Is Mars Ours?

By Adam Mann

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Last year, about a month into the pandemic, I reached for something comforting: the 1992 science-fiction novel “Red Mars,” by Kim Stanley Robinson. I’d first read it as a teen-ager, and had reread it a handful of times by my early twenties. Along with its two sequels, “Green Mars” and “Blue Mars,” the novel follows the first settlers to reach the red planet. They establish cities, break away from Earth’s control, and transform the arid surface into a garden oasis, setting up a new society in the course of a couple hundred years. On the cover of my well-worn copy, Arthur C. Clarke declared it “the best novel on the colonization of Mars that has ever been written.” In my youth, I considered it a record of what was to come.

It had been a decade since I’d last cracked open the book. In that time, I’d become a journalist specializing in space, covering its practical, physical, biological, psychological, sociological, political, and legal aspects; still, the novel’s plot had always stayed with me, somewhere in the back of my mind. It turns on a series of questions about what we owe to our planetary neighbor—about what we are allowed to do with its ancient geological features, and in whose interests we should be willing to modify them. In Robinson’s future, a disgruntled minority of settlers argue that humanity has no right to alter a majestic place that has existed without us for billions of years; they undertake ecoterroristic acts to undermine Martian terraforming efforts and, in the end, succeed in keeping parts of Mars a wilderness. I used to think it sensible that their opinion was relegated to the margins. Reading the novel again, I wasn’t so sure.

“It seemed to me obvious,” Robinson told me, over the phone this winter, when I asked him how he’d come to place that particular dilemma at the center of his trilogy. Environmental ethicists have long debated how we ought to treat the Earth, and asked whether the natural world has intrinsic value. In 1990, one of Robinson’s friends, a nasa astrobiologist and planetary scientist named Christopher McKay, posed the question “Does Mars have rights?” in a paper of the same name. Ultimately, McKay answered in the negative: he concluded that, when we speak of the value of nature, we’re really thinking of the value of living organisms. Unless the red planet is alive, McKay argued, we’re unlikely to extend to it the same environmental considerations that we apply to biospheres on Earth. “I thought that might be true for Chris McKay,” Robinson said. “But people living on Mars would develop affection for the place as it is.”

In February, nasa successfully landed a new robotic rover on the surface of Mars. Perseverance, as the vehicle is known, will roll around an area called Jezero Crater, searching for signs of life. It will collect up to thirty test-tube-size samples from the red rocks and dust, storing them so that a future mission can bring them into Martian orbit and, eventually, back to Earth. I have no ethical qualms about the tracks that Perseverance will lay down, nor about the part that it will play in absconding with a bit of Mars. But, in contemplating a future human presence on the planet, I start to worry about the questions presented in Robinson’s books. If there’s nobody around to stop us from doing what we want, what should we do?

Space exploration presents ethical quandaries even on Earth. Astronomers sometimes want to place telescopes on sacred land. In orbit, we scatter litter. Countries are now debating whether we have a right to mine the moon or asteroids, and asking who should be entitled to use such places as a second home. Space agencies and tech billionaires are working to solve the myriad technical issues associated with travelling to and staying off-world, but, once that’s done, there’s the problem of our conduct after we get there. Critics suggest that, in space, we risk repeating the mistakes of the colonial past, in which exploration was often a cover for the exploitation of native beings and environments.

Advocates of space settlement have long borrowed from an old-fashioned version of the American mythos, which holds that conquering the untamed wilderness of the New World made us better and more democratic as we advanced westward. At least symbolically, space, the final frontier, is sometimes presented as a savage land in need of humanity’s beneficent influence. For a time, SpaceX, the private company run by Elon Musk, called its planned passenger vehicle the Mars Colonial Transporter. (In 2016, Musk announced that the vessel would be renamed, because it might end up travelling “well beyond Mars.”) In recent years, nasa has shifted away from non-inclusive language—the agency now speaks of missions that are “crewed” rather than “manned”—but not everyone has followed suit. “We must remember that America has always been a frontier nation,” Donald Trump said, in his 2020 State of the Union address, while describing renewed ambitions to settle the moon. “Now we must embrace the next frontier: America’s Manifest Destiny in the stars.”

