Today, Explained - Living on Mars

Episode Date: August 15, 2025

The most powerful people in the world want to send humans to Mars. Getting there will be extremely difficult. Staying there will be even harder. This episode was made in collaboration with Vox’s Future Perfect. It was produced by Avishay Artsy, edited by Jolie Myers, fact checked by Laura Bullard, engineered by Patrick Boyd, and hosted by Sean Rameswaram. Listen to Today, Explained ad-free by becoming a Vox Member: vox.com/members. Transcript at vox.com/today-explained-podcast. During the Mars Society in the Southern Utah desert participants pretend they are on Mars to study the environment and collect data. Photo by Paul Harris/Getty Images. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Today explained shot Robbinsburg outside the Arid Space Museum in Washington, D.C. to ask, would you want to live on Mars? No, I wouldn't want to live on Mars. No. I just think simply it's just too dangerous. Yeah. Oh, hell yeah, of course. It'd be cool to see something different and be pioneers. Even with the risk involved?

I mean, we risk our lives when we walk out here on the streets. No, I would miss my family. They're all here. They were all here. I would not want to leave them behind. If I got paid for it, yeah. How much did you want to get paid for it? $10,000. That's it?

Yeah? You gotta ask her more. Okay, $1 million. That's more like it. No, because the risk of death is too high. What are the risks? Have you seen the Martian? With Matt Damon?

Yeah. Thank you. Living on Mars, on today explained from Vox. Today explained Sean Ramos from here with biologist Kelly Wienersmith, who's the co-author of a book called A City on Mars, all about our subject today, settling Mars. Yeah, so Elon Musk wants a self-sustaining settlement, so he wants a backup for humanity. Having two planets that are both self-sustaining and strong. I think it's going to be incredibly important for the long-term survival of civilization.

Jeff Bezos wants us to move heavy industry to space to save Earth and move population from Earth to space. We can move all heavy industry and all polluting industry off of Earth and operated in space. And then other common arguments are, you know, space resources will make us rich. The first trillionaire in the world is going to be the person who first mines, Asteroids. Space will allow humans to spread out. We won't fight over land anymore, so it will make war either obsolete or at least a lot less common. I would love to see, you know, a trillion humans living in the solar system. But the arguments that I think are the best are that we need a backup for humanity, but I totally disagree with Musk on the timeline. Elon Musk has said that his company, SpaceX, can get humans to Mars as early as 2029.

And I think most people, if you push, what they really want to say is that space is awesome and no one has a right to stop them. And so that argument holds as long as the thing you're doing really doesn't hurt anyone. And by the end of the book, it wasn't clear to us that that was the case because if we end up for a scramble for territory and space between nuclear-wielding superpowers, that could have implications for all of us. So it is an activity that impacts us all. We've been talking about Mars for a while in this show. I think we need to like just start from square one. Like, how do we go about getting humans to Mars? Yeah, so the trip to Mars is going to be a long one.

With current technology, it will take somewhere between six to nine months to get there. During that trip, you're going to be exposed to space radiation. Yes, we'll have shielding, but shielding is heavy and expensive, so we might not have all the shielding that we need. Additionally, none of the current proposals include spacecraft that are rotating, so that would create artificial gravity. So during this trip, you're going to be seeing the loss of bone and muscle and maybe even vision that we see on astronauts on the space stations. So it could be, you know, not just a dangerous trip, but also a trip where your body is sort of breaking down along the way. And then hopefully you're still alive when you get there. Yeah, fingers crossed.

When people are generally talking about space settlements, what exactly might that look like on Mars? Would it just look like Earth? I don't think so. No, no, it's not going to look like Earth at all. And I think most of the people who want to go to Mars are totally comfortable with that idea. But like, you know, a typical day on Mars, you would wake up in an underground bunker. Because radiation is raining down on the surface of Mars because Mars doesn't have the radiation protections we have here on Earth. So most of the proposals include living underground. You can't step outside of your habitat because Mars has 1% of the atmosphere of Earth,

and that's too low for our bodies to survive. So like the nitrogen would bubble out of your blood and kill you. Probably not a great way to go. So no going outside. A lot of the day is going to be spent on things like subsistence farming. It's going to be hard to grow our own food and do the recycling that we would need to do to make these habitats sustainable. And probably a lot of exercise, because 40% of Earth's gravity might not be enough to keep our

muscles strong and our bones strong. It's funny to think of this toxic, deathly, desolate planet being the sort of salvation for humanity, because what you're describing right now sounds not exactly like something that's going to save us. But so the rest of space sucks even more is the thing. So, like, Mars has some good stuff. So it has a day and night cycle that's pretty close to Earth, so that'll feel kind of home-like. The temperature swings on Mars are pretty moderate compared to what you find on a lot of other planets.

