Millennia ago, Polynesian explorers sailed across vast stretches of the Pacific Ocean to settle new lands. Around 1000 AD, the Norse crossed the North Atlantic and settled Newfoundland, paving the way for later European voyages to the Americas. Now, it’s our turn to risk life and spend billions traversing vast stretches of space to settle elsewhere.

Introduction to a New Frontier

Welcome to my blog, Gear & Gravity. I created G&G for a few reasons. Amongst them are because I’m a bored nerd who hasn’t used their brain for years and need something to do when I’m at work, not working. Considering this is my inaugural post, I think some introduction is in order. I want G&G to be mainly engineering focused. Engineering as in (but not limited to) rocket engines, high performance vehicles, artificial intelligence, far-future human societal development with robots and artificial brains. That kind of stuff. I have plans for a few different series, one of which is to do with the colonization of Mars, so I’ll begin with an introduction of why I think we should colonize the planet. For now, just a surface level analysis of my thoughts on the subject, as I plan to make this a series of extensive deep-dives.
While I’d love to dive straight into the architecture and engineering of a massive-scale colonization effort on Mars (which will be a long series of in-depth posts on this blog), it’s important to first ask: Why should we? I’d love to imagine that everyone reading this is a hardcore, engineering-at-all-costs, limit-pushing accelerationist, but some aren’t as easily convinced. For that reason, I propose some basic reasons why we should dedicate at least some of humanity’s collective intelligence to the goal of expansion. Colonizing Mars fulfills our compulsion for expansion, secures resources, and mitigates civilizational risk, which ensures humanity’s survival and prosperity. I’m sure it’s somewhat inevitable that we expand to the moon and Mars at least in an exploratory capacity, assuming such escapades are not killed by political strife or the end of civilization. However, I believe it is important that we make settlement and colonization a priority in the space exploration industry.

The Human Proliferation Compulsion

Throughout human history, we continually exhibit a compulsion to explore and expand. I call it the “human proliferation compulsion.” Even when there are no external pressures to leave our homes, we still climb the tallest mountains and dive the deepest depths, driven purely by innate curiosity. Pushing limits and surviving in extreme environments is the name of one of our favorite games. This tendency has some interesting byproducts in our interpersonal and international relations. Run into another lost hiker in the wilderness? You’re likely to help one another. An ocean liner is in distress? All vessels in the vicinity rush to help, regardless of international status. This manifestation of cooperation and unification is unique to humans when they’re “going somewhere or doing something in some vessel”. A colonization effort the scale that would be required to plant a seed of civilization on Mars would undoubtedly serve to unify many nations on Earth with a common goal, just as the International Space Station did. Though one may argue that once colonization efforts slow down, it’ll be back to business as usual (which consists of bickering over menial human politics). In my opinion, the scale required to cooperate on such a colonization effort would have trickle down effects throughout the entirety of human society and net positive effects.

Securing Resources for Growth

The love of the game isn’t the only reason we explore. Historically, peoples have been driven by sociological, environmental, and economic pressures. It’s well known that the Polynesians set sail partly due to resource and land scarcity, while European empires sought riches in South America and Africa. Similar socioeconomic pressures will eventually force us to look starward to sustain our ever-growing civilization. It may be hard to imagine a world where Earth runs out of nickel or one where bringing nickel back from Mars is economically viable. Yet, consider that many metals are already scarce, and with our exponentially growing economy, they will only become scarcer. For example, we are already experiencing a nickel shortage on Earth. 1.5 billion smartphones are produced each year, each one containing a battery, which requires nickel. Electric cars, stainless steel, and electronics production all rely on nickel. This is just one example of the countless minerals and metals we use to support industry on Earth that are abundant in space. As scarcity increases, the cost of resources will increase, and the drastic decrease in space launch costs will only continue. These are the first steps toward making extraterrestrial resource mining economically feasible. Eventually, it will cost less and be more environmentally friendly to retrieve resources from space than to mine them on Earth. Without drilling deep into the geology of Mars, it’s clear that the planet holds massive, civilization-sustaining potential. Resources such as ice, iron, titanium nickel, and countless others are known to be abundant on the planet. Additionally, Mars’ strategic position near the asteroid belt opens up possibilities for a virtually infinite supply of resources. I envision the mining industry on Mars returning raw resources from the belt, processing on-planet or in orbit, and then shipping them back to Earth for our uses here.

Mitigating Civilizational Risk

Now we talk about risk management. In the past, entire species have been wiped out by mass extinction events. Known history records five mass extinctions, all caused by purely natural events. In the modern world, the new Human God has the power to intentionally or unintentionally cause the extinction of intelligent life on Earth. Whether through nuclear war, genetically engineered bioweapons, ecological collapse, or any of the myriad other ways we could destroy ourselves, the chances of annihilation feel higher than ever. While at the time of writing, near-Earth asteroid 2024 YR4 has been calculated to no longer pose a significant threat, at one point its probability of impact exceeded 3%. It’s easy to imagine those odds rising instead, or a genetic bioweapon gone-wrong being “accidentally” unleashed on humanity.

Balancing Earth and Space

Many will ask, “Why not focus on preventing mass extinction on Earth instead of abandoning our home planet?” Well, nobody is saying we shouldn’t focus on prevention, except for a small sect of humans in the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement. I think we all share the same fundamental value: humanity should survive. I propose a different doctrine to those who argue we should only focus on prevention. We should maximize the probability of human civilization’s survival. This means mitigating extinction risks on Earth while simultaneously building redundancy into our civilization. You never know when Nibiru might emerge from behind the sun, satirically of course, and smash Earth into a billion little pieces. I have the utmost confidence in Bruce Willis and his crew to save the world, but in the off-chance that they fail, it would have been nice to set up shop on Mars. And yes, before this blog gets branded as anti-Moon propaganda, we should also be building there.

Looking Ahead

More to come on this subject in the form of a series of deep dives, architecting our invasion of the Red Planet. We’ll be looking into what the engineering of such a feat would (will) look like. What technologies will we use? What will we have to build? How many people will we need and how much money will billionaires have to shell out? How will we go to the toilet on Mars? All of these questions will be answered, and more.