Marketing Mars

Earthlings have been projecting hopes and fears onto Mars for a very long time. For millennia, humans have observed and ascribed meanings to the unsettling, rust-colored, wandering light in the sky. More than a century of popular storytelling and literary speculation, along with decades of scientific exploration, have produced myriad representations of our alluring neighbor. The most explored planet in the solar system after Earth, a slew of landers, robotic rovers and flyby missions have revealed neither Edgar Rice Burrough’s multi-limbed alien warriors nor a civilization based on irrigation canals. Instead, they have shown that our sibling planet is a freezing, irradiated, desolate desert world that has been in stasis for billions of years.

Longtime science fiction about humans on Mars is striving to become science fact. A new generation of aspiring colonial explorers is hyping the 2030s as the decade of first human landings and even initial settlement. We are increasingly being bombarded with the message that humanity can and should become multiplanetary by expanding to Mars. As our home planet’s ecological crises intensify in frequency and severity, this extreme vision is marketed as necessary, desirable, and inevitable.

For the first time since the Apollo program, which took the first humans to the Moon in 1969, momentum to get “boots on the ground” is underway. NASA, the European Space Agency, China and the United Arab Emirates are all pouring money into Mars missions. Space is no longer just the realm of nation-state rivalries. Billionaires infatuated with dreams of corporate expansion beyond Earth’s atmosphere are pushing the fantasy that humanity’s future is in space, from tourism in low orbit luxury hotels and the untold riches of asteroid mining, to sustained human presence on the Moon and the grand prize: Mars itself. The “dawning of the new space age” is here.

The view of Earth from space, captured by the Apollo 17 crew in the famous “Blue Marble” photograph, helped inspire a modern environmental movement that framed humanity as sharing a common fate on this miraculous oasis. How are images of Mars being wielded in our consciousness today? The cultural lenses projected onto Mars as a destination are as much about how we view our history, ourselves, and the commitment to Planet A in the face of looming Planet B. Whose imaginations are we inhabiting?

The age of astro-colonialism is upon us, but for all the fanfare and bravado, there is a lack of public discussion about the implications of what we might call our current interplanetary moment. Are the dreams of the Red Planet meant to divert and distract from the nightmares on the blue one?

In a time of accelerating extraterrestrial ambition and terrestrial catastrophe, it is vital to question how human relationships with the Red Planet are being actively shaped and sold. When we take the time to unpack the dominant narrative frames shaping US discourse about Mars, we find familiar mythologies geared up in space suits.

Frame #1 Species Survival: Planet B

I believe that the long term future of the human race must be space and that it represents an important life insurance for our future survival, as it could prevent the disappearance of humanity by colonising other planets.

—physicist Stephen Hawking

A common slogan seen on signs at climate protests around the world is: “There Is No Planet B.” This may seem self-evident to the millions concerned about mounting ecological threats, but it is the exact opposite of the dominant Mars narrative. To many of its advocates, Mars’ biggest selling point is that it is Planet B. For true believers, long-term, self-sustaining human settlement on Mars is not only possible within our lifetimes, it is an existential necessity for species survival.

This frame is echoed by pro-Mars advocacy groups, space and planetary science circles, and by commercial interests with a stake in surveying Mars. The prevailing narrative is that colonizing Mars is imperative; that the best chance for guaranteeing human survival is to cease being a “single planetary civilization.” In this framing, Earth is an unstable, imminent death trap, a ticking time bomb that (select) members of our species must escape. As early science fiction author Robert A. Heinlein warned, “The Earth is just too small and fragile a basket for the human race to keep all its eggs in.”

To be fair, the list of oft-cited extinction-level threats is long and terrifying. Obliteration by an asteroid, suffocating under the dust from a supervolcano eruption, and the usual panoply of human-engineered self-destruction: from runaway climate change to raging pandemics to that enduring 20th-century obsession, nuclear war.

With all these gathering horsemen of the apocalypse, we must prioritize safeguarding the “light of consciousness” off-world. This frame is infused with urgency, anxiety, and an aura of inevitability. Not if but when.