And it has a lot of the building blocks that we're going to need to live. It's got oxygen and carbon and water just about everywhere. You've got to work a little hard to find it. You've got to clean out some chemicals to make it drinkable. But all the stuff we need is there. So I think you can imagine a day when you would have a self-sustaining settlement on Mars. and it's hard to imagine that happening just about anywhere else in the solar system.

Okay, so let's say we get to that settlement and whatever, there's a group of a half-dozen or a dozen people living up there. We've talked about some of the physical challenges. What about the psychological ones? Yeah, those could be pretty intense. So you're going to need plans for how to provide them with support. You might want to send a psychologist with you on this trip

because they're not going to be able to make calls home. So, you know, if you're on the International Space Station, and you're bummed out, you can call your wife. You know, they're close enough. It works. But Mars has a communication delay that's a minimum of three minutes and as much as like 20 to 22 minutes. And sometimes when Mars is on the other side of the sun from Earth, you can't call it all.

So all of your support needs to be self-contained because you're not going to be able to have, you know, live calls with your girlfriend, your mother, your psychiatrist, any of those things. And it's probably going to be a little boring. So you'll want to plan ahead. you'll want to bring Netflix if you can. There's also this idea of like terraforming Mars and making it more Earth-like, right?

Would that help? Is that even possible? I mean, it may technically be possible. When you think about how awful Mars is and the lengths that you'd have to go to to terraform it, it seems crazy when you think about how, you know, we're dealing with a two degrees Celsius increase in temperature here on Earth and it's causing us all these problems.

The idea that we could control the Martian climate to get it to be Earth-like is a bit out there. But, you know, most of the proposals involve things like dropping nuclear weapons on the poles to liberate the water vapor, which would get trapped in Mars' thin atmosphere and slowly warm things up. It's the fast way and a slow way. Okay. Give me the fast way. The fast way has dropped thermonuclear weapons over the poles.

You're a super villain. That's what a super villain does. Yeah. This would be something that would take decades, maybe hundreds of years to accomplish. And it's not really clear, according to international law, that you're allowed to do that. So Mars and all of the rest of space belongs to all of humanity. So before you go dropping nuclear weapons on Mars, you should probably get the whole international community to give that activity the thumbs up. And I'm not super optimistic.

That would go down well at the UN. I'm glad you brought up the UN. Who's in charge up there? Well, it depends on where the Martians came from. So according to international law, somebody is in charge of people or corporations once they go. So if Elon Musk, through SpaceX, sends a bunch of United States citizens to space, then the United States would be in charge of making sure that the Martians continued to follow international law. And if it's China, it's China. And yep, that's right. But there's the potential for conflict there, too, of course. Absolutely. Yeah. So international law is not clear about.

about what you're allowed to do once you're up there. So you're not allowed to claim sovereignty over anything in space. So Musk can't go up there and claim, you know, a nation that he calls Moscow or something like that. But you can land, you can land anywhere you want and then never leave. And it looks like you can extract resources and sell them. And so, you know, whereas the first space race was just to get to the moon first and step on it and then go home, it looks like this new space race is going to be between the United States and China. and now it's about grabbing the best parts of space and staying there so that even if you don't call them, you know, China and the U.S. Part 2, you're still essentially keeping them just for yourself.

You know, it's funny. Our last show about Mars, we talked about this sort of potential for humanity to work together to accomplish remarkable things out in space as sort of a motivating factor. Is there any chance that like instead of maybe ending up in some turf war with China or who might be, ever else in Mars one day. Like right now, as we're starting to hatch plans to do this, we could collaborate with our adversaries? Is anyone talking about that? There's absolutely people who are trying to get all the parties together to figure out a plan that makes everybody happy so that you don't end up with this scramble. This is why I call myself in the book a space bastard. Am I allowed to say bastard on your show? I can say a space jerk.

No, you're allowed to say bastard. Okay, great. Yeah. A space bastard because, you know, you go to space settlement conferences and people say all of these beautiful things. And I also am inspired and awed by space. But I think that when you're taking on a task where people could die and there could be implications for people back here on Earth, it's important that you also be clear-eyed about, you know, the kinds of things that humans do. But I hope that we figure out a path forward that's peaceful. space bastard or space jerk if the kids are around. She's got a podcast. It's called Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe. Check it out. I don't know where you land on Mars, but for me, it's like, why not both? Why not work on all our earthly problems while exploring space to the best of our abilities?

