Share This article

Much the same drive that led genetics phenom Craig Venter to smash government-led efforts to hack the first genome now drives Elon Musk to beat NASA in hacking Mars. It has been one year since Musk laid out his plans for a million-man march to Mars, and now, he regales us with an even more fantastic vision — total thermonuclear transformation of Mars’ climate.

The truth is, there are very few bold ideas today that were not already hashed out in near exacting detail by the great ones of the nuclear age. This new play is taken right out of the manthropic bible itself, Engineer’s Dreams, written in the mid-fifties by Willy Ley. In this classic tale of optimism and confidence nukes were the tool, and the whole Earth was the nail. Controlled explosions could dam the Gibraltar, raise the Mediterranean, green the Sahara, bore channel tunnels, and redirect the jet stream.

Chatting last night on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, Musk revealed his own dream for inducing rapid climate change on Mars through massive polar explosions. This could potentially warm things up much faster than any long-range terraforming project yet imagined. That would make his pet Martian colonies a lot more attractive. But many rational minds might question the agenda of any century-scale effort whose goal is merely to sustain us in our current fragile biophysical form.

I mean think about it: Here you have a guy who on the one hand tells us how AI will evolve devilish prowess in mere decades, while on the other presumes we will not metamorphose a completely new techno-flesh right there along with it. For those too prim to come right out and say it, we will do it here: terraforming or climaforming is a dead-end space technology, a distraction for those who aspire to little more than souped-up hydroponics, or who are simply busy making other plans. The reason is simply that it is too slow.

Anyone with even a casual mathematical familiarity or otherwise intuitive grasp of complex physical systems has some appreciation that the evolution of stability takes time, if it is even ever achieved at all. Stock markets, predator-prey dynamics, and even entire biospheres all generally show extremely erratic behavior at their outset, but eventually settle into repetitive limit cycles or stable points as their internals adapt. The problem is that at planetary scales, even with nukes, terraforming is like designing a new Tesla with a lodestone compass where the fancy new GPS console should be — it will look ridiculous when you try to resell it.

A few well-placed nukes may inject some heat or alter radiative transfer. But unless you are willing to coexist with an ongoing barrage of nukes every time the climate doesn’t behave, you should probably steer clear of the Mars signup sheet.