Yes—if by “migration to Mars” one means a large, permanent, self-sufficient human settlement, I think “a joke” is provocative but directionally right.
The key distinction is:
going to Mars ≠ living on Mars ≠ reproducing a civilization on Mars.
NASA plainly treats a human Mars mission as technically conceivable, and is actively studying landing sites, water ice, radiation, life support, and surface operations. So I would not call a crewed expedition a joke.
But the popular Musk-like image—
thousands or millions of people moving to Mars and creating a second autonomous branch of human civilization
—is vastly more difficult than the imagery suggests.
The fundamental problem is that Mars is not a slightly unpleasant Earth. It is an environment in which an unprotected human dies very quickly. The atmosphere is extremely thin and mostly CO₂; there is essentially no breathable oxygen, no global magnetic shielding comparable with Earth’s, intense radiation exposure, average temperatures far below freezing, toxic perchlorates in the soil, and only 38% of Earth’s gravity. NASA’s own educational material emphasizes both solar/galactic radiation and the huge dependence on food, water and life-support infrastructure.
And low gravity may turn out to be one of the nastiest unknowns. We know quite a lot about 1 g and increasingly about microgravity. We have almost no long-duration human data at 0.38 g. We do not know whether conception, fetal development, childhood skeletal development, cardiovascular physiology and healthy aging can proceed normally there.
That matters because a colony isn’t a colony until people can:
be born → develop → reproduce → grow old → maintain infrastructure → manufacture replacements
without Earth continually rescuing them.
That is a much higher bar than merely keeping six astronauts alive for eighteen months.
The hidden absurdity is ecological
This is perhaps the point I find most important.
Humans are not portable autonomous organisms.
We are nodes inside an extraordinarily thick Earth ecosystem:
microbiome + plants + animals + soil + fungi + atmosphere + oceans + nitrogen/carbon cycles + sunlight + gravity + millions of interacting species.
A Mars settlement therefore has to carry not merely Homo sapiens, but a tiny artificial reconstruction of Gaia.
And nobody presently knows how to build a completely closed ecological system that remains stable indefinitely. Even on Earth, with sunlight, one atmosphere and immediate access to repairs, projects such as Biosphere 2 showed how unexpectedly difficult closed ecosystems are.
So the fantasy is sometimes framed as:
“We will terraform Mars.”
But before we can terraform Mars, we would first need to demonstrate that we can maintain a little artificial Earth inside a box without killing ourselves.
That is a rather sobering inversion.
And Mars is actually worse than many damaged versions of Earth
This is where the “backup planet” argument becomes particularly strange.
Suppose Earth experienced:
- severe climate warming,
- nuclear war,
- major ecological collapse,
- asteroid impact,
- supervolcano.
In almost every remotely survivable scenario, post-catastrophe Earth would still be enormously more habitable than Mars.
Earth would still have:
gravity,
atmospheric pressure,
oxygen,
oceans,
soil,
nitrogen,
a magnetosphere,
an enormous biological inventory,
and readily available raw materials.
If we possess enough technology to make millions of people sustainably live on Mars, we almost certainly possess enough technology to make a badly damaged Earth habitable again much more easily.
So:
Mars is an excellent exploration target but a remarkably poor lifeboat.
That is the conceptual error behind much of the colonization rhetoric.
There is also a brutal logistics asymmetry
Mars launch windows occur roughly every 26 months.
Transit typically takes many months. Communication delay ranges up to about 22 minutes one way, so there is no real-time medical or engineering help. Landing large payloads is itself extremely difficult because Mars has the worst of both worlds: enough atmosphere to cause dangerous heating, but too little to make parachutes sufficient. Even robotic Mars landings remain technically formidable.
Then imagine not landing a one-ton rover, but repeatedly landing:
reactors,
excavators,
pressure vessels,
food,
medical equipment,
machine tools,
replacement electronics,
greenhouses,
fertilizer,
spare seals,
industrial furnaces,
and hundreds or thousands of humans.
The sexy part is the rocket.
The colony is mostly:
plumbing.
And plumbing that must continue working for centuries in a place where opening the wrong valve kills everyone.
So I would distinguish four claims
|
Claim |
My assessment |
|
Humans will visit Mars |
Very plausible |
|
A small research base analogous to Antarctica |
Plausible, though enormously expensive |
|
A permanently occupied settlement highly dependent on Earth |
Possible |
|
A large self-sufficient Mars civilization / backup humanity |
No demonstrated path presently exists |
That last one is where I think the video’s skepticism hits home.
And it connects directly to our preceding discussion of interstellar travel.
There is a sequence here:
Moon: hostile, but nearby.
Mars: survivable technologically, but ecologically alien.
Interstellar space: biologically grotesque.
The farther humans leave Earth, the more obvious something becomes:
Human beings are not merely embodied; we are ecologically embodied.
The thing we need to transport is not simply a body.
It is a world.
And suddenly Heidegger’s In-der-Welt-sein becomes almost embarrassingly literal: you cannot put Dasein into Starship and send it to Mars without also asking, which Welt goes with it?
That is why I would amend the familiar phrase “multiplanetary species.”
A few humans enclosed in pressure vessels on Mars would not really have escaped Earth. They would be living inside technologically prolonged fragments of Earth, importing terrestrial atmosphere, terrestrial microorganisms, terrestrial food webs, terrestrial machinery and terrestrial history.
So perhaps the more accurate description is not:
humanity colonizes Mars
but
Earth grows a tiny, precarious prosthesis 225 million kilometres away.
That, I think, is much closer to reality.
