The idea of terraforming—i.e. artificially revamping an entire alien planet to recreate on it the optimal conditions for human habitation—isn’t exactly new. The term was coined by science-fiction writer Jack Williamson in his 1942 short story Collision Orbit. The first scientific account of the concept was written by astronomer Carl Sagan in a 1961 article published in Science Magazine.
By 2022, in the age of the literal takeoff of private space enterprise, the terraformation concept enjoys more popularity than ever before. From senior scientists and engineers to random bloggers like myself, increasing numbers of people seem to be taking an interest in it.
Being the one planet in our solar system that most closely resembles Earth, Mars has naturally become the obvious target for the concept’s theoretical application. However, it most closely resembling Earth does not mean that it is anywhere nearly similar to it and thus readily susceptible to transformation. Far from it…
Lack of oxygen and pressure on the Martian surface would kill a non-artificially-sustained human in minutes; freezing temperatures in hours; dust storms in days; toxic soil in weeks; radiation in months; low gravity in years… These are only some of the predictable hazards of the Martian environment to terrestrial life.
All proposed plans to terraform Mars of course start with addressing the most critical for our survival issue: the lack of atmosphere. Featuring things such as gigantic mirrors in orbit or nuclear missiles, they heat the planet up, cause its ice cap to melt to create an ocean and release CO2, let the greenhouse effect warm the planet further, and eventually introduce terrestrial plants to begin generating oxygen…
And then they still have to do something about the lack of magnetic field, lower gravity, and myriad other problems we do or don’t yet know of…
But however fascinating they may be, my intention here is not to discuss prospective solutions to such problems. And that’s not because I have the slightest doubt that all this will someday become technically possible. But rather because I think it will ultimately prove unnecessary.
Quite frankly, all this terraforming business sounds to me a bit preposterous; kinda like buying a new car because you got a flat tire; or buying a new house with a larger door because the discarded couch you found on the street does not fit through your current house’s door.
The human body is a machine that evolved for survival under the precise conditions on planet Earth during the last couple of million years. Would you want to send a cat to explore the Moon rather than a rover designed for this exact purpose? Why would you then want to send an Earthling to Mars in the first place rather than designing a Martian?
That surely seems a much more straightforward approach. Biological evolution, even at its tormentingly slow pace by natural selection, has proven to adapt readily to environmental changes. When we fully decipher life’s programming language and become able to edit it at will—which quite positively is going to happen long before we become capable of transforming entire planets—we may as well design custom bodies mechanically optimized for survival on Mars.
Many current people, even among the ones who comprehend the feasibility of such an undertaking, may argue that this approach is defeating the purpose since it won’t anymore be we who inhabit Mars. But here again, we must redefine who we are. And it’s already becoming clear that much more than flesh we are consciousness. As long as I can keep calling myself I, I am no less myself in an alien—or a virtual for that matter—body than I am within my current primate one.
Far more spectacularly than overcoming God during the Renaissance, our next great renaissance is bound to take place when we transcend our very selves. If we are to explore the universe, we’ll have to begin with relinquishing our humanness.