The most famous (and influential, thanks to his massive wealth) evangelist for the Planet B frame is, of course, Elon Musk. As he recently said on Joe Rogan’s popular podcast, “I think this is really a race against time. Can we make Mars self-sufficient before civilization has some sort of future fork in the road?” He described his “plans” for transporting a million humans and millions of tons of cargo to Mars over the coming decades. Science fiction author Cory Doctorow recently confessed, “Whenever I think about Musk, I feel some personal responsibility because there is a kind of cadre of tech billionaires who’ve read our dystopias and mistaken them for business plans.” Nevertheless, Musk’s capacity to manifest dystopian nonfiction is firmly established. Creative trolling examples abound, such as Activista’s Mars Sucks billboard outside of SpaceX for Earth Day, and a recent social media reply to Musk’s post declaring “Time to go to Mars” by Star Wars actor Mark Hamill: “You first.”

Central to this vision of Mars as a replacement for Earth is terraforming. A sci-fi staple, terraforming refers to the spectacular acts of planetary engineering that would transform Mars’s severely inhospitable environment to support human needs. Mars boosters tend to pull heavily from science fiction when describing highly speculative ideas, such as heating the planet’s surface with giant orbital solar reflectors, genetically engineering microbes that will create an atmosphere by converting CO2 to O2, or, as Musk often suggests, nuking the ice caps.

Needless to say, this confidence in the possibility of bending Mars to our will is not shared by many outside the proponents of Mars as Earth 2.0. Astronomer Lucianne Walkowicz has been an outspoken critic of the hubris of treating Mars as a backup planet. She points out that, “While we might debate the possibility of transforming the habitability of Mars, we have a demonstrated track record of unintentionally changing a planet to be less hospitable to humanity, and no practicable idea of how to do the reverse.”

Frame #2 Wild West Frontier 

I think it is every bit as vast and promising a frontier as the New World was some centuries ago.

—Sen. Ted Cruz, at “Destination Mars—Putting American Boots on the Surface of the Red Planet” hearing of the Subcommittee on Space, Science, and Competitiveness

By now, the image is commonplace: a space industry billionaire advertising his company’s latest achievement while popping champagne in low Earth orbit. The billionaires in question—Richard Branson (Virgin Galactic), Elon Musk (SpaceX) and Jeff Bezos (Blue Origin)—are somewhat interchangeable, particularly since they all wear the same cowboy hat. The choice of headgear by these “billionauts”—the term of art for billionaires with the personal wealth and ambition to publicly moonlight as astronauts—reinforces the core framing of Mars as the new Wild West horizon, a frontier that requires space cowboys to explore and conquer.

Mars colonization pitches imagine this new home, or “spome” (space home, a term coined by prolific “Golden Age” sci-fi writer Isaac Asimov), as a prospector’s paradise in the making and recreation of nostalgic versions of American frontier life. Settler colonial tropes are projected onto the screen of Mars as a terra nullius. Untrammeled, uncorrupted, and untamed, a pristine virgin wilderness that invites rapacious extraction, a red blank slate to reboot civilization.

The dominant scientific narrative in the United States space program parallels the American cultural narrative: what Linda Billings, NASA space communicator and space policy analyst, calls “frontier pioneering, continual progress, manifest destiny, free enterprise, rugged individualism, and a right to life without limits.” Amnesiac praise functions as if westward expansion was an uncomplicated narrative, not marked by tremendous violence, subjugation, and dispossession.

An enduring thread of space-settlement fantasy views Earth as needing the influence of a space frontier civilization to show us a tougher, freer, better way. Robert Zubrin, head of the Mars Society, declares in his manifesto, “The Significance of the Martian Frontier,” that humanity needs Mars because this new frontier will provide the next great stage of human development. A clean juxtaposition of alien Mars with the familiar frontier.

The promises multi-billionaires make for space outposts are steeped in centuries-old Eurocentric mythology, of enacting progress by moving to new lands and putting them to their proper use, celebrating expansion to a landscape allegedly devoid of humans, enabling a wildly creative frontier civilization, or providing huge economic advantages to whoever makes the first move.

In his second inaugural speech, Trump vowed to “pursue our Manifest Destiny into the stars, launching American astronauts to plant the stars and stripes on the planet Mars.” The unselfconscious language of settler colonialism justified as divine expansion is infecting outer space.

Asteroid mining has been touted for years as the “Gold Rush” of the millennium. Mining the Moon, Mars and asteroids for precious metals and minerals is the astro-capitalist fantasy of limitless, unregulated wealth to be earned in space.

Arthur C. Clarke, sci fi author of 2001: A Space Odyssey, asked of the drive to propel us up and out, “Will moral advances accompany the technologies that make spaceflight possible and allow us to escape our past, or will the future be characterized by the same opportunism and exploitation that defined European and American expansion?”

Frame #3 SPACE RACE

The space race playing out among billionaires like Branson, Bezos and Musk has little to do with science—it’s a PR-driven spectacle designed to distract us from the disasters capitalism is causing here on Earth.

—Paris Marx, author and tech critic

It is impossible to discuss humanity’s efforts to expand into space without the lens of national competition. With Sputnik serving as the permanent cultural reminder, dominating space has long been a proxy for geopolitical power. Our first robotic and human expeditions beyond Earth were ignited by Cold War rivalry, which unleashed a massive mobilization of government resources in the service of what was openly called “The Space Race.”

Although the Soviet Union is long gone, the Space Race frame continues to shape both public understanding and national policies. Trump’s nominee to lead NASA, billionaire pilot Jared Isaacman, who was the first private citizen to complete a spacewalk, has made this context explicit. After his nomination hearing, Isaacman posted on X, “I can promise you this: We will never again lose our ability to journey to the stars and never settle for second place.”

Meanwhile, China’s Mars plan, the Tianwen-3 mission, is a two-part Mars sample return mission scheduled for launch in late 2028, with return to Earth expected around 2031. Both NASA and China aim to build lunar bases with continuous human presence at the South Pole of the Moon in the 2030s. Tension over who will be first is intensifying.

This latest iteration of the Space Race is not the simple binary tale of Cold War rivalry; in fact, it is the latest player to join the fray, the private space industry, which is best poised to get people to Mars. This “new” space race is largely led by venture capitalist entrepreneurs, private companies and start-ups, catalyzing and controlling much of the mass momentum, with the oversized figures of Bezos, Musk, and Branson dominating the competition to fund and popularize space exploration and tourism.

The second astronaut to walk on the Moon, Buzz Aldrin, has urged the need to get past the “flags and footprints” blip. Touring the globe wearing a t-shirt saying “Get your ass to Mars”, he wants permanent habitation by 2039.

Cosmologist Aparna Venkatesan has called this phenomenon the “manufactured urgency” of space colonization, where the actions of state and private global interests are “driven by a perpetual anxiety to not be the last to arrive.”

Frame #4 EXPLORATION AND DISCOVERY 

Nothing seems to pique a spirit of wonder, curiosity, ambition and humility quite like space exploration and discovery. 

—Matthew Shindell, Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum curator

Uncritical references to the New World, Age of Discovery and Columbus thread through promotion of the social good of space exploration, of ships crossing the starry sea. The Mariner and Viking missions evoked historical voyages of discovery that brought Europeans to the shores of unknown worlds. As the long-awaited inaugural Mars landing takes place in the fictional For All Mankind TV series, an intercom voice announces, “In 1620, a ship called the Mayflower traveled across the Atlantic Ocean in search of a new world. Some came to escape their past, others to follow their dreams.”

NASA “Mars Explorers Wanted” poster series

Alongside a series of hip vintage style recruitment posters, NASA exclaims on its website: “Be A Martian! Mars needs YOU! In the future, Mars will need all kinds of explorers, farmers, surveyors, teachers . . . but most of all YOU! Join us on the Journey to Mars as we explore with robots and send humans there one day. Be an explorer!”

Fifty-five years after the legendary Apollo generation, named for the Greek god riding his chariot across the sun, NASA has branded its next “Moon to Mars” era as “The Artemis Generation,” the lunar goddess and twin sister to Apollo. Setting up the first long-term human presence on the Moon as a steppingstone to Mars promises the ability to find water and fuel, to expand the logistics supply chain to enable resupply and refueling of deep space outposts.

In the promotional video “Why the Moon,” narrator Drew Barrymore (who not coincidentally had her screen debut in the 1982 movie E.T.) and NASA team members explain why returning to the Moon is the natural next step, and how the lessons learned from Artemis will pave the way to Mars and beyond, infused with a tone of upbeat certainty and excitement. “We are going.” “Science fiction turned reality.” “Our success will change the world.” “We are preparing for Mars.”

At the root of much of the Mars narrative are assumptions that equate exploration with progress and unquestioned good. A belief that the fundamental urge to explore is a defining, inherent human trait and innate drive.

Historically, the “Age of Discovery” inaugurated centuries of violent colonial exploitation of human life, labor, and the more-than-human world. Ferrying millions of tons of cargo may be an easier feat than reckoning with the weight of supremacist cultural baggage.

Mars is the only planet we know that is entirely inhabited by robots. Scientific motivators for sending humans to Mars in the near future assert that researchers on the planet will be more adaptable and efficient than rovers, capable of accomplishing more in less time. The Martian surface is “all past” as its time stands still, without plate tectonics or large-scale recycling of rocks. Planetary science professor Sarah Stewart Johnson describes, “The place we are visiting with spacecraft is almost the same world as it was 3 billion years ago … Perhaps echoes of the beginning of life, entombed deep in the planet’s ancient rocks.”

Mars has been an obsession for celestial cartographers for more than 150 years, starting as a tool to argue that Mars was inhabited. Famously, Percival Lowell’s maps bolstered a theory of intelligent life with a complex irrigation canal system and vegetation. Whereas the first maps assumed an existing populace, the newest generation of maps invite a populace. Anthropologist Lisa Messeri, in her study of “Mapping Mars in Silicon Valley,” notes, “The goal for today’s maps is not about alien habitation but to establish Mars as inviting to human explorers … to establish Mars as a destination, the ‘awaiting Red Planet.’”

Frame #5 TRANSCENDENCE

Not even the sky is a limit.

—TikTok star Kellie Gerardi on the Virgin livestream during the 2021 Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin space launches

A 2015 Newsweek article posed the question, “Is Mars the escape hatch for the 1%?” A decade later, the fact that billonauts are among our loudest advocates for Mars suggests the answer is yes.

The fourth planet from the Sun is represented as a destination of freedom: from regulations, societal and terrestrial constraints, and the biological limits of the Earth itself. For years, critics have voiced concerns that billionaires’ space investments enable an escape from the climate chaos that the economic system, which enriched them, continues to fuel here.

Many of the most persistent voices for Mars colonization are philosophically libertarian. Earth is too bureaucratic, too rule-bound and oppressive, with its laws of gravity and government—an insult to the lofty evolutionary heights that necessitate pulling up anchor. There is nothing holding tech titans back on Mars, except for the issue that space is constantly trying to kill you, necessitating every type of technologically assisted tether to keep you alive.

Space colonization, like its parallel ascension fantasy, the Christian Rapture, has long involved a tension between the liberation of a chosen vanguard and the imminent destruction of the Earth, viewed as undesirable or doomed. Journalist Naomi Klein draws attention to ways that the blaring space dreams of the wealthiest men on Earth function as secularized Bible stories: “The most powerful people in the world are preparing for the end of the world, an end they themselves are frenetically accelerating.”

This framing of Mars aligns it with a broader cultural narrative of salvation through technology. Colonizing Mars fits neatly alongside transhumanist visions of transcending the limitations of human bodies, of “hacking death” through cryopreservation immortality, and “longtermist” views of a future when humans become digital intelligence that colonize the universe, thus preserving existence for billions of years. Journalist Gil Duran distilled this emergent Silicon Valley cult religion on a recent episode of his The Nerd Reich podcast as, “Replace the soul with code, heaven with Mars, and Jesus with billionaire saviors.”

What Is Outside The Frame

The old science-fiction dreams … are just a moral hazard that creates the illusion we can wreck Earth and still be okay. It’s totally not true.

—Kim Stanley Robinson, author of the Mars trilogy

Taking these five frames together, we see the overlapping collage of the Mars sales pitch. A multiplanetary future for humanity is presented as necessary not only for our survival but as the vision that will innovate our industries, rekindle our adventurous pioneer spirit, and ultimately liberate (some of) us from being Earth-bound.

What is rendered obscure, marginal, or invisible by these visions? What inconvenient facts left outside the frame might subvert the overly convenient narrative contained within?

Much of the framing outlined above has left out a very significant factor: reality.

Dynamic duo Kelly and Zach Weinersmith, in their new popular science opus A City on Mars: Can We Settle Space, Should We Settle Space, and Have We Really Thought This Through?, delve into well-researched, sobering detail about every aspect of life in space, including what they describe as the profound “suckitude” of space for human physiology. There is no systematic, generational research on how space impacts medical conditions or the viability of reproduction. Just one example of the incompatibility of space for our Earth-evolved bodies is the stunning rate at which astronauts lose bone density. Dying in novel ways is also outside the frame.

Outside the frame is the perennial question of funding these expeditions, from the time of Rev. Abernathy’s critiques of the Apollo moon landing expenditure, which found expression in Gil Scott-Heron’s iconic song, “Whitey on the Moon.” What is the moral calculus that justifies prioritizing a multi-trillion-dollar otherworldly project in the name of abstract “human progress” in the face of immeasurable human suffering?

Assume enough people do make it to Mars to begin the terraforming that Occupy Mars folks love to conjure. Among the wave of scientific revelations about Mars is the discovery that the Martian surface is covered with perchlorate, a poisonous, corrosive dust that is lethal to humans to breathe in the parts per billion range.

No less a Mars zeitgeist-shaper than Kim Stanley Robinson, author of the seminal 1990s sci-fi Mars trilogy, which provided a foundational terraforming template, admits that the perchlorate discovery massively increases the difficulty of any hypothetical future. More fundamentally, Robinson raises the question of whether pursuing such unlikely outcomes as making Mars habitable is worth the effort when Earth civilization is currently destroying its own homeworld’s biosphere. Unlike the Planet B crowd, he strongly believes that Mars is “irrelevant” if Earth is doomed.

Which brings us to, perhaps, the most all-encompassing absence from the Mars sales pitch: Earth itself. Outside the frame is our profound interdependence with our terrestrial home and the astounding wild diversity of life forms who, like us, have been born in the embrace of our gravitational field. Space colonies will not save the millions of species at risk of extinction. The threat to biodiversity is one of the ecocidal consequences of an economic system driven by limitless growth. This ideology is exactly what has given us the very billionaires who seek to expand this worldview, unaltered, into space. Why would we believe it is possible to build resource-intensive life support systems on Mars when we haven’t been able to stop the rapid decline of life support systems on Earth?

As Carl Sagan poignantly expressed, “What shall we do with Mars? There are so many examples of human misuse of the Earth that even phrasing this question chills me.”

Touch Grass

Humanity needed a moon landing to realise that the much more exciting thing is the earth itself—but landing on it is not so easy.

—Bruno Latour, philosopher and anthropologist of science and technology

“Grass by the Home” is a 1980s song beloved by Russian cosmonauts, which became famous when it was performed by the band Zemlyane (translated to “Earthlings”). Elevated to the status of official anthem by the Russian Space Agency Roscosmos, the lyrics sing: “We dream not about the roar of the spaceport/Not about this icy blue space/We dream of grass, grass by the home/Green, green grass.” “Touch grass” as a current meme implies that someone needs to reconnect with reality, get offline, and venture into the world outside.

The song’s sentiment was shared by some members of both Soviet and American crews, as Apollo astronaut Bill Anders reflected, “Here we came all this way to the Moon, and yet the most significant thing we’re seeing is our own home planet, the Earth.” Similarly, exoplanet researchers, who have catalogued thousands of planets searching for those in the habitable “Goldilocks Zone,” express a common refrain that “home is the most interesting thing.” As author Jaime Green describes, “The more you look for planets like Earth, the more you appreciate our own planet itself.”

Indeed, many who have traveled to space have had transformative experiences of awe, of looking back and being struck by the view of the Earth, a phenomenon known as the “Overview Effect.” Ninety-year-old William Shatner, known to millions as Captain Kirk from Star Trek, had an Overview Effect experience during his 2021 Blue Origin trip, gazing at Earth from the starry beyond. As he beheld the staggering biodiversity that took billions of years to evolve being destroyed, the fragility of our life-containing atmosphere, the nurturing warmth of our home in the “vicious coldness of space,” he was overcome with immense grief: “My trip to space was supposed to be a celebration; instead it felt like a funeral.”

Here is revealed the true sleight of hand of the Mars pitch at this moment in history. We are encouraged to believe that human ingenuity and industry can turn uninhabitable Mars into a habitable Earth. This fantasy is a distraction from the reality that Earth is being rapidly turned into Mars.