Do you think humans will ever colonize Mars? What would life there actually look like?

Even if we have the technology to colonise Mars, we shouldn’t. Colonisation would lead to a planetary catastrophe; let’s confront the ecological crisis on Earth, and implement solutions which will improve and prolong the life of our species, and all the other life forms on Earth, that make up our biosphere.

The impulse to colonise Mars originates from legitimate concerns. Human induced climate change, the extinction of numerous species and their habitats, and the discovery of the interconnectedness of life on Earth makes us wonder if it would not be better to simply relocate to another planet to continue our existence as Homo sapiens.

Those concerns are perfectly valid – the proposed solution is an even more catastrophic response, based on cultural pessimism. Mars is an appealing candidate for terraforming – the latter being the buzzword for changing the inhospitable conditions on Mars to make them accommodating for human life. This presents an immediate question; if we can reshape Mars to look more like Earth, then why cannot we change our economic and ecological practices on our current planet to make it more like Earth?

In this connection, I would like to share a comment by an Australian federal politician from 2025, which succinctly encapsulates why the mentality of colonisation would inevitably lead to disaster. Do not get me wrong, I do not normally follow the statements of Australian politicians. They are largely a spineless, snivelling opportunistic lot. But occasionally they make comments which indicate their depraved, demoralised and cowardly ideology.

Sussan Ley, who was apparently the nonentity leading a political party of equally insignificant nonentities, made a comment that Elon Musk’s efforts to explore and colonise Mars are akin to the First Fleet, the initial British conquistador foray into what became Australia. The First Fleet, Ley intoned, did not set out to destroy anyone, and neither does Musk’s technological initiatives to explore space, and eventually colonise Mars.

It is clear that Ley has no understanding of Australian history, nor space exploration, nor Musk’s billionaire fantasies of astronomical conquest. Her comment clearly flies in the face of historical reality; the British deliberately set out to destroy the indigenous peoples of Australia. Likening the frontier wars to the proposed colonisation of Mars is reviving the myth of terra nullius, the fiction that Australia was uninhabited prior to the arrival of the Europeans.

Mars is uninhabited, you say, and that is true. But to colonise a territory involves destroying and reshaping what is already there. Mars, long the subject of science fiction writers, is not inhabited by little green men, nor are its ‘canals’ full of water. It was erroneously believed, from the late 1870s onwards, that Mars had canals of water, an observation first proposed by astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli. That belief was definitely overthrown many decades later.

Colonisation has never been a simple matter of packing up and relocating to an empty space, much like we see on television. The coloniser actively re-engineers and reshapes the environment they intend to secure and occupy, no matter how empty it might be. We are only now beginning to understand Martian geology, and the vast mountains, valleys and craters that predominate the landscape of that planet.

Mars definitely has vast amounts of water ice, both at the polar caps and beneath the surface. That’s convenient – obviously we need water for agriculture, food production and cleaning. How will those water reserves be extracted and purified? What about sewage treatment, and the risk of water-borne diseases? What about irrigation? Just those questions are enough to make us realise just how impactful any changes to the Martian environment and atmosphere would have to be to provide conditions hospitable to life.

Any attempt at Martian colonisation would be subjected to the private profit demands of the current billionaire space race. The tech bro giants – Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Richard Branson – want to inflate their already swollen egos by achieving ever-more headline-grabbing exploits in space. Egomania of cosmic proportions has already overtaken the drive to explore space for educational purposes, answering the big scientific questions regarding the cosmos.

The collective wealth of the billionaire parasites could be funding solutions to the problems of ecological destruction. They could devote their considerable financial resources to fighting the loss of biodiversity, supporting renewable energy technologies, reducing our dependence on environmentally destructive fossil fuels, and combating the spread of infectious diseases. The Covid-19 pandemic highlighted the need to have an internationally coordinated response to medical threats, because viruses do not stop at borders.

However, we are being encouraged to become cheerleading bystanders to a billionaire space race which only parasitises the scientific community’s knowledge capital. The billionaires are basically leeching off the astronomical fraternity.

When Juan Posadas, Argentine Trotskyist militant and union organiser, made some offhand comments about space exploration and humanity settling on other planets, he was ridiculed as an example of an eccentric, ideologically narrow minded militant indulging cosmic fantasies – Trots in space was the expression.

Whether he deserved to be ridiculed for his flights of fancy regarding extraterrestrial life, I do not know. He died in 1981, so he is not here to defend himself. What I do know is that fantasising about other planets is not confined to the writings of Posadas. An even loonier delusion is now being promoted by the financial-technological-algorithmic complex.

The Washington Post, in 2018, published a fawning series called Companies in the Cosmos. Extolling the virtues of corporate space travel, the writers were advocating that private companies now take the lead in space exploration. Are we to become passive spectators as dysfunctional corporations reproduce their maladaptive consumerism on other planets?

Rather than dreaming about Martian colonisation, let’s focus our energies on reviving and preserving life on Earth. David Attenborough, the great nature documentary maker, said as much in his 2025 work Ocean.

Making the case for hope, he said that over his long lifetime, he has seen species brought back from the brink of extinction due to collective action and political will. Creating scenarios for Martian takeover only distracts us from the urgent task of fixing our own planet. Colonial forays into Martian territory only reproduce the consumerist ideology underpinning the economic practices harming the Earth’s biosphere.