Why not both? An astrophysicist will tell us why not both when we're back on Today Explained. Support for today explained comes from Thrive Market. If you've been enjoying your summer, Thrive Market wants to remind you that it's going to end at some point. And so they're having a back-to-school sale. Okay, let's check it out. If you want your pantry to be full of everything your family needs for back-to-school time, says Thrive Market. You might want to check out Thrive Market.

Even if you're not heading back to school, by the way, says Thrive Market. With Thrive, you can find those high-quality pantry staples, those snacks, those vitamins, that skin care from those brands you know and trust. And you can shop it all from the comfort of your home. Claire White is our colleague here at Fox. She has tried Thrive Market. Here's what Claire thinks. Thrive Market's offerings are so expansive. There's not just snacks and fun things to try.

There's also pantry staples. So things that I would get in any grocery run, like almond butter. olive oil, spices, they really have anything that your kitchen could need. Could now be the best time to try Thrive Market? 25% off select items, new members, 30% off a first order, plus a free gift. You can go to Thrivemarket.com slash explain to start saving. That sale ends August 31st. Hello, Earth.

Hello, what? If that's the Earth, where a heck of me? My name is Adam Becker, and I am a journalist, author, and astrophysicist. Perfect. What a combo. Thanks. Tell me about the author part. What have you written? Books? Yeah, I've written two books. And the more recent one is called More Everything Forever. and it is about the horrible ideas that tech billionaires have about the future that they're trying to shove down our throats and why they don't work.

Is one of them Mars? One of them is Mars, yeah. So you think Mars is a horrible idea? Mars is a terrible idea. Mars is a terrible place. But you're an astrophysicist slash author slash journalist, which means at some point you were a young child who dreamt of space. And part of the dream of space is Mars, right?

Sure, yeah. No, I mean, when I was a kid, I thought that the future was just in space. You know, I watched a lot of Star Trek, right? Because I'm a huge nerd, and I was like a young growing nerd, and a young growing nerd needs to consume healthy amounts of Star Trek in order to grow up to be like a big strong nerd. And when I was a kid, I sort of thought of Star Trek as kind of like a documentary about the future, not like literally a documentary, but I thought, yeah, this is what we're shooting. for. This is what we want. We want to be in space. That's where the good future is. And then I grew up. Notably, there weren't a lot of billionaires on Star Trek, or they didn't talk about it at least. No, in fact, what they talked about was that there was no money. You see, money doesn't exist in the 24th century.

No money. You mean you don't get paid? The acquisition of wealth is no longer the driving force in our lives. We work to better ourselves and the rest of humanity. So you grow up and you see the intersection of space and money and you kind of change your mind about how you feel about space or at least Mars. Yeah, I mean, look, I love space, right? You know, I did a PhD in astrophysics for a reason. I love space. I think that space research and like exploring space with robots and, you know, satellites is amazing.

But, yeah, seeing billionaires turning space into another kind of status icon for the ultra-wealthy, it's gross. You know, Musk talks about Mars as if it's the inevitable future of humanity and that, you know, going to Mars as a project to sort of save humanity, like some giant philanthropic effort. And it's just nonsense. He says, we got to go to Mars in case there's a disaster here on Earth. And we got to put a million people on Mars by 2050. and they've got to be able to survive even if the rockets from Earth stop coming. The fundamental fork in the road for human destiny is where Mars can continue to grow, even if the supply shifts from Earth stuff coming for any reason.

I'm like, dude, that is not happening. Mars is awful, and there is nothing that could happen to Earth that would make it a worse place than Mars. Okay, what about the Bezos argument for space colonization? I mean, look. I hate to be in the position of trying to, like, devil. advocate for these billionaires. But I'm just curious what you make of their arguments. Okay, I will say one nice thing about one billionaire, right? Jeff Bezos got it right about Mars.

Jeff Bezos, I think at one point made fun of Musk for promoting Mars. He's like, Mars sucks. And like, yeah, you know what? Jeff Bezos is right. Mars does suck. It's everything he said after that. That was a problem, right? Because Bezos also has a specific vision for space. He says, oh, well, we need to go out into space to live in hundreds of thousands or millions of enormous space stations so we can have a trillion humans living in space in a couple of centuries.

If we had a trillion humans, we would have, at any given time, a thousand Mozart's and a thousand Einstein's. And before you tell us what you think of that idea, we see a lot of this in the science fiction that we love to watch. Oh, yeah. Yeah, totally. From Star Trek to interstellar to 2001 a space odyssey.

