I have intermittently followed Elon Musk’s Mars project, but not because I think it will succeed. It will fail due to the distances involved, the near-vacuum of the Martian atmosphere, the difficulty of sustaining human breeding stock in a high-radiation environment, and the gravity any colonizing expedition would have to overcome to leave Earth in the first place.
To have a chance, Musk needs:
Lots and lots of big rockets. More than he’s got.
A ship that will keep human beings undamaged by cosmic and solar radiation during their journey through interplanetary space.
Tools and energy sources to make the Martian environment safe for humans. A small fusion reactor powering one of Musk’s tunneling machines would be a start.
People willing to sign up for a one-way trip.
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I grew up reading science fiction. I devoured Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Mars novels, in which the protagonist, John Carter, is instantly transported to Mars through a portal in an Arizona cave. I read Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land, wherein a human child raised by Martians is brought to earth and becomes, in his innocence, a new messiah. I read Ray Bradbury’s Martian Chronicles, where humans get to Mars and destroy its dying civilization and witness, through telescopes, an atomic war on earth. I read Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke and Philip K. Dick, all of whom wrote fiction in which the logistics of space travel had been solved by human ingenuity, but human pathologies were as ugly and unsolvable as ever.
So fusion reactors were possible. Exceeding the speed of light was possible. And asteroid mining. Space elevators—vertical funicular railroads twenty-five thousand miles long. Cities in orbit. Dyson spheres harvesting all the energy radiated by their stars. Galactic empires. Cultural conflict with aliens. Sex with aliens. Revenge sex with aliens.
Personal star ships. I wanted one.
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Without a radical revision of the laws of physics, none of these are possible. We’ve revised the laws of physics before, of course, and it may be that Elon Musk is counting on a further revision to get humans to Mars. Quantum transport is a phrase that rolls off the tongue, but I just made it up, and I’m afraid it’ll only get you from one side of a nanometer to the other.
Even if this universe is a computer simulation, as some cosmologists have suggested, it’s a simulation that includes the laws of thermodynamics and impossible-to-travel distances.
As for the creature or creatures that might have created that simulation, maybe they’re trying to find out what happens when you put beings of unlimited imagination in a limited arena, with finite resources and finite lifespans, and let them go at it. It’s a jolly what-if experiment, or a cruel joke on the lab rats, or an attempt to recreate the conditions that lead to the creation of the simulation that the creators themselves are stuck in.
If you have unlimited wealth, it’s tempting to believe anything is possible. But unless Elon Musk can figure out a way to reprogram our reality, he won’t get to Mars. Neither will his employees. No matter how many people would volunteer to go, no matter how detailed the plans and how ingenious the machines packed into those ships, Mars won’t be a hedge against extinction. At best, humans will be tourists there.
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Which reminds me: tourist season is nearing its end in Sawtooth Valley, and the number of cars and trucks on the highway no longer remind us of panic-stricken refugee migrations. Million-dollar motorhomes no longer speed by the house at 70 mph, towing tricked-out Jeep Wranglers or Ford Broncos. Paddleboards, mountain bikes, kayaks, four-wheelers, and motorcycles no longer ride in trailers behind big diesel pickups. Fishing and hiking costumes aren’t as common on the streets of Stanley as they were in July.
Sawtooth Valley isn’t Mars, but some of the same impulses that have motivated Elon Musk to plan a Mars colony motivates our summer visitors. Motorhomes and RVs become self-contained modules, allowing survival in a hostile environment. Specialized equipment for extravehicular activity becomes an obsession. Shops for camping, bicycling, and fishing gear exist if anything’s been forgotten, but things are seldom forgotten, because trips to Cabela’s and REI are part of the preparation, and preparation is part of the narrative, and a good story, it seems to me, is what people are after when they decide to visit Sawtooth Valley.
It’s expensive, but narrative has always been expensive. And in a world where sport clothing is made in Bangladeshi factories, where diesel engines power motorhomes the size of city buses, where a year’s depreciation on the vehicles that go by our house could buy a year’s food for a drought-crippled African country, it’s possible to believe that the best narratives still require human sacrifice.
The end of summer leaves me feeling like one of Bradbury’s or Heinlein’s fading Martians, watching Earthlings clamber through our ruins. They pull their trailers onto meadows that once held a neighbor’s cows, fish for planted rainbow trout on riffles once full of spawning salmon, drive 4-wheelers and motorcycles on once-quiet forest trails, wear sidearms while waiting in line for breakfast at the Stanley Bakery. Some of the locals have long called our tourists pilgrims, but there’s no religious impulse in the tourist heart. Instead, they see themselves as colonists, at least for the length of their vacations.
