The Lure of Mars: Our Destiny or Our Delusion?

When the early pictures starting coming in from the Mars Curiosity rover, I was seduced by the wonder of them. The pictures were so clear and the landscapes so vivid that they looked like someone’s vacation photos from Nevada.

I found space.com, which posts daily pictures from the rover and follows its tracks over the weeks and months – you can see the pictures it takes each day, and follow it through gullies and up hills. 

I started reading about the NASA team that was guiding Curiosity and wondered how amazing it must be to come in the office each morning and navigate this one-ton forensic science lab (“like a police sniffer dog,” a friend quipped) across hundreds of millions of kilometres of space. Who drove it?  How? How long did it take to communicate with it? (18 minutes each way).  And so the idea of the documentary, Destination:Mars took shape in my mind, and through the winter of 2015 I would “travel” this way to Mars every night before going to bed.

It was not just another world on Mars I was discovering, but a whole other world on Earth. I learned about the Mars Society, which wants to colonize Mars, and started reading about serious scientists who believed we could “terraform” Mars and alter its climate. One entrepreneur was recruiting people to make a one-way journey, and over 200,000 applied. Billionaires like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos were building rockets.  I had been dimly aware of most of this, like most people, but when one puts it all together, it began to look like a much bigger phenomenon. 

What was the lure of Mars? What about Mars captured millions of people's imagination?

I could understand adventure, exploration, science, even profit…but something more was also driving Mars fever.

For many, it seemed like a yearning for another world, a different future, a long-term hope. And soon, I also began to see that beyond hope, there seemed to also be a darker side of that yearning – the sense that it was rooted in a despair. So many advocates of Mars settlement feared that Earth was destined for doom from nuclear war, climate change, overpopulation, volcanic eruptions or some galactic catastrophe like an asteroid impact. The story just grew more and more interesting: a mixture of adventure, science, hope and despair. Some of it looked almost cult-like.

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But when Stephen Hawking spoke, everyone listened. His is a gloomy vision of humanity’s ability to survive “the next hundred, let alone the next thousand years” and that is why he felt it was essential to venture out “into the blackness of space” and colonize other planets. This lent legitimacy to the Mars colonization movement.

Then I started reading those who were disturbed by the Mars colonization phenomenon, like astronomer Lucianne Walkowicz. She thinks the colonization dream is a delusion that distracts us from the real crisis facing earth – climate disaster. Many others also feel the idea of Mars as a “fallback” planet is an abdication of our moral duty to save earth.

So as I delved deeper, and spoke to more people, the theme of the documentary started to form: Is Mars our destiny or our delusion? The documentary would be about today as much as it would be about the future; and it would be about transforming Earth as much as it would be about transforming Mars. We wouldn’t answer the questions, we’d open them.

Some friends thought my fascination with Mars was out of character with the documentaries I’ve done before, which were more historical or social. However, I think a good story has layers, and should take you to unexpected places and provoke new thoughts. Mars had it all:  Cutting edge science, behind-the-scenes of high-security laboratories, fascinating characters from rover drivers to billionaires, titanic rocket launches, journeys two kilometres underground — and at the core of it, a profound ethical question: the future of our planet and our species.

It’s been an exhausting journey making Destination: Mars, including going two kilometres straight down under the Canadian shield, but I feel I’ve not only been to the depths of the earth in person, and to the frontier of space in my mind, but I’ve met some of the most dedicated scientists of our generation, dealing with one of the great issues of our generation: what is the ethical and moral view of our destiny as humans?

And I’m still mulling over that one.