The problems with such rhetoric can be seen most clearly when speaking to those whose stories it disrespects. Hilding Neilson, a Canadian astronomer, greeted me over Zoom, from his beige Toronto living room, with a stoic expression. I asked his opinion about the people currently leading the charge on space exploration, and he paused to compose himself. “What I see . . . I’m trying to say this in a way that’s on the record,” he began. “What I see are organizations that view Mars in the same way that colonizers, pioneers, and settlers viewed the early West—that it was terra nullius, a land of opportunity for them, and that the land was free to take.”

Neilson, who studies the life cycles of stars, is Mi’kmaq; the indigenous nation that he belongs to extends over parts of eastern Canada and northern Maine. It’s difficult to be sure, but it’s possible that he is the only First Nations faculty member in astronomy or physics in Canada. “It’s hard for scientists, especially in terms of astronomy and space exploration, to see themselves as anything but ethical,” he said. “There’s a whole system built around this idea of space exploration being ethical and pro-human, but it’s also one that doesn’t necessarily hear voices from non-Western perspectives.”

It is precisely in its interactions with Native communities that astronomy has acted most questionably. In the nineteen-nineties, the San Carlos Apache Tribal Council battled with officials over a plan to build the indelicately named Columbus telescope on Mt. Graham, in southern Arizona’s Sonoran Desert, the tribe’s traditional homeland; in 2005, the Tohono O’odham Nation, also situated in southern Arizona, filed a lawsuit to contest construction of a proposed gamma-ray detector on the summit of nearby Kitt Peak, which they call Iolkam Du’ag and consider sacred. More recently, Native Hawaiians have objected to the placement of the Thirty Meter Telescope, or T.M.T., on Mauna Kea. Years ago, when I was fresh out of my undergraduate studies in astrophysics, I dismissed concerns about the T.M.T., seeing the matter as a contest between outdated religion and noble science. After speaking to members of the Kānaka Maoli, or Hawaiian people, I was able to see how academics were using established power structures to get what they wanted. Today, each of these mountains hosts multiple telescope domes.

Neilson is largely in favor of space exploration, and thinks ethically settling other places is possible. “But we have to be more inclusive of different perspectives, and to understand where our own mainstream perspectives come from,” he said. “It has to be about being part of Mars, as opposed to making Mars part of us.”

Those who advocate for human space exploration make a number of arguably unexamined assumptions. These include the idea that travelling to other worlds is inevitable, that the drive to explore is somehow in our genes, and that technological advancement is equivalent to moral progress. I have heard it said that we will learn to exist better on Earth using techniques developed for living on Mars. “That’s a really cute thought,” Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, a theoretical particle physicist and cosmologist at the University of New Hampshire, told me. “But figuring out how to settler-colonize the United States didn’t help us live in a more ethical global community.”

Video-chatting from her home office on the New Hampshire coast, Prescod-Weinstein told me a story about the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century French astronomers who travelled to the colony of Saint-Domingue, now part of Haiti. “Part of their mission was to figure out how to better measure distances, so ships could travel across the Atlantic faster—basically, so that it would be easier to move members of my family and enslave them,” she said. Tracing her ancestry back to both Barbados and Eastern Europe, Prescod-Weinstein is “a queer, Black, Jewish, agender woman,” and said that her second discipline has become “Black feminist science, technology, and society studies.” Two years ago, she was a panelist at “Decolonizing Mars,” an “unconference” at the Library of Congress.

I asked Prescod-Weinstein the question that I’d been contemplating: “Is Mars ours?” “Obviously, my answer to that is no,” she said, laughing. “Like, is the Earth ours? I’m sitting here looking at the trees on the land behind my house. I depend on that photosynthesis, the entire exchange of taking in carbon and making it easier for me to breathe. So does the Earth belong to me or the trees?” She worried about the disregard that humans can have for things that aren’t human; in some indigenous societies, she said, land is considered a family member. “If we think about Mars as family, what do we want for our Mars family? I think we need to learn a different way of being in relation with each other.”

