I love space. I want to say that first, because what I'm about to say sounds like I don't.

What's the pattern?

Humans have been "colonizing" Antarctica since the 1950s. Seventy years later, about a thousand people live there in winter, five thousand in summer, in research stations, on rotation, supplied entirely from outside. Almost nobody is born there. Nobody retires there.

Antarctica has air. It has water, frozen. It's a three-hour flight from Chile. Mars has none of that and is seven months away on a good day.

So the honest forecast, the one that follows the pattern, is Antarctica: stations, scientists, maybe miners, on rotation. That's an achievement. It's not a city.

In Radical Next I wrote about the interplanetary chapter with some wariness. Not because it's impossible, but because so much of the current push, asteroid mining for battery metals, Mars as a backup planet, is an extractivist reflex wearing a spacesuit. We ran out of the easy stuff here, so let's go take it there.

Here's the irony. Everything you'd need to live on Mars, closed-loop water, food grown without soil, energy with no fossil fuels, materials made from almost nothing, is exactly what we need to keep living on Earth. The Mars program is an Earth program that's embarrassed to say so.

What should leaders do now?

So, three things.

If you're investing in space, invest in the closed loop. Water recycling, food systems, energy storage. Those pay off on Earth first and on Mars eventually.

Be honest about the timeline. Stations by the 2040s is a real plan. A city is a marketing plan.

And ask what the space program is really for. Science and inspiration are good answers. Escape is not. There is no backup planet. There's this one, and the technology to keep it.

We'll go to Mars. A few of us, for a while. The rest of us will live in the future we build here with the same tools. That's the interesting mission.

If you knew there was no backup planet, what would you build first?

Related: Will biology replace the factory?

Sources
  1. Sam Rad, Radical Next (2025), Planetary and Interplanetary chapter.
  2. "Demographics of Antarctica": about 1,000 people in winter and 4,000 to 5,000 in summer, at research stations run under the Antarctic Treaty.

Sam Rad, The Change Futurist. Keynote speaker on change, transformation, resilience, and AI adoption. Author of Radical Next. Book a keynote