Mars! We have to colonize it, as a home-away-from-home in case something happens to make Earth uninhabitable? People talk excitedly about being there first, even at the expense of making a one-way trip. People don't seem to be thinking about this clearly.
I’ve been writing a little science fiction between job offers, so I’m not exactly a Luddite technology hater, but let’s (meaning anyone who sees this in spite of Twitter’s ban on Substack links) think about this for a minute.
Mars is dead, and deadly. Whereas Earth is larger, and probably has two cores keeping its protective magnetic field working, Mars' core has long since cooled. Mars has no global magnetic field, and has been blasted by barely attenuated Solar wind for billions of years. It's mostly CO2 atmosphere has been stripped to a density equivalent to Earth's at about 100,000 feet.
Colonists, if they survive months of microgravity and radiation, and can still walk, and haven't become mass murdering, psychopathic cannibals in the close confinement of the trip out, will have to live underground. Lava tube hotels? Hydroponic crops (potatoes?) in low light and only slightly mitigated ionizing radiation from the Sun? Think about supermax prison, with limited oxygen, and recycled food and water—millions of miles from home, with absolutely no hope of escape.
Some will get to go outside between Solar storms, and do a little science in the dead, blasted landscape. We’ve all seen the pictures—a geologist’s paradise, to be sure. Others will likely come to wish they had stayed at home, and taken their chances with climate change.