The classic sign of froth in a bull market has always been crazy fantasies being marketed as realistic corporate aspirations of visionary entrepreneurs. Coming in the wake of SpaceX’s IPO in June 2026, this long read in Noema is an antidote to the madness that has gripped some people. American entrepreneurs aim to colonise Mars within a few decades, and Elon Musk famously wants to die there. Yet, as Henry Wismayer reports in this superb Noema feature, some of the loudest proponents of a human colony on Mars may be starting to rethink their approach.
The Red Planet has never lacked evangelists. Wismayer begins at London’s British Interplanetary Society, the “world’s oldest space advocacy organization,” among enthusiasts one friend calls “space wizards.” A 71-year-old fellow, Jerry Stone, says Columbus, Magellan and Cook “didn’t cross millions of miles of space to land on the surface of another world. If that doesn’t excite you, then I don’t know what will.”
SpaceX has “slashed that cost” of reaching orbit “to around $1,500 per kilogram,” from $54,000 in the shuttle era. Musk himself once foresaw “maybe a city in 20 years, but for sure in 30, civilization secured.” Then, came Musk’s about turn: “The overriding priority is securing the future of civilization,” he posted, “and the Moon is faster.”
The fullest blueprint is Robert Zubrin’s. The Mars Society founder’s colony of “50 to 100 dogged individuals” would “go to work” on arrival, “grinding cement from gypsum; firing bricks from claylike deposits; smelting iron from the rust-red ferric oxide that carpets the entire planet.”
However, Henry Wismayer explains: Mars “is an uncompromisingly hostile planet and a dreadful place to be a living organism,” and settling it is likely to leave pioneers “progressively irradiated, sick, mad and dead.”
“The Martian air is 95% carbon dioxide. Breathing this air would suffocate the average human in a few seconds.” Step outside a suit and “all the water in his body would vaporize in an instant, making it difficult to predict what would kill him faster: asphyxiation or a kind of total bodily implosion. Either way, the near-vacuum conditions would soon desiccate his corpse, leaving behind a freeze-dried mummy that — owing to the lack of moisture and putrefying bacteria — would never decompose.”Radiation runs “50 times higher than on Earth”. The -80°F cold is, per SpaceX, merely “a little cold, but we can warm it up”. The sum, he writes, is a “totally hermetic existence, confined to a landscape more Hades than Elysium.”
Even sealed inside a habitat, the biology defeats us. Kelly Weinersmith, whose “A City on Mars” set out to cheerlead settlement and ended up doubting it, fears most what cannot be tested. “The one that scares me the most is reproduction,” she tells Wismayer. “To have a self-sustaining settlement means you need to have women giving birth on Mars. And we absolutely do not know if that’s safe….she had never seen a queue outside a women’s restroom at a space convention.”
Fewer than 700 humans have been to space, and, notes SETI’s Nathalie Cabrol, “they’ve still taken a beating up there.” The deeper trap is adaptation: “We have co-evolved with our planet for four billion years… our posture has been shaped through our interactions with this biosphere.” Acclimatise to Mars, and “returning to Earth is going to become very difficult very fast.”
Nor does the politics reassure. An “off-planet city, in which even the very air you breathe will need to be centrally controlled, and where exit options will be nonexistent, would be uniquely predisposed to totalitarianism,” argues Johns Hopkins political scientist Daniel Deudney.
And, having survived all that, you would be bored. Wismayer’s most unexpected charge is that “aside from being comprehensively lethal to human health and well-being, Mars is catatonically boring.” NASA’s near-million Perseverance images left him “hard to feel inspired,” the gallery “empty tracts of sand and rubble beneath a brownish, miasmic sky.” Picture “a lonely astronaut on an EVA, kicking over rocks on a gravel plain several million miles from home, accompanied by nothing more than the hum of their life support apparatus and the beat of their own heart,” and Mars “won’t be a place for those of fragile mind.” Worse, says space psychiatrist Nick Kanas, orbital astronauts “can see the beauty of the Earth in all its glory,” whereas “on Mars, it’s just an insignificant dot in the heavens”.
Wismayer closes with a Bradbury tale whose astronauts, met on Mars by a replica of their hometown and their long-dead relatives, realise too late they have been lured to their graves by their own memories. Today’s planetary adventurers, he warns, “risk pursuing Mars to humanity’s detriment, imperiled less by the limits of their genius than by the fertility of their imaginations.
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