Last year, about a month into the pandemic, I reached for something comforting: the 1992 science-fiction novel “Red Mars,” by Kim Stanley Robinson. I’d first read it as a teen-ager, and had reread it a handful of times by my early twenties. Along with its two sequels, “Green Mars” and “Blue Mars,” the novel follows the first settlers to reach the red planet. They establish cities, break away from Earth’s control, and transform the arid surface into a garden oasis, setting up a new society in the course of a couple hundred years. On the cover of my well-worn copy, Arthur C. Clarke declared it “the best novel on the colonization of Mars that has ever been written.” In my youth, I considered it a record of what was to come.
It had been a decade since I’d last cracked open the book. In that time, I’d become a journalist specializing in space, covering its practical, physical, biological, psychological, sociological, political, and legal aspects; still, the novel’s plot had always stayed with me, somewhere in the back of my mind. It turns on a series of questions about what we owe to our planetary neighbor—about what we are allowed to do with its ancient geological features, and in whose interests we should be willing to modify them. In Robinson’s future, a disgruntled minority of settlers argue that humanity has no right to alter a majestic place that has existed without us for billions of years; they undertake ecoterroristic acts to undermine Martian terraforming efforts and, in the end, succeed in keeping parts of Mars a wilderness. I used to think it sensible that their opinion was relegated to the margins. Reading the novel again, I wasn’t so sure.
“It seemed to me obvious,” Robinson told me, over the phone this winter, when I asked him how he’d come to place that particular dilemma at the center of his trilogy. Environmental ethicists have long debated how we ought to treat the Earth, and asked whether the natural world has intrinsic value. In 1990, one of Robinson’s friends, a NASA astrobiologist and planetary scientist named Christopher McKay, posed the question “Does Mars have rights?” in a paper of the same name. Ultimately, McKay answered in the negative: he concluded that, when we speak of the value of nature, we’re really thinking of the value of living organisms. Unless the red planet is alive, McKay argued, we’re unlikely to extend to it the same environmental considerations that we apply to biospheres on Earth. “I thought that might be true for Chris McKay,” Robinson said. “But people living on Mars would develop affection for the place as it is.”
In February, NASA successfully landed a new robotic rover on the surface of Mars. Perseverance, as the vehicle is known, will roll around an area called Jezero Crater, searching for signs of life. It will collect up to thirty test-tube-size samples from the red rocks and dust, storing them so that a future mission can bring them into Martian orbit and, eventually, back to Earth. I have no ethical qualms about the tracks that Perseverance will lay down, nor about the part that it will play in absconding with a bit of Mars. But, in contemplating a future human presence on the planet, I start to worry about the questions presented in Robinson’s books. If there’s nobody around to stop us from doing what we want, what should we do?
Space exploration presents ethical quandaries even on Earth. Astronomers sometimes want to place telescopes on sacred land. In orbit, we scatter litter. Countries are now debating whether we have a right to mine the moon or asteroids, and asking who should be entitled to use such places as a second home. Space agencies and tech billionaires are working to solve the myriad technical issues associated with travelling to and staying off-world, but, once that’s done, there’s the problem of our conduct after we get there. Critics suggest that, in space, we risk repeating the mistakes of the colonial past, in which exploration was often a cover for the exploitation of native beings and environments.
Advocates of space settlement have long borrowed from an old-fashioned version of the American mythos, which holds that conquering the untamed wilderness of the New World made us better and more democratic as we advanced westward. At least symbolically, space, the final frontier, is sometimes presented as a savage land in need of humanity’s beneficent influence. For a time, SpaceX, the private company run by Elon Musk, called its planned passenger vehicle the Mars Colonial Transporter. (In 2016, Musk announced that the vessel would be renamed, because it might end up travelling “well beyond Mars.”) In recent years, NASA has shifted away from non-inclusive language—the agency now speaks of missions that are “crewed” rather than “manned”—but not everyone has followed suit. “We must remember that America has always been a frontier nation,” Donald Trump said, in his 2020 State of the Union address, while describing renewed ambitions to settle the moon. “Now we must embrace the next frontier: America’s Manifest Destiny in the stars.”
The problems with such rhetoric can be seen most clearly when speaking to those whose stories it disrespects. Hilding Neilson, a Canadian astronomer, greeted me over Zoom, from his beige Toronto living room, with a stoic expression. I asked his opinion about the people currently leading the charge on space exploration, and he paused to compose himself. “What I see . . . I’m trying to say this in a way that’s on the record,” he began. “What I see are organizations that view Mars in the same way that colonizers, pioneers, and settlers viewed the early West—that it was terra nullius, a land of opportunity for them, and that the land was free to take.”
Neilson, who studies the life cycles of stars, is Mi’kmaq; the indigenous nation that he belongs to extends over parts of eastern Canada and northern Maine. It’s difficult to be sure, but it’s possible that he is the only First Nations faculty member in astronomy or physics in Canada. “It’s hard for scientists, especially in terms of astronomy and space exploration, to see themselves as anything but ethical,” he said. “There’s a whole system built around this idea of space exploration being ethical and pro-human, but it’s also one that doesn’t necessarily hear voices from non-Western perspectives.”
It is precisely in its interactions with Native communities that astronomy has acted most questionably. In the nineteen-nineties, the San Carlos Apache Tribal Council battled with officials over a plan to build the indelicately named Columbus telescope on Mt. Graham, in southern Arizona’s Sonoran Desert, the tribe’s traditional homeland; in 2005, the Tohono O’odham Nation, also situated in southern Arizona, filed a lawsuit to contest construction of a proposed gamma-ray detector on the summit of nearby Kitt Peak, which they call Iolkam Du’ag and consider sacred. More recently, Native Hawaiians have objected to the placement of the Thirty Meter Telescope, or T.M.T., on Mauna Kea. Years ago, when I was fresh out of my undergraduate studies in astrophysics, I dismissed concerns about the T.M.T., seeing the matter as a contest between outdated religion and noble science. After speaking to members of the Kānaka Maoli, or Hawaiian people, I was able to see how academics were using established power structures to get what they wanted. Today, each of these mountains hosts multiple telescope domes.
Neilson is largely in favor of space exploration, and thinks ethically settling other places is possible. “But we have to be more inclusive of different perspectives, and to understand where our own mainstream perspectives come from,” he said. “It has to be about being part of Mars, as opposed to making Mars part of us."
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