygen, and before long humans could be breathing comfortably as they strolled in shirt sleeves on the green planet.

This scheme sounds outlandish today, but there was a time when Europeans couldn't imagine settling the American wilderness either. The Spanish and French leaders, as well as the officials of the Dutch West India Company, didn't initially emphasize permanent settlements of families. They sent mainly single men--soldiers, traders, and trappers--on temporary assignments to extract resources. America was a nice place to exploit, but you wouldn't want to live there.

"From the Spanish point of view," Zubrin says, "the only parts of the Americas that were valuable were the places with civilized Indians that could be taxed. They dismissed the rest as a howling wilderness. The British had a different notion of where wealth comes from. They created farms and towns in New England, turning the wilderness into a domain where social reproduction could occur."

The British settlers, motivated by a yearning for religious freedom, eventually outnumbered and expelled the Spanish, French, and Dutch from most of North America. Isolated from Europe, they created new kinds of communities with new kinds of liberties. "Humanity needs room to play and experiment with ideas in human governance," Zubrin says. "In 1776 Thomas Paine wrote, `We hold it in our power to begin the world anew.' So they did, and so do we. People will endure the risk and hardships of emigrating to Mars if, like the colonists in America, they can find a higher level of freedom."

Zubrin has come up with 16 new rights he would like to see on Mars, such as the right "to build, develop natural resources, and improve nature," and the right to practice an occupation without a license. "The Martian frontier could be like the frontier in the American West, where you didn't need a license to be a doctor," Zubrin says. "If you got good results, you had a clientele. If you had bad results, you were lynched."

His fellow libertarians have come up with their own bills of rights for Mars, which are being debated on the Mars Society's Web site (www.marssociety.org). What kind of property rights should there be on Mars? Should euthanasia and narcotics be legal? Do Earthlings even have the right to discuss the rights of future Martians? There's a certain absurdity to the debate--and to the very existence of the Mars Law and Governance Task Group--but also a certain glamour. If you're going to conduct a theoretical argument about something as arcane as occupational licensing, you may as well set it in outer space.

Meanwhile, back on planet Earth, the more mundane question remains: Who pays for the first trip? At its founding convention, the Mars Society resolved to raise $1 million to establish its own training base in the Arctic, on Canada's Devon Island, and it's also planning to send its own instrument along on a NASA spacecraft in 2003.

"We might want to send along a balloon that will float above Mars with a camera attached to it," Zubrin says. "We could market that for its entertainment value and advertising revenue. Maybe you couldn't pay for the whole mission with that revenue, but the Mars Society membership would pay for the difference. It's the Jacques Cousteau model: You combine membership dues with commercial revenues from films and documentaries. As you take one little step after another; you build up your credibility to raise the $5 billion for the manned mission."

Already a few entrepreneurs are looking to launch their own missions into space. Two companies, hoping to tap the adventure travel market, have announced plans to build space planes that will take customers for a brief ride just outside the atmosphere. Another firm, Space Dev, has raised $20 million as part of its plan to send scientific instruments to survey an asteroid and sell the data to scientists. But the Mars mission requires investment of another order of magnitude, and even enthusiasts like Zubrin aren't sure the private sector will take the risk anytime soon. As he hopes for a private mission, he's also lobbying for an old-fashioned NASA program.

"I'm a hard libertarian about rights on Mars, but not about getting there," he says. "With something as risky as Mars, it would be useful for the government to absorb some of the up-front costs. Spanish merchants weren't willing to back Columbus' first trip without royal involvement. Lewis and Clark were funded by the U.S. government--and then, as soon as they came back and said there's beaver there, John Jacob Astor's people did their own private exploration that ultimately was much more extensive than the government's. The American government also stimulated the private sector by setting up forts in the frontier, which attracted peddlers who established trade routes in the area. If the government set up a research base on Mars, it would stimulate private competition to lower the costs of delivering cargo."

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