Mars colony

Now that we’re quite sure that there are only seven permanent residents on Mars – the rovers we have sent there – we are ready to colonize it and become a two-planet species; or at least that’s what Elon Musk wants to actualize. The idea would be to send a few pioneer developers with enough equipment to start a small, self-sustainable pod-based community that could eventually grow to become an acclimatized biosphere able to support the population of a large city. If the principle behind going through the vacuum of space to an orb with a much dimmer sunset is to increase the chance of the survival of our species, and thereby the only sentient and intelligent life that we know of, then I may could possibly get behind it…at least the proponents of the idea would be pursuing consistency with the fundamental premise of ‘survival of the fittest’. The harsh reality is that those with the gusto, intellect, and indeed, financial entrepreneurship to propel themselves permanently off of the sphere to which they were brought into existence upon may be committing intellectual and species-level suicide – and literal suicide, for that matter, however delayed the effect may come. Beyond that, my problem with a Mars colony, or any interstellar colony for that matter, is singular. If the potential colonizers understood that we have made a wasteland out of the paradise we were given, what on Earth (or ‘what on Mars’) do they think we will make out of a wasteland? Perhaps, normally, our expectations are too low, but I believe those who are shooting for the stars – or at least the red one in the sky that looks like a star but is, in fact, much closer and circling our own star – for them, they have set their expectations far too high. I’m afraid once they arrived and had set up a livable community, if that ever happened, they would discover that their utopian dreams would quickly be shattered by the reality that they still have to deal with the same busted Earthlings that they thought they were leaving behind…that is, they would have to deal with the brokenness of each other, and themselves; a problem too insurmountable even for a new planet to fix.