Space, a final frontier. The endurance rotation is 67, 68 RPM. Okay, get ready to match our span with the retro thrusters. It's not possible. No, it's necessary. Open the pod bay doors, hell. I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that.

Yeah, absolutely, yeah. But, you know, science fiction, is fiction, right? It is a set of stories that we tell. And we tell those stories not to predict the future, but to say, oh, what if we use this as a setting to explore some question about being a human? One of the great science fiction authors of all time, Ursula Le Guin, said that science fiction is not a guide to the future and that science fiction authors are not good guides to the future and that that's not what the subject is about. But I think like any good millennial, there are tweets that live rent-free in my head, and one of them is the torment nexus tweet,

where it says something like science fiction author in my book, I created the torment nexus as a cautionary tale, tech billionaire. At long last, we've created the torment nexus from classic science fiction novel, don't create the torment nexus. I agree that science fiction can give us something to aspire to, but it's not the literal technology in the science fiction stories. One of the things I love about Star Trek is it does show a kind of future to aspire to in terms of how the people relate to each other in the kind of world that they've built independent of the technology. You know, Star Trek was groundbreaking, even in the original series, in terms of, you know, showing a diverse group of people on an aspiration

mission of exploration and self-actualization and working together as friends to explore the world that we live in. I understand, Mr. Spark. The glory of creation is in its infinite diversity. And the ways our differences combine to create meaning and beauty. That is a future to aspire to.

That is not what Jeff Bezos has in mind. Jeff Bezos's idea is to put a true, trillion people in space, and he says he wants this, because if we stay here on Earth in a few centuries, we're going to run out of resources and run out of energy. And he's right about that. That's true. If you just assume the current rate of constant growth in usage of energy, then a few centuries after that, 700 or 1,000 years after that, you're using all of the energy output of the sun. But what you're saying is there's an alternate, and that is to not use all of our resources?

Yeah, or at least to, you know, safeguard them more wisely and use them, you know, in a more sustainable way. It sounds like for all you disagree on with these tech billionaires when it comes to Mars or space colonization. Like, we all have to agree that life on Earth is not infinite. Sure. Our sun, the source of life here on Earth, will eventually die. Yes.

And I know it's very far away. It is. But we made it to the moon. Yep. And making it to Mars feels like it could be, you know, a step in the right direction. And, you know, when I sat on the steps of the Air and Space Museum here in Washington, D.C., and ask people whether we should go to Mars or whether they would want to go to Mars, they don't talk about Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos. I think we need to see it.

I think we need to expand what we know, what we see. They kind of talk about that idea that space is in. infinite, and as a race, a human race. Yeah. I was saying it's a cool, like, advancement for, like, human kind and everything. It's something we should pursue. Do you have to push the limit of science to discover new things? Do you really think that we should skip the stepping stone just because these guys have

some maybe wrong-headed ideas about why we should be taking that step in the first place? I mean, look, I don't think Mars sucks because the billionaires want to go there. I think Mars sucks and the billionaires want to go there. And you don't even see a reason to go there so that we can experiment with what it would be like to live on another planet long term. You don't even see a use for that because it might teach us something about the actual moonshot that we discover in 100 or 1,000 years, which is, there's some planet in some distant galaxy that's just like home. Look, if we find a planet around another star, even in our own galaxy, forget distant galaxy, that's just like home, we're not going.

It's not happening. Okay? The speed of light limit is a hard stop. We are not going. And no one is coming to save us. And I find that hopeful. We have to save ourselves. There's a story, okay, and I don't know if this is true, I think it's apocryphal,

that toward the end of his life, somebody asked the great architect and visionary, R. Buckminster Fuller, if he was sad, that he was going to die without ever having gone to space. And his answer was, we're in space. We live in space. And we live in the most special and amazing place in space. This is a place that we evolved to live, and everything about it is so well suited for us. And it's not just the distance of the planet from our sun. It's not just the mix of gases in our atmosphere. It is everything about this biosphere.

We can eat the fruit off the trees. We live in a place where food literally grows on trees. It's awesome. This is an amazing place, and we should continue to learn about the universe that we are a part of as we build a better home for ourselves here where we belong. forever, AI overlords, space empires, and Silicon Valley's crusade to control the fate of humanity. Abishai Artsy produced today's show, which was made in collaboration with Vox's future perfect team. Jolie Myers edited, Laura Bullard checked the facts. Patrick Boyd mixed. You can listen to today Explain Sans ads by going to Vox.com slash members, and you can listen

to our Sunday show, explain it to me, tell you more about well, well, wellness here on Earth. weekend.