Colonizing Mars is bullshit.
Many of us know this to be true. Thanks to [all-encompassing gesture at the state of the world in 2025], it is now extremely obvious that the socio-political sphere influences space exploration to an immense degree. It has also never been more apparent that colonizing Mars is bullshit. And yet, within planetary science and outside of it, many of us keep having the same circular conversations on the topic, all of us wasting valuable time and energy that could otherwise go towards direct action on viable problems.
Much of the “colonizing Mars debate” has centered on whether colonizing Mars is possible (it’s not), whether doing so could ever be profitable (it couldn’t), and whether colonizing Mars could be better or worse depending on whether a nation-state or a private corporation does it (both options are bad). For me, these arguments are all too high-level, and serve as a distraction. They prevent the main debate from ever being fully resolved, and they do it by avoiding the core problem: it doesn’t matter which imaginary ways people dream of making money (or not) or Mars. What matters is that, at a fundamental level, colonizing Mars is bullshit.
While lots of people probably agree with me on this, that hasn’t necessarily translated into effective advocacy against it; instead, many of the existing arguments against colonizing Mars take the premise at face value. The discussion goes: if we were able to colonize Mars, how would we do it? To me, starting with this premise is a failure, because you’ve already ceded some ground. At worst, it takes it as a given that colonizing Mars is something people should do; at best, it accepts colonizing Mars as an idea that should be tolerated, if only as an intellectual exercise. Well, I’m here to tell you: no, it’s not something people should do, and no, you shouldn’t take it seriously! Colonizing Mars disgusts me, and it should disgust you, too.
This is, of course, because colonization is bad.
While this is something that theoretically we should all agree on, it’s important to state the obvious, because it’s certainly not stated enough in the colonizing Mars debate. Some ideas are so long-lived and pervasive we forget they’re there at all. They become part of the fabric of our reality, buried so deep that even as we disavow them, we can’t imagine how the world might work if their tendrils were removed. For much of the western world, colonization is like this. If we’re lucky, we’re taught in school about the horrors of European colonization, how settlers destroyed the lives of countless peoples in an attempt to reshape the rest of the world in their image. It was a bad thing that leaves a legacy of death, misery, and collapse behind it. However, the other thing we’re taught about colonization is that it’s in the past. It happened; it was bad — let’s move on! After all, if colonization was still a thing that happened, wouldn’t everyone agree to stop doing it? And if it were possible to give the land back to the people it was stolen from, wouldn’t we just… do that?
Apparently not! At least, not according to the people in power. Western powers have not reckoned with the global effects of colonialism, at least not in any meaningful way; many of the nation-states that did (or in many cases, are still doing) the colonizing are busy casting the horrors of colonialism as a fraught era of the distant past, or presenting colonialism as a proud national legacy with few, if any, problems. Meanwhile, the people they’ve colonized continue to live in the shadow of colonization’s aftermath. They have not forgotten, and are constantly working to regain their land, history, and future.
But this piece isn’t about the legacy of colonialism on Earth (though I encourage you to learn as much as you can about how it affects you and your home, wherever that may be). This piece is about how, because we haven’t reckoned with colonialism on Earth, its old logic gets uncritically applied to Mars. The spectre of colonialism — though it is, of course, very much not dead — undergirds every argument we keep having, and attempts to obfuscate a very simple truth. Colonizing Mars is bad because colonization on the Earth was bad, and we should never do it again anywhere.
The Perseverance rover observes the Martian horizon. Image via NASA.
One argument people sometimes make to me is that while colonialism is bad, colonizing Mars is completely different, because this time the land really will be empty. There are no people whose cultures must be upended, no homes to be torn down and replaced, no sacred spaces to be desecrated in the name of “progress.” On Earth, colonization is demands oppression, because one people must be displaced so that another can violently reshape their culture, land, and legacy in its image. But Mars is a blank slate, filled only with dust, rocks, and thin air — here is where colonization can really thrive in its purest form! Here is where we can finally make something out of nothing, and this time it hurts no one.
This is, obviously, bullshit.
