We can terraform Mars for the same cost as mitigating climate change. Which would you rather?

Andrew Lilico:

One frequently quoted study of the global costs of mitigating climate change put them at around $3 trillion by 2100, with the main benefits being felt between 2100 and 2200. Here is alternative way to spend around the same amount of money with around the same timescale of payback: terraforming Mars. A standard estimate is that, for about $2-$3 trillion, in between 100 and 200 years we would be able to get Mars from its current “red planet” (dead planet) status to ” blue planet” (i.e. a dense enough atmosphere and high enough temperature for Martian water in the poles and soil to melt, creating seas) – achievable in about 100 years – and from there to microbes and algae getting us to “green planet” status within 200 to 600 years.

There are two standard objections to such terraforming. First, it is said to be too expensive, altogether, to be plausible. Second, it is said to require too long a timescale to be plausible. Both of these objections appear decisively answered by climate change policies and indeed energy policies in general. Between now and the 2035 alone, global investment in energy and energy efficiency (in many cases with a many-decades payback period) is estimated at about $40 trillion, of which $6 trillion is in renewables and $1 trillion in low-carbon nuclear. We are willing to spend many trillions on projects that could take over a century to come to fruition.

But in a century that red dot in the night sky could be transformed into a blue dot, and a couple of centuries later into a green dot. We know how. We just need to decide to do it. If we decided to go for it, some of you reading this article could be alive to see that blue dot.

What an adventure that would be! In the ancient world, humanity had poor knowledge of almost anywhere. The conquests of Alexander the Great are sometimes seen through the lens of his desire to stand on the shores of a legendary great ocean he had heard of, where the lands ended. By the Mediaeval period we had the journey of Marco Polo and expeditions of Zheng He. Then the Portuguese got in with their effort to sail around Africa to India. Columbus sailed West and Magellan circumnavigated the Earth. In the 19th century Livingstone and Stanley explored Africa and as the 20th century began Amundsen discovered the North West Passage and went first to the South Pole and probably also the North. In the Fifties Hillary and Tenzing conquered Everest and in 1960 the Trieste reached the bottom of the Marianas Trench. Immediately humanity had conquered these last earthly adventures, we had the race to the Moon, reaching it in 1969.

And then… well, essentially we stopped. Like late Roman Imperialists hedged in after the Teutoburg Forest, Western culture has decayed into decadent pleasures. Absent new discoveries or voyages to make, humanity’s adventures are sex or thrill-seeking or drugs or, as the character Cuckoo puts in in the eponymous BBC3 series: “Would you like to know the longest journey I’ve ever taken? The journey into my mind…..”

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