In speaking about why we might not want to destroy rock faces on Mars, many of the people I interviewed talked about living biospheres on Earth. But perhaps taking the regard that we’ve developed for natural things on our planet and extending it to places where there might not be life is too much of a stretch. “Rocks don’t have rights,” Robert Zubrin, an aerospace engineer and the founder of the Mars Society, which advocates settlement of the red planet, told me. “They don’t have the ability to do anything or desire to do anything. Michelangelo did not commit crimes against rocks by violating their right to be left alone in order to make statues.”

Zubrin appeared on my laptop screen sporting wispy gray hair and an avuncular energy—he’s the kind of person you can imagine arguing with over Thanksgiving dinner. The shelves of his Colorado office were crowded with books, piles of paper, and two hard hats. In November, in an essay for National Review, Zubrin argued against the “wokeists” who he believes are trying to halt space exploration. The essay centered on a submission to the Planetary Science and Astrobiology Decadal Survey—a once-in-ten-years affair in which scientists discuss their research priorities—titled “Ethical Exploration and the Role of Planetary Protection in Disrupting Colonial Practices.” The paper’s twelve co-authors and hundred and nine signatories, Prescod-Weinstein among them, encouraged scientists to think about how to “prevent capitalist extraction on other worlds, respect and preserve their environmental systems, and acknowledge the sovereignty and interconnectivity of all life.”

A degree of planetary protection is enshrined in international law, in order to prevent backward or forward contamination. In 1967, the U.S. signed the Outer Space Treaty; its Article IX prohibits signatories from allowing Earth microbes to reach Mars, or from letting Martian biota hitch a ride to our planet, where they might infect terrestrial organisms. At the moment, Martian life is hypothetical, though an increasing number of scientists think that it could exist. Earth and Mars have both been hit by meteors during their four-billion-year history; some have been large enough to knock debris into orbit, and perhaps out toward other planets. It’s possible that, in the past, microbes have travelled between our world and others. Tiny organisms might still be doing so today.

For these reasons, Zubrin is not terribly keen on planetary-protection laws. He argued, moreover, that the authors of the “Ethical Exploration” paper had gone further—into what he called “an extreme anti-human position.” In his view, ethical thinking must be based in the question of whether an action benefits human flourishing; the good that might come from having Mars as a second home, both for us and for the creatures we bring, outweighs the needs of a putative native biosphere.

Debates about colonization may be concerned with the future, but they’re informed by the problems of the present. With that in mind, I spoke with Moriba Jah, an aerospace engineer at the University of Texas at Austin who has worked as a spacecraft navigator for several of nasa’s missions to Mars. When we spoke, Jah wore large earrings and a septum piercing, and a circular tattoo peeked out from the collar of his shirt. After completing his degree in astrodynamics, Jah became acquainted with the problem of space junk—the tens of thousands of derelict satellites, spent rocket boosters, and metal fragments now in orbit around our planet. He has since become a space environmentalist, testifying before Congress, briefing the United Nations Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space, and chairing a nato panel that included discussion of space-garbage mitigation.

“If we went to Mars today, what would we see?” he asked. “Some scattered debris, heat shields that have been broken up, parachutes flapping in the wind”—the equipment used to land robots on the red planet. “So we’re doing it again. There is an environment. It may not be an ecosystem defined as having living organisms, but it is a place of human interaction, and so it needs to have protective measures.” Jah argues that governments should fold sustainability concerns into their licensing processes for space activities; with that taken into account, he is in favor of settling other planets, and even of terraforming them. His biggest concern is democratic accountability. He thinks that laws should govern our behavior in space.

Timiebi Aganaba, a British, Canadian, and Nigerian space lawyer currently employed by Arizona State University, in Tempe, advanced a similar view. According to Article I of the Outer Space Treaty, space exploration is meant to be carried out in the benefits and interests of all countries. “The challenge we have from a legal perspective is that there is no institution that regulates that,”Aganaba told me. “How do you allocate that benefit to everyone?”

