VOLUME VII, CHAPTER 8, SECTION 1
Mars Has None of the Seven Gifts: to Go There Is to Leave Paradise, Not Find It
The last chapter made plain that Earth is the one and only paradise. This chapter faces the loudest answer this age gives to the ruin of that paradise: if Earth is spoiled, we will go to Mars and start again. This section meets it with a plain reckoning, gift by gift. Mars has none of the seven things Earth gives free. To move there is not to reach a second paradise. It is to leave the only one we have, and to trade a home that gives all things free for a place that gives nothing at all.
Take the seven gifts of the last chapter and hold Mars against each. Air: Earth gives breath, free, to every living thing. Mars has no air a person can breathe. Every breath there must be made by machine, carried, sealed, paid for. Fail the machine an hour and all within are gone. Water: Earth sends rain and springs and rivers, free. Mars has no running water to drink. What may be locked in its cold must be dug, melted, cleaned by machine, at great cost, in small measure. Soil: Earth's ground grows the grain, free. Mars has no living soil that grows food. Its dust is barren, laced with what would poison a crop. Every mouthful must be grown under glass, in earth carried or made, under lamps run by machine. Sunlight: Earth's sun pours warmth on all alike, free. Mars is far colder, its light thin and weak, its cold deep enough to kill in the open in minutes.
Go on. The turning seasons: Earth's steady round lets the grain ripen and life keep its rhythm, free. Mars has no such gentle round, only a long, harsh, barren year no crop was made for. The warmth of the human world: on Earth, people gather into families and villages and light the evening fires, and the whole warm round of human days rises up, borne by the Earth beneath. On Mars there is no such ground to bear it, only sealed boxes in which a few might huddle, walled off from a dead waste that would kill them the instant the wall failed. Life that renews itself without end: Earth's grass springs green again, one generation follows the next, life does not run out. Mars has no life at all, none to renew, a dead world, silent, barren, from pole to pole.
Set the reckoning side by side and it is stark past argument. Every one of the seven gifts Earth gives free, Mars lacks entirely. On Earth, breath, water, food, warmth, the round of the seasons, the company of the human world, the endless renewing of life, all given, free, asking nothing. On Mars, not one of them given. Every breath, every drop, every mouthful, every degree of warmth must be made by machine, sealed against a dead waste, and the failure of any one machine, for any hour, is death for all within. Earth is a home that gives all things free. Mars is a sealed box in a wasteland where nothing is given and everything must be wrung from a dead world at ruinous cost, and where one breach of the wall is the end. To call the move from the one to the other a way out is to call leaving paradise for a tomb an escape.
See plainly, then, what the dream of Mars really offers. It does not offer a second paradise to replace the first. There is no second paradise. In all the reach of the heavens we have searched, we have found not one other world that gives even one of the seven gifts free, let alone all seven together. Earth alone gives them. Earth alone is paradise. What the Mars dream offers is not a new home but a sealed refuge in a wasteland, and not for all, but for the few who could be carried there and kept alive at vast cost, while the billions who could not go are left behind on whatever was made of the Earth. To take this for a way out is to mistake a tomb for a door.
This reckoning is not set down to mock the reaching toward Mars, nor to say a person should never set foot beyond this Earth. It is set down to break one dangerous thought: that because we might go to Mars, it does not finally matter if Earth is spoiled, since there is somewhere else to go. That thought is false at the root, because there is no somewhere else. Mars is no paradise to fall back on. It gives none of the seven gifts. If Earth is ruined, it is not that we lose one paradise and keep another. We lose the only one there is, and what waits beyond is not a second home but a dead waste in which, at best, a handful might be kept barely alive in sealed boxes, at ruinous cost, one wall's breach from death. See this, and the thought that Mars is a way out falls apart in the hand. The next section holds to the light the claim built on that thought, the claim that Earth may be abandoned and the ruin walked away from, and asks whose cost that claim is really paid with.
Credit to the ancestors; the mistakes are mine: Tiger Lyon.