The easiest way to tell this is bullshit is to notice that when someone says “colonization is bad, BUT…” what will follow is some form of thin-skinned justification for doing it anyway. The more laborious way to tell this is bullshit is to actually listen to the thin-skinned justification. What makes it okay this time? The argument rests on a kind of “aw, shucks” type of logic. It begins with the premise that colonization is good, and the only problem with it is that on Earth, people looking to expand into empty space and make it their own made the “oops!” realization that it wasn’t so empty after all. It’s a revisionism that imagines colonizers as innocent explorers discovering their mistakes in real time, but who somehow keep making more. But one does not simply slip and fall into colonizing another group of people — it’s a process that requires sustained effort (and violence) over decades to centuries. Pretending that “blameless people looking for a new home” is how colonization happens assigns innocence to an act that is a series of conscious, vicious choices. From the Spanish Conquest to Manifest Destiny, those at the forefront of colonization efforts were well aware that the land they worked to occupy was full of people. They just managed to reframe it as empty — empty of the right sort of person, the kind that could take the land’s resources and harvest them for the right sort of purpose.
The second part of that last sentence illustrates the problem, which is that colonizing Mars is still colonization. It is arriving at a place with the intent to use. Without the impediment of people, colonization can skip straight to step two, which is occupying and exploiting the land. If you like and respect the natural world, this part of colonization also sucks! Occupied land is often used to replicate the colonizer’s culture and values (with varying degrees of success), or for raw extraction of resources (to be shipped back to the imperial core). Or both! To the colonizer looking to reshape conquered land in their image, adaptation to a new environment is rejected in favor of forcing the environment to bend to expectation. In the past, such thinking led to the proliferation of English-style housing in the Caribbean, which was then repeatedly torn apart by hurricanes; today, we see golf courses built in the desert that must be constantly maintained against both the climate and the wildlife. Reproducing the colonizer’s environment on colonized land requires constant effort; and yet, somehow the desire for control is deemed worth the ever-mounting cost.
This is, on a much smaller scale, similar to what would (theoretically) be required for terraforming. Terraforming Mars is currently impossible; its atmosphere is so thin that even vaporizing the polar ice caps wouldn’t thicken it enough to make it breathable. Until other sources of CO2 become available in high quantities, Mars will remain a cold, dry desert. And yet the desire for terraforming persists, in science fiction and science itself, motivated by the deep-seated desire to bend reality itself and win. We can conquer Mars and make it livable. We can overwrite what was there before — and because it was empty before, there’s no reason not to do so. Right?
Various sources of carbon dioxide on Mars and their estimated contribution to martian atmospheric pressure. Image via Goddard Spaceflight Center.
If we don’t terraform Mars, there’s also the second option, which is turning Mars into one big resource. As noted above, if colonized land isn’t turned into a playground for the colonizer, it’s often stripped for parts; what’s left behind is scarred and unrecognizable. The conversion of the American Midwest to farmland has permanently transformed the regional climate; massive deforestation for lumber has devastated forests, from Ireland to the Amazon; open pit mines in Chile, Russia, and the United States leave landscape scars so large they’re visible from space. European colonizers needed gold, silver, and sugar, and obtained them through thorough occupation and exploitation of the Americas. Today, the west needs lithium, cobalt, and other rare earth elements for its technologies, a cost that is once again offset, this time to rural Australia, Chile, and Congo. What’s done to the land during colonization is its own form of brutality, enacted by those who view “empty land” as valuable only for the resources it might contain, rather than as something with its own history. It’s entitlement at the planetary scale.
Mars is almost lucky in this regard, since it seems to lack traditional resources. We’re more likely to mine asteroids than Mars (though this is unlucky for the asteroids). However, many ongoing discussions center on how Mars could be of use when/once colonized. We could extract its buried water for settlements (extremely difficult), nuke its ice caps to try to build a thicker atmosphere (impossible, see above), or otherwise produce resources in situ, either to support terraforming or provide materials for further space exploration. Mars is a dead world, but surely it has something we can use.
A NASA schematic of Mars-based in-situ resource utilization, focused on “atmosphere resource acquisition and processing.” Image via NASA.
All these options suck! Mars either gets terraformed into Earth 2, has any possible resources harvested, mined, or possibly nuked, or both. We’re so eager to jump straight to colonization that all the ideas we’re willing to waste our time on when it comes to the future of humanity and Mars are the impossible, the impractical, and the cruel. Does Mars really have no value to us other than as a Planet B for the rich or the next big open pit? That’s why colonizing Mars is bullshit, on a fundamental level. It’s not fine to do it “because it’s empty.” Even if it was, I don’t think we should look at the legacy of what’s been done to the Earth in the name of colonial progress — the ongoing deforestation, vast open pits, and associated environmental catastrophes — and go “Yippee! Time to do that again, to another landscape!”
