Is Mars Ours?

Should we treat other
planets like natural resources or national parks?

By Adam Mann

May 11,
2021

In April, nasa’s Perseverance rover
took a selfie on Mars. Discussions abound about what an ethical human presence
on the red planet might look like.Photograph from NASA /
Shutterstock

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.”

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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.

Adam Mann is a freelance space and physics reporter
whose writing has appeared in National Geographic, Scientific American, and
Wired. He lives in Oakland, California.