Now more than a half century old, the O.S.T. is starting to show its age. It includes almost no mention of private space companies, asteroid mining, or human settlement. Although it remains the ultimate arbiter on space law, its wording remains vague enough for multiple interpretations. Last year, as part of its plan to return to the moon, the U.S. unveiled the Artemis Accords, a set of legal guidelines for countries that wish to participate in American-led lunar activities. Nine countries have since signed on, agreeing to the pact’s most controversial provision: that resources extracted from celestial bodies can be owned, utilized, and sold. Some experts say that this contravenes the O.S.T.’s second article, which prohibits territorial claims on other worlds. It’s unclear whether the U.S. will convince the other major space powers, including Russia and China, to sign the accords.

Aganaba is in favor of developing a space economy, but she wants negotiations about it to include people from around the world. At the moment, the scales are tipped heavily in favor of people and nations that have been historically powerful. For instance, the U.S. has licensed the launch of tens of thousands of satellites for SpaceX’s Starlink project, which aims to bring space-based Internet to far-flung places—a move that Aganaba says can be seen as similar to resource hoarding. “Anywhere on Earth, if you’re going to exploit a natural resource, you have to pay royalties,” she said. “Why should space be different?”

Space still exists mainly in our imaginations, and we all imagine it differently. At one extreme, there’s the apocalyptic vision painted by Elon Musk, who wants to back up civilization on Mars in case of a catastrophe on our world. (Representatives of SpaceX declined to comment for this story.) A more optimistic view comes from the “Star Trek” franchise, which has shown humanity coming together in the spirit of science and exploration to discover strange new worlds. For nearly four decades, Michael Okuda, a Los Angeles-based graphic designer, has been an instrumental part of “Star Trek”: his distinctive control-panel designs for the U.S.S. Enterprise on “Star Trek: The Next Generation” are affectionately called “okudagrams” by fans. When his Webcam switched on for our interview, he was watching a live stream of SpaceX’s colossal silver rocket, now called Starship, which was waiting for clearance to take off on a test flight. Periodically, he checked in to see how things were progressing.

Though Gene Roddenberry, the creator of “Star Trek,” originally pitched his series as a Western set in space, Okuda pointed out that the show soon changed its tone. “It began to embrace concepts like the prime directive, in which Starfleet explicitly values the autonomy of indigenous life-forms and civilizations,” he said. Like Zubrin, Okuda thought reasonable people ought to be able to find ways of treating native beings respectfully. He suggested a scenario, not unlike the one in Robinson’s trilogy, in which settlement and even resource exploitation occur on Mars while a national-park-type system simultaneously preserves the beauty of the planet and its native ecosystems. This, he thought, could also be seen as an expression of American values.

After our chat, SpaceX’s Starship shot to an altitude of nearly eight miles, shut down its engines, and came tumbling back to Earth. The plan was to have the craft, which is twelve stories tall, reignite its engines and right itself—but, in this instance, it crashed, producing an enormous fireball. On Twitter, Musk was nevertheless cheerful about data from the test.

During interviews to promote his latest documentary, “Fireball,” which examines humanity’s fascination with meteorite crashes, the seventy-eight-year-old film director Werner Herzog made critical remarks about Musk’s plans. I decided to ask for his opinion, too. “Is there an ethical way to settle other planets?” I wrote to Herzog, through a form on his Web site. He replied:

Dear Adam Mann . . .

As to space exploration: I am very much in favor, and I would like to take part in it with a camera, but this is a task for a different generation. Colonizing other planets is another thing—it is one of the technological utopias that will come to an end during this century.

I’m pleased that this is an issue on which everyone is free to express an opinion. Though I worry that we will end up making unforeseen mistakes in space, I nurture some hope that we can avoid the errors of the past—a wish that descends, perhaps, from the old idea that space is some heavenly realm. As Herzog writes, many of these questions may turn out to be flights of fancy. We see in space the possibility of redemption, which may never come.