The Mars Delusion
June 25, 2026 at 06:30PMIn a thought experiment, Henry Wismayer imagines what might happen if Elon Musk, wearing an “Occupy Mars” T-shirt, stepped out onto the surface of the Red Planet. Would he die first from asphyxiation, or something like a total bodily implosion? Either way, it would not be pretty. Wismayer writes a smart, wide-ranging piece for Noēma on the dream of colonizing Mars—the physics, the biology, the politics, and the psychological toll of life on an extraordinarily hostile and profoundly boring planet. It’s clear Wismayer had a lot of fun writing this piece, and it’s just as entertaining for us to read.
There will be tourism, and prestige luxury merchandise (Zubrin submits that the settlers might export artificial Martian diamonds tinted with a regolith hue). Perhaps they could sell the broadcast rights to low-gravity spectator sports like rover racing or something “comparable to the exhilarating Quidditch games” in Harry Potter; on Mars, Zubrin points out, “basketball players will be able to jump three times as high.” Eventually, the Red Planet will evolve into a galactic entrepôt, making and selling goods to the miners quarrying platinum ore in the asteroid belt located between Mars and Jupiter.
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2026/06/25/mars-human-colonization/
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