Mars as a Red Herring in Climate Conversations

Mars has been a place for dreams for a long time. A god of war, a planet, the home of invaders in science fiction, more recently the scientific and space exploration frontier. The details change, but the function remains the same. Mars is a projection surface. It absorbs whatever story we need it to carry.

That potency can be used in productive ways. For science, Mars poses serious questions about the origin of life and habitability.

But that potency can also be used for cognitive escape. In climate conversations, Mars often stops being a prompt for thinking and becomes a prompt for leaving. Literally. Not just leaving a rational discussion of the challenge, but simply leaving Earth.

The proposition can sound reasonable on the surface. Our fellow earthlings who founded space companies frame Mars as "life insurance" from extinction (Elon Musk, Space.com), tied to humans becoming a multi-planet civilization, or see space industrialization as an environmental move, suggesting that we "can move all heavy industry and all polluting industry off of Earth and operate it in space" (Jeff Bezos, Business Insider).

(One of us also heard him say, in an after dinner speech, that we needed to go to Mars because "all the big challenges on Earth had been solved." That quote does not appear to be online anywhere, but the listener is sure she was not drunk. Or at least not that drunk.)

That framing does a lot of rhetorical work. It allows powerful economic actors to present themselves as custodians of the species. It also smuggles in a category shift. The climate crisis becomes something like an engineering timeline problem instead of what it actually is, namely a governance problem.

With any currently imaginable technology, and even some pretty speculative ones, going to Mars is not a climate plan. It is a project for a few. A small number of people going to Mars could be an extraordinary scientific and human achievement. The problem is scale. If we anticipate that Earth might become less habitable for billions, a solution that can move a tiny fraction is not mitigation. It is selection.

NASA’s own human spaceflight framing makes the constraint clear. The Human Research Program identifies five hazards astronauts face on long missions: space radiation, isolation and confinement, distance from Earth, altered gravity, and closed or hostile environments (NASA). None of them have a well-tested, much less proven, solution. And astronauts are prepared to accept hazards that ordinary citizens are not.

If we care about life in the practical sense—meaning people, food systems, coastlines, and ecosystems—we should act differently. The immediate solutions are not primarily in the space technology bucket. They are in the social coordination and enforced rules bucket.

The core of our climate crisis is organized around consumptive capitalism: extract, produce, consume, dispose. It is incentivized by waste and emissions being cheap. This linear model could be replaced by a "circular economy." This means redesigning the rules so "use and dispose" stops being the default, and, ultimately, stops being profitable.

We do not need Mars to imagine that.

There is already a growing social movement that has gained some traction in this direction:

The "Buy it for Life" movement. In a perfect world, consumