Elsevier

Futures

Volume 117, March 2020, 102514
Futures

Essays
Visions of a Martian future

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.futures.2020.102514Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Human future missions to Mars will affect human social, cultural and ethical life.

  • The study of future space missions should include broad interdisciplinary approach.

  • Human space colony may challenge our psychology and morality.

Abstract

As we look beyond our terrestrial boundary to a multi-planetary future for humankind, it becomes paramount to anticipate the challenges of various human factors on the most likely scenario for this future: permanent human settlement of Mars. Even if technical hurdles are circumvented to provide adequate resources for basic physiological and psychological needs, Homo sapiens will not survive on an alien planet if a dysfunctional psyche prohibits the utilization of these resources. No matter how far we soar into the stars, our psychologies for future generations will be forever tethered to the totality of our surroundings. By shaping our environment toward survival and welfare during the voyage to Mars and in a Martian colony, we indirectly shape our psyches and prepare them for a mission of unprecedented alienation and duration. Once on Mars, human factors such as leadership structure, social organization and code of conduct, group size, gender balance, developmental cycle, mobility, length of stay and the ecological settings and type and manner of subsistence, will create a novel Martian culture. The degree that settlers are severed from the Earth will affect how radically foreign this culture will be when compared with cultures on Earth.

Introduction

The recent expansion in number of privately funded space programs has galvanized the public’s desire for space exploration that will fulfill the vision of a multi-planetary future for humanity. Ambitious plans of creating the first human settlement on Mars are frequently presented as the next proverbial giant leap for humankind (Szocik, Lysenko-Ryba, Banaś, & Mazur, 2016). Mars One, a proposed one-way mission to Mars to establish the first human settlement, has been the topic of much public attention. SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has recently communicated his vision for humans as a multi-planetary species (Musk, 2017). Rationales for such a mission are not obvious, especially when contrasted with the financial burdens and political determinants (Szocik, 2019). One additional issue is also the long-standing debate between the value of human versus robotic missions (Szocik & Tachibana, 2019). However, the underlying question of whether or not to go to Mars no longer seems germane given the current serious plans of some space agencies and innate human desire for exploration. Despite some overly optimistic predictions and perhaps willful ignorance of possible obstacles, the critical questions now concern when and how humans will begin their odyssey to the Red planet.

In this paper, we will discuss significant challenges facing currently planned human missions to Mars. Among the most obvious are medical and technological challenges, which are a prelude to more complex ethical, social, anthropological, and evolutionary challenges. We propose that the human factor on a mission to Mars is simultaneously both the most integral and most vulnerable aspect of that planned enterprise. We refer not only to human biological and physiological vulnerability but also to the broad set of factors that encompass human mental, social, ethical, and political life. We discuss selected issues that should be taken into account by every planner of a mission to Mars who conceives of such a mission as a long-term enterprise or even a future settlement for humans beyond Earth.

Our multidisciplinary paper is aimed at analysis of selected aspects of the human factor in space, which may also include human cultural creativity, ethical codes, and religious beliefs. Given the history of religion on planet Earth, we believe that any founding social structure or government should be secular in nature, but, at the same time, allow for a wide spectrum of religious expression among colonists. We believe that it is worth considering these issues as a multi-planetary human species may provide a blueprint comprising living records of cultural and biological evolution from Earth to the outer planets. We surmise that upon the establishment of a Martian society, humans will organize their lives following schemas both derived from evolution of cultural forms on Earth, but adapted to create new schemas for meeting the challenges of life on Mars. While our paper is far from a comprehensive analysis, we believe that our considerations will add value to future studies regarding the possible challenges and consequences of efforts to transform humanity into a multi-planetary species, However, we are not aligned with the approach described by Richard Tutton as “multiplanetary imaginary” (Tutton, 2018). Whereas Tutton’s term describes a utopian projection of desired future reality, our paper focuses on identifying and analyzing various challenges associated with the human factor in space and on planets and moons of the solar system, using extrapolations from human history on Earth.

Section snippets

Destination Mars

There are numerous reasons why humans should wish to visit and potentially settle on Mars. This includes satisfying the innate human desire to explore, through to the perceived need to preserve humanity from existential catastrophe on Earth, be it natural or man-made or a hybrid of the two. Earth has faced numerous catastrophes which include mass extinctions and yet there still may be difficulties regarding political justification for the enormous investment needed to fund a space refuge (

Environmental ethics for Mars exploration

The ethics regarding human settlement of Mars may differ according to whether it is inhabited or not and we summarise our thinking in Fig. 1. We propose the development of an international Earth Charter consisting of overriding principles developed and communicated prior to the commencement of settlement activities. If there is already life on Mars, our proposed charter would mandate us to identify and catalogue species, understand the potential risk posed to colonists such as infection if

Can deep altruism sustain space settlement?1

To achieve the transition from an earthly species to a multi-planetary one, humankind must cope with a purely earthly, cooperative challenge. The establishment of a permanent human settlement on Mars will require unprecedented cooperation and coordination by successive generations over deep time. This is especially true if the dream of terraforming Mars is undertaken, as the process must be carefully controlled over centuries and maintained in perpetuity. We note that terraforming is a popular

The challenge of the study of the human factor in a mission to mars

The study of human space exploration, primarily when referring to planned but yet-to-be realized missions, entails an obvious methodological challenge. One of the basic tools that is used in this field is study by analogy. By analogy we refer here to particular conceptual tools, methodologies, and fields of knowledge applied to a partially unknown space environment. That partial lack of knowledge is the “tragedy” of space scientists. On the one hand, we possess knowledge based on the time

Martian environmental psychology: the choice architecture of a mars mission and colony

The first voyagers who venture to Mars and seek to live on soil beyond our terrestrial home will face an environment mismatched with the one in which their genomes, epigenomes, and psyches evolved. Environmental psychology can be employed to shape the choice architecture of a vessel to Mars and a colony upon it, in order to bias choices toward the fulfillment of fundamental existential, relationship, safety, and fitness needs. Aspects of surroundings that could be engineered to create

Living on Mars: when we become aliens2

In the context of current human achievements in space-exploration programs, and our current technological limitations, the concept of societies living on Mars sounds like science fiction. We spend our lives pinned to planet Earth. In half a century of human space flight, fewer than 600 people have been to low Earth orbit, and just 12 have stood on the surface of another world. The cost and difficulty of extracting humans from gravity’s grip seem to have put dreams of living off-Earth on ice.

Yet

Conceiving religion in an extra-planetary environment: some dilemmas and paths

Our last scenario in regard to future human Mars missions refers to one of the most influential issues in the framework of biological and cultural evolution: religion. Religious scholars understand “religion” as a set of beliefs and practices aimed at maintaining a horizon of transcendence or a reality dimension beyond the current physical one. Trying to conceive of a religious dimension in a very remote and unpredictable environment invites reflection at multiple levels and raises serious

Conclusions

We seek here to demonstrate that the human factor on a mission to Mars goes beyond medical challenges and technological limitations. Those are obviously very difficult, and we may hypothesize that they will affect deep-space missions at all stages. However, the human factor in a Mars mission appears at the very beginning of the enterprise, in human nature here on Earth, when we ask why we should settle Mars, and when we consider the best ways of appropriately preparing future Mars settlers.

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