Terraforming Mars means erasing the history of the red planet.

Mars is imposed throughout human history, our imagination filling its red sights with fantastic details long before our space missions even return rudimentary photos. At the time when our best observations of the red planet showed only a rusty disc spotted with dark spots, one wondered if these marks were natural features, or perhaps engineering projects? technologically advanced martians. Tribune published a headline titled "Mars, populated with a single thinking vegetable!", Accompanied by an illustration of a sparkling Mars, with a huge eyeball on a stem protruding into deep space.

Because we imagined Mars so long, it's easy to forget that the story of Mars is his. Past eras of the Red Planet have been written in the desert, hidden beneath plains dotted with creaky rocks, whose expanses are interrupted by brilliant silk dunes and imposing volcanoes. Modern research on Mars tells us that this landscape was once characterized by vast expanses of water, a warmer climate and a thicker atmosphere, but all have since been lost, leaving the cold, dry surface we see today . In some places, tire tracks mark the record of human exploration – at least by our robotic avatars, the rovers of Mars. While Mars is a "dead" planet in the sense that it has no significant geological activity and no known life forms today, it still has weather conditions (including the huge global dust storm that now surround NASA's rover Mars Opportunity). Unlike the moon, where the whole record of humanity's out-of-the-world adventures is written and unperturbed in the lunar dust, the winds of Mars will eventually wipe these tracks.

For potential Mars explorers, these barren plains are a tempting destination – but Why No matter who wants to go to Mars depends on who you ask. Some observe the immaculate landscapes and imagine that they can answer some of our most pressing questions about the origins and evolution of life in the universe: has life ever existed? in another world? Could it still exist under the Martian surface today? If Mars had life, how different (or not) of life can we find on Earth? And if life has never started there (or started, but failed to flourish) – why? The proximity of Mars and the (relative) ease of transposing Earth exploration tools to its rocky surface make it one of the best places to pose and answer these questions.

However, others see these Martian views as a blank slate, a drawing board on which to write a new story for both Mars and for humanity. Terraforming, or the idea of ​​radically transforming the environment of another world to be more welcoming to life, has long existed in science fiction and scientific literature. One of the most influential works on terraforming has bridged the gap between fiction and reality: scientist James Lovelock and Michael Allaby's 1984 novel, The Greening of Mars, have used science fiction to transform the red planet into literal pastures. Although the ideas for terraforming methods vary widely, the basic reasoning is that placing greenhouse gases (usually more carbon dioxide) in the planet's atmosphere could create enough heat and heat. atmospheric pressure. climb to a still habitable Mars. Today, the visions of a terraformed Mars come from the promotional videos of SpaceX: an animated Mars enters the future, its surface becomes green, the clouds float in its thickened atmosphere. Presumably, the water, oxygen and carbon dioxide involved in these images have been "released" by the inescapable child of terrible technology, Elon Musk, whose terraforming proposal consists of depositing thermonuclear weapons on the polar ice caps.

A global environment is not an empty pool that can simply be filled with a garden pipe.

Despite the hold of terraforming on the popular imagination, it remains firmly in the realm of fiction. On the one hand, Mars seems to lack the carbon dioxide reserves needed to inflate its atmosphere and warm it up in the first place. Recently, researchers have examined all known carbon dioxide inventories in the last decades of Mars research, concluding that even if all sources could be put into the atmosphere, it would produce only minute changes in atmospheric pressure. . In addition, the increase in temperature and pressure of the atmosphere means that the available water does not reabsorb immediately, but it will evaporate quickly and disappear into the air (immobile). Because the Martian atmosphere is incredibly dry, this water will never rain and will return to the ground, as our water does on Earth, and would remain rather sequestered in dry air (yet). While the authors admit that still unexploited carbonate deposits can still be used, making carbon dioxide available from these deposits would require global mining.

In short, a planetary environment is not an empty pool that can simply be filled with a watering hose and brought back to its previous function. This fact should not come as a surprise to anyone who pays attention to climate change, a global disaster made up of both inexorable changes in the livability of the Earth and the constant inability of governments and industry to act sufficiently urgently to preserve it. While we could debate the possibility of transforming the habitability of Mars, we have only proven experience of involuntarily change a planet to be Less hospitable to humanity and no practical idea of ​​how to do the opposite.

In many ways, the question of whether we could technically terraform Mars is beside the question – it's the way we ask them that tells us a lot about how we imagine ourselves in relation to the earth and the environment, especially those on Earth. After all, we do not need to go to Mars to find a blank border, or at least the idea of ​​a border – the concept of wild and untouched land is an integral part of the American myth. The wild landscapes were commemorated by the beautiful paintings and prose of naturalists like Thomas Cole and John Muir, and when the national parks were created for the first time in 19^e century, they were (and still are) seen as safeguarding something truly unique, precious and, yes, American, for generations to come. In 2017, when the Trump administration announced its intention to reduce the national monuments of Grand Staircase-Escalante and Bear Ears, there was a public outcry. At the same time, Utah's Republican Representative Jason Chaffetz introduced a bill in the House authorizing the sale of public lands in Utah. He was forced to withdraw the bill after wide immediate opposition.

But pure wilderness, like the invocation that the destiny of humanity is to leave the Earth, is an invention and a relatively recent creation. Although national parks are now beloved treasures, preserving them as intact wilderness has surprised the many Aboriginal nations that were active on these lands at the time. Because the idea that settlers had of nature was only the place where humans did not live, the preservation of these lands basically meant the withdrawal of the people who lived there – and because these settlers could not understand the humanity of indigenous peoples. people from their home countries drew the plans for forced relocation and assimilation, as well as the reservation system that persists today.

Advocates of humans living on Mars say that there is no ethical dilemma for Mars: no life seems to live there, and if so, it is probably just microbes. After all, we kill microbes all the time here on Earth. In fact, we destroy the microbes that could lead us into our spaceship and contaminate the environment of Mars. What are the few others? Even those who are forced to study Mars's own story sometimes argue that the transformation of the Martian environment is obvious, so we can do away with that as well. In this camp, there are researchers who avoid the word terraforming in favor of ecosynthesis, a term borrowed from the ecology of restoration on Earth, which means an intervention aimed at restoring an earlier disturbed environment. When "terraforming" implies that the planet will become more similar to our Earth (terra), ecosynthesis implies that the restoration of the previously thick atmosphere of Mars, even if it is unbreathable by man, is a moral imperative that the humanity can impose on all Martian life. One may wonder whether these so-called saviors of Mars would advocate a return to the primitive atmosphere of the Earth, before cyanobacteria provide the oxygen from which humanity breathes.

Does the value of an environment exist solely in relation to humanity or, more broadly, in relation to life? If so, what life? Should an environment be intended to be worthy of existence? If so, to whom? In the case of Harper this month, Mining Rosenblum and Samuel James's portrayal of copper mining in the southwestern United States argues that we behave as if the merit of the land was not than its use. James's photographs show a vast network of terraces of open-air mines torn from the desert, yawning like the mouth of hell. Open pit mines drool streams of turquoise toxic waste in some of the continent's most amazing spaces – is this environmental devastation the Silver Bell mine in Arizona, or a future terraforming operation on Mars?

Terraforming may seem like a particularly difficult engineering challenge, but in reality, it is an escape from the much harder task of confronting our past, present, and future here on Earth. When we invoke worlds like Mars as our new frontier, we erase the complex story of what borders mean here on Earth, as well as the legacy of the inequalities that continue today. We must recognize that the radical transformation of the earth – be it on this planet or beyond – is also the erasure of history, and in this erasure, we could give up something profound about Mars, as we do here on Earth.