Lastly, I also reject the other part of this logic, which is the claim that Mars is empty. We’ve observed Mars for literal centuries, and ever since Schiaparelli interpreted its complex surface features as a network of canals, we’ve known that Mars has a vibrant geologic history. It’s been completely resurfaced by water, wind, and volcanism over billions of years; it’s hosted lakes and rivers and built mountains and canyons. Mars still has a vibrant, evolving surface today, and even if it’s never hosted life of any kind, it still has value, just because of what it is. Mars is a planet! It lives and dies on timescales that exceed any human lifetime. To colonize it without a second thought is to claim the dreams of a few members of humanity supersede all four billion years of Martian history. And that is, in my opinion, bullshit. Mars is not and has never been empty. We’ve landed robots on Mars and heard the sound of the wind.
If you disagree with me — if you think nothing at all on Mars could ever matter, because the survival of humanity on another planet is more important — that’s fine, I guess! But that’s colonial thinking, and it’s bullshit, and you shouldn’t expect anyone to thank you for it.
Landscape on Mars taken by NASA’s Curiosity rover after crossing a dune. The colors have been white-balanced to show what Mars would look like if it had Earth’s sky. An interesting choice we keep making! Image via NASA.
Did you think this piece was over? I wish I could be done there! Unfortunately, I can’t be done, because while we’ve just covered why colonial thinking is what motivates the idea of Mars as empty land, the other big argument people make to me about the colonization of Mars rests on the nature of humanity itself. You see, when we fantasize about colonizing Mars it’s because we’re moved by spirit of exploration innate to humanity, which makes everything totally fine! We can’t help but colonize Mars — it’s in our nature as intrepid pioneers.
This is very obviously bullshit as well. Once again, we’re offered a justification that’s nothing more than another variation on “colonialism is bad, BUT…” However, like with the “it’s okay because Mars is empty” argument, digging deeper can expose the ways that colonial thinking remains central to the premise of space exploration itself, and that’s very much worth doing if we want to meaningfully explore space in any other way. What is meant here when invoking “exploration” and its connection to the human spirit, and why does it make colonizing Mars an inevitability?
The exploration problem plagues almost all of space exploration. One of the most common justifications for crewed space exploration — that is, the act of sending humans to other planets — is that humans are “hard-wired to explore.” Exploration is “in our DNA,” which means we can’t be content with seeing the Solar System through the mechanical eyes of our satellites; we need to go ourselves. As a child dreaming of becoming an astronaut, I found this phrasing inspiring. Now I find it kind of weird, especially because I now have the tools to put the legacy of modern space exploration into its historical context.
Kennedy’s famous Moon speech cites George Mallory’s ill-fated 1924 Everest expedition, and his drive to climb Everest purely for the exploration of it — “because it is there.” This comparison is profoundly indicative of the colonial roots of the U.S.’s approach to space exploration. Mallory’s death as part of the second British expedition to Everest has long been cast as a heroic tragedy; however, it was also directly caused by the British Empire’s long-standing use of exploration to expand its power and prestige. After other races to reach extreme destinations, including the North and South Poles (which also resulted in numerous deaths), British attempts to summit Everest were presented as “conquering the third pole” in the form of the world’s highest point. That it was framed as a conquering is not an accident. The British were indeed climbing Everest because it was there, but also because doing so, and doing so first, was a moral victory that had real weight on an imperial stage.
These Everest expeditions had the weight of empire behind them; Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay’s eventual success in 1953 was made possible by the British Empire’s capacity to press not just its own men, but also Tibetan and Sherpa porters, into service. On Earth, who gets to do exploration, and which places are deemed exotic enough to explore (and thus conquer), is dictated by historical legacy; so too does who must, willingly or not, help those doing the exploration. The people who believed in risking their lives to climb mountains also believed in empire, and its attendant necessity to control the very porters and aids who helped keep them alive.
Everest and the surrounding Himalaya. Image via NASA.
As Everest illustrates, exploration and colonialism are intertwined. When Kennedy needed to galvanize the US public to support massive expenditures on rockets and astronauts, an existing mythology around exploration was waiting for him to use. Astronauts became heroes, and space became the final frontier. But when we consider current hopes about crewed space exploration in the context of Everest, it does raise the question: whose destiny is it to reach Mars and die a hero? Whose destiny is it to be on Mars to support those heroes, and die forgotten?
Because we have yet to fully unpack how the legacy of exploration is intwined with colonialism, “exploration” as an idea is often applied uncritically. This is how phrases like the “innate exploratory drive of humanity” easily become justification for doing colonialism as part of space exploration. The U.S. government has consistently used this language, not just through invoking Everest but also through drawing a direct connection between the Manifest Destiny that drove settlers West and a new destiny that drives Americans to the stars. It doesn’t matter that as a species we’ve already successfully landed on Mars ten times; there are multiple operating Mars rovers and seven active satellites in orbit from four different countries. All of this is insufficient in the face of the true exploration involved in colonizing Mars — the kind that invokes phrases like “boots on the ground” and “final frontier.” US Senate Subcommittee hearings have titles like “Destination Mars: Putting American Boots on the Surface of the Red Planet,” a harsh reminder that exploration-as-colonialism is rarely far from militarism. British control of India enabled their exploration of the Himalaya; US and Soviet control of missile and rocket technology enabled their access to space. When it comes to the future of humans on Mars, it’s worth asking: are we exploring Mars, or are we occupying it? A look back at our history seems like we can’t have one without the other.
While that interpretation of space exploration might sound depressing, I will remind you: this exploration logic is bullshit, and when you really think about it, it’s also extremely pessimistic about the nature of humanity. I do think humans are driven to explore! We’re naturally curious, and we love to learn new things; doing so is fundamental to every society ever made. It’s what keeps us alive. It’s deeply sad to take that trait and conflate it with a need to do exploration as part of a colonial project. Some might argue that colonization is also in our DNA, but I’m human, and I think it sure fucking isn’t. So why on Earth would I cede the future of space exploration to anyone who thinks it is?
A view from the Kimberly formation taken by NASA’s Curiosity rover. This image has also been white-balanced to simulate Earth conditions. Image via NASA.
Here’s the thing: we already know it’s possible to go someplace just to see it. People do it all the time; it’s why camping, rock climbing, hiking, and other hobbies are popular worldwide. It’s the entire ethos behind national parks (though, at least in the US, the establishment of national parks is also fraught with colonial legacy). Most people already intuitively understand what it means to love a place for its inherent beauty, not for what it could become if we built a mansion or a mine on top of it. There’s an alternative kind of exploring, one that cedes ownership of land in favor of sharing space with the trees and the wind and the earth itself. It’s a kind of exploring I hope to be able to do for the rest of my life.
Similarly, it’s always been possible to learn about the unknown without tearing it apart and taking what we want from it. Everything I’ve learned about Mars was first seen through robotic eyes, and what I learned is: I don’t have to be able to breathe on Mars to love it. If you cannot love or value Mars without landing on it yourself, or rewriting its very nature with terraforming, then you are a coward and a colonizer. Your opinions are bullshit, and none of us need to listen to you.
If you take one thing away from this piece, which has gotten far too long, I hope it’s this. Colonizing Mars is bullshit, because colonization as a concept is bullshit. It cannot be fixed. There is not a secret good version of colonization where it stops being bad with this one neat trick. The history of colonization is one of cruelty to people and land, and it should not happen again anywhere, including on Mars.
Maybe this makes you sad! Maybe letting go of the dream of terraforming Mars, mining Mars, or escaping all your earthly problems by living on Mars, makes you sad. That’s okay! This is growth. We cannot, as planetary scientists or space enthusiasts or a society, move forward with space exploration on the premise that colonization is the goal. If you truly love Mars, or the Moon, or just space itself, it’s time to let go of the idea that these places are tools to serve us. To colonize Mars is not to build a monument to human ingenuity, but a reminder of humanity at its most merciless. We have enough of those already.
Imagine the ways we can learn about and interact with Mars once we’re done wasting our time with the colonization argument! We’ve spent years trapped in a constant spiral of “what’s the best way to colonize Mars” and the answer to this is easy: there isn’t one! What’s hard is the next step: figuring out new ways to relate to Mars, and space exploration. What will we do if we’re not exploring with intent to own? What can we learn if we’re not limited to figuring out what we can exploit? The real human ingenuity, to me, is imagining something new. It’s very easy to imagine colonizing Mars, because there are many examples of what colonization looks like. It’s much harder to imagine something different, better, and altogether new. This is where the exploratory spirit of humanity can really thrive.
And remember: if someone tells you colonizing Mars is good actually, you have options: you can either send them this article and save yourself a lot of time, or just throw their phone into a lake. Change starts with you!
One last landscape from the Curiosity rover. Image via NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS.