Should We Colonize Mars?
A one-week seminar that starts with a comparison table and ends somewhere much stranger. Mars has a hundred times Earth's surface radiation, a third of its gravity, an atmosphere that is almost entirely carbon dioxide, and a mean temperature of −60 °C. The case for going anyway rests on an argument students rarely encounter — that a species with everything in one place is a species that can be erased. The case against is mostly arithmetic.
Open the student page for this topicOne-Week Instructional Plan
The Year 1 rhythm. The deck has a clean internal structure that maps onto it directly — why we might go (existential risk, life, technology, inspiration), then why we might not (cost, lives, quality of life), then how we'd go if we did (multinational, national, or commercial).
Two Planets, Side by Side
Free write (5 min): students record their opening instinct — should we go, and why does the question interest them or not?
Data work. The deck opens with a photograph that makes Earth and Mars look like twins, then the table that shows they aren't:
- The comparison table — surface area 510 million km² against 144 million; gravity 9.8 m/s² against 3.7; mean surface temperature 14 °C against −60 °C; surface radiation 0.274 μSv/h against 27; an atmosphere of 78% nitrogen and 21% oxygen against one of 96% carbon dioxide and 0.1% oxygen.
- The history of human spaceflight, 1957–2020 — Sputnik, Gagarin, Kennedy's challenge, Apollo 11, Salyut I, the Viking lander touching down on Mars in 1976, Challenger, the ISS, SpaceX's Falcon I in 2008 and Starship's high-altitude tests in 2020.
- Five reasons to go — survival of the species, discovering life, improving life on Earth, growing as a species, and demonstrating American leadership. Ask which are compelling and which feel like rationalisations.
- The existential-risk slides. A 10-km asteroid ended the dinosaurs 66 million years ago; such impacts have historically come on roughly a 26-million-year cycle and can release more energy than a billion nuclear warheads. Four other mass extinctions in 500 million years, most likely volcanic. Yellowstone sits on a supervolcano that erupts about every 600,000 years and last erupted about 600,000 years ago. A 2008 informal expert survey put the risk of human extinction by 2100 at 19% — the deck itself says to take that with a grain of salt.
Assign the readings, due before Tuesday:
- 5 Undeniable Reasons Humans Should Go to Mars — Business Insider
- What It Would Take to Colonize Mars — Inside
- Five Steps to Colonising Mars — BBC Future
- The Astronomical Cost of Going to Mars — and Staying There — BBC Future
Three Positions Worth Running
Mindful moment (5 min), then breakouts. The deck supports a genuine third position, and the week is better with it:
- Colonize. A species confined to one planet can be ended by one event. Space exploration has already produced LASIK surgery, water purification, solar cells, GPS, aircraft anti-icing, and freeze-dried food. And, as Neil deGrasse Tyson argued, an audacious mission could pull a whole generation into science and engineering — "the next generation of astronauts to land on Mars are in middle school now."
- Explore, but don't settle. Perseverance has been working the Jezero crater since February 2021 with seven instruments, nineteen cameras, two microphones, and a helicopter, at a mission cost of $2.75 billion over eleven years. Curiosity is still running a decade after landing. If the goal is finding evidence of past microbial life, we may not need to send people at all.
- Don't go. The deck's three objections: too expensive, too many lives, no quality of life. Musk projects a $100,000–$500,000 round-trip ticket, but a peer-reviewed study calls establishing and maintaining a colony currently infeasible — several enabling technologies don't exist, there is no viable plan for growing enough food, and the payload for a first colony would exceed thirteen heavy rocket launches.
What life there would actually be: living underground most of the time because of radiation, almost no direct sunlight, gravity under half of Earth's causing muscle atrophy and bone loss, mostly freeze-dried food shipped from Earth, very little privacy, and a small population feeding isolation and loneliness.
Open the Discussion
Mindful moment (5 min), then the whole-group seminar:
- Why do human beings explore? Why do we take the risks that come with it?
- Would you sign up to be one of the first Mars colonists? Would those who went be like the first occupants of Jamestown?
- How seriously do you take existential risks — asteroids, supervolcanoes, nuclear war? Should we be preparing harder, and is Mars a sensible way to prepare?
Then the governance question, which students find unexpectedly gripping: should a Mars mission be a multinational effort like the ISS, an American race like Apollo, or a commercial competition between companies like SpaceX? And should any part of Mars belong to whoever arrives first?
Before students leave: themes, lingering questions, and one new resource for Thursday.
What Could Be Lost
Mindful moment (5 min), then students share the resources they found and take the deck's hardest closing question: what are the downsides of trying to colonize Mars — what could be lost?
Answers worth drawing out: the money not spent on Earth, the lives of the people who go, the scientific value of an uncontaminated planet, and the moral hazard of treating a second planet as an escape hatch from the first. Pair it with the other closing question — what would actually change for humanity if Perseverance found evidence of past microbial life?
Score Your Participation
The four reflective questions, then the participation matrix. Students also use the participation rubric to score the week and explain the score.
Notes for the Guide
This topic looks like a fun science week and turns into a philosophy week around Tuesday. That turn is the point — plan for it rather than resisting it.
The Comparison Table Is About Magnitude
- Most students — and plenty of adults — won't know what a sievert is. The deck says explicitly that this is fine. Nobody needs to understand the unit to see that Mars has about a hundred times Earth's surface radiation.
- Same for the atmosphere: the oxygen line moves from 21% to 0.1%. Let the numbers do it.
- If students want a single takeaway, it's that every element of survival — air, warmth, shielding, food, gravity — has to be manufactured and maintained, forever, with no margin for failure.
The Extinction Slides Aren't Meant to Frighten
- The deck is direct about this: slides 7–9 exist to establish that humanity faces real existential threats, which is the premise of the strongest argument for going. They are a setup, not a scare.
- Handle the 19%-by-2100 figure honestly — it came from an informal survey at a single conference, and the deck itself flags it as soft. It is a good chance to model taking a striking number less seriously than it wants to be taken.
- If a student is genuinely anxious, the useful redirect is that scientists broadly believe we could divert an asteroid given enough warning — the problem is detection, not capability.
Where Discussion Tends to Go
- "Do we have to go to find life?" is the question that reframes the room. Perseverance is already doing the science. Once students separate exploration from colonization, the argument gets much sharper.
- The Jamestown parallel is a genuinely good history detour — the danger, the mortality rates, the mixed motives, and who bore the cost. The deck suggests it, and it lands.
- Elon Musk becomes the subject if you let him. Keep the discussion on the commercial-versus-national-versus-international question, which is the interesting version of it.
Adapting This Topic
- Optional extensions: The Very Real Effort to Track Killer Asteroids and Comets and Life on Mars? (Smithsonian), plus Colonization of Mars (Wikipedia) for students who want the technical detail.
- Short week: merge Wednesday and Thursday. Keep the governance question — it is the one most students have never been asked.
- Note on the deck: the Tang reference on the spinoff-technologies slide is an intentional joke aimed at teachers. Students will have no idea what it is.
- Pairs well with: the life-elsewhere topic, which takes the same evidence and asks a different question of it.