I was taking a bath and perusing my Twitter feed earlier today, as the unemployed geologist is wont to do, when I came across an interesting argument.  Essentially, this person, a woman who blogs for Scientific American, was claiming that the calls for colonization of Mars are inspired by the same white privilege that drove the colonization of the Americas and the settling of The West by Europeans.  There are, of course, a lot of negative connotations that come along with that (e.g. the enslavement of millions of Africans and the genocide of the Native Americans).  She also felt that the colonization of Mars by the richest 1% would not “save humanity” as people like Elon Musk have claimed.

As an avid space exploration enthusiast, my feathers were thoroughly ruffled by these claims.  So, I want to refute her two main points.

First, let’s talk about rich people.  Yeah, we all hate ‘em.  They got money, we don’t, and they don’t feel like sharing.  However, if they want to spend their money on a one-way trip to Mars, by all means we should let them.  Here’s the reality – space exploration is expensive, but very necessary.  Make no mistake, at some point in the future a mass extinction event will occur that will threaten all human life on Earth.  Major extinction events have happened before on Earth…at least five times.  It may be an asteroid, it may be a virus, it may be extreme volcanism, or it may be nuclear war – and without some human life off-world, we’re likely screwed.  It isn’t a question of IF, but of WHEN.  And this isn’t a far out crazy notion – there are studies going on right now about the next mass extinction.

So what does this have to do with rich people?  Well, like I said, space exploration is expensive, and colonizing Mars would likely be the most expensive human endeavor, ever.  Right now it costs a tourist about $30 million to spend a week in space, and moving to Mars would be costlier than that.  So the first wave of civilian colonists may very well be the super-rich.  If that is the case, so be it. Their initial investment will build the incredibly complex infrastructure required, so at a later time, the lowly masses can colonize at a greatly reduced cost.

To be clear, the very first colonists will have to be engineers and scientists, because if something breaks on your first trip to Mars, you need someone there who can fix it.  And any major colonization effort will require a massive investment of manpower, money, and time from the major world governments.  Rich people alone cannot colonize Mars.  No matter what, this will be a multi-national effort spanning decades, and it will require the help of thousands of people here on Earth.

So what about her second point?  Well, remember all that doom and gloom about going extinct?  That isn’t the only reason to explore and colonize space.  Some might argue that human beings have an innate desire to explore.  That our curiosity drives us to constantly push further and further out.  It is what drove our ancestors out of Africa and into every corner of the planet.  That same spirit of exploration was also, unfortunately, used as justification for the genocide of Native Americans by white settlers as they colonized the Western part of North America.  So…that’s not good.

My real issue with this argument, though, is that Manifest Destiny wasn’t all about exploration.  It was about the whites feeling morally superior to the native people, and feeling obligated to bring the wild under the control of agrarian civilization.  Hopefully, most of this won’t be an issue when we start colonizing Mars.  There are no native Martians.  There is no sign of life, at all, on Mars (that doesn’t mean there never was life or that we should stop looking for it).  And thus, there can be no genocide, for there is no Martian to kill.  There will not be a great enslavement, because there is no Martian to enslave.

So where does that leave us?  Well, I agree that as humanity moves into the solar system, we should not take our prejudices and historical baggage with us.  We should not use the settling of The West or the colonization of the Americas as analogies for the colonizing of space.  Fundamentally, they are very different endeavors.  Yes, both are mass colonizations, but that’s where the similarities end.  One involved the mistreatment and murder of thousands, and the other is a coming together of the greatest minds to accomplish an extraordinary feat of engineering, science, and exploration.  So, instead of a Manifest Destiny, let’s call it…I dunno, Cosmic Intention.  There, problem solved.