The first few snow squalls coming over the peaks will close the Bakery and most of the other restaurants. The highways will empty. A million people come through the valley every summer, but it doesn’t seem like it because they all go home when their time off is over.
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Only during the pre-vaccine pandemic did we have people who looked like they would stay, as people fleeing Covid sought refuge from a microbe whose lethality, contagiousness, and duration were unknown. Those visitors carved out campsites where no campsites had been before, hid their trailers in nooks and hollows and behind stands of lodgepole, and showed up every day for Wi-Fi in the parking lot at the Stanley Library. Some of them were distance workers, and they planned to stay the winter. They all left before it got really cold.
We did gain some insight into the survival instincts of people like Elon Musk, who must have looked at the hundred million miles of space between here and Mars and decided it would be a suitable barrier to climate refugees and atomic missiles and plagues. When he says he’ll be one of the colonists, I believe him, and I also believe him when he repeats the Biblical idea that a small remnant of humanity will survive the wrath of God or mutant Covid or climate chaos or nuclear war.
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I liked the idea of going to Mars, once. I wanted to climb Olympus Mons, raft down Valles Marineris as soon as terraforming allowed for liquid water on the surface, explore the deep caves whose entrances have been mapped by Mars orbiters. I imagined being an enthusiastic citizen of the kind of community you can have under a dome, where everybody has a job and a purpose, and malcontents and criminals are just pushed out the airlock. I would have tended the fusion reactor or the hydroponic farms or the water recycling plant, would have volunteered for committees and workshops, and gone outside the dome to repair micrometeorite impacts.
But then I turned sixteen.
I realized that under a dome, even a big one, claustrophobia might become a problem. In Arizona, the Biosphere II mission, an attempt to develop a sealed, self-sustaining biological system, developed problems with its atmosphere and was opened to the outside before anyone died.
Also, my fellow humans began to appear unfit for utopian visions. The problem with a Mars colony won’t be getting a tunnel-boring machine up there, or making a reactor work, or clearing sand from the solar panels, or neutralizing the perchlorates in the raised-bed gardens. It will be people killing the people with whom they compete for resources. Same as here on Earth.
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In spite of these issues, I’m hoping that Elon Musk never gives up on Mars. Pundits have speculated that his genius stems from an adolescent unwillingness to accept limits, an inability to adapt to the rules and regulations of everyday life, and a refusal to put away childish things. Hence Mars. Hence tunneling machines. Hence a secret place where nobody can bother you. Hence the decision to buy Twitter and toss it against the wall a few times to see if it will break.
But time has a way of forcing even billionaires to accept reality. And if Musk ever visits Sawtooth Valley, he’ll see it’s a place surrounded by walls of mountains that let you control who comes in and who goes out. It’s got plenty of places to explore, and a breathable atmosphere. The water is plentiful and non-poisonous. The climate isn’t lethally cold. The sunshine isn’t lethally ultraviolet. You can use wood instead of fusion for heat. It doesn’t grow much food, but that can be fixed with geothermal greenhouses. It wouldn’t take much to build bomb shelters for a small remnant population.
In time, it could be the location of a nostalgic little town, straight out of a Ray Bradbury book, with a malt shop and a corner store and a haberdasher, and a boy riding his bike down a tree-lined sidewalk with a dog running beside him, a girl peeking from behind a curtained window, and a smiling librarian locking the library for the day and waving as he rides by.
You can see how that sort of thing might capture a boy’s imagination.
I’m afraid that Elon Musk will look at Sawtooth Valley not just as a tourist, but as a billionaire tourist. He will see a place of refuge similar to the one he’s thinking of constructing on Mars, but one a lot cheaper and more easily realized. It will fit his narrative of human survival, of defensibility, of sustainability in an unsustainable world. An outpost. A colony. A simulation. An endless vacation.
The non-billionaire tourists will have to be stopped, of course, before they spoil everything. You can do that with checkpoints and drawbridges and light artillery. The locals will have to be vetted to make sure they fit the narrative. There will be rules to obey—just because Musk thinks the rules don’t apply to him doesn’t mean they don’t apply to other people. Locals will need to wear name tags and wear appropriately rugged clothes.
They’ll have to be okay with the bloodbath going on outside the walls, but it’s not like they’ll have a choice.
There’s a good chance that Elon Musk will buy the valley if he sees it, and he’ll customize it to fit his story. I don’t think Julie and I will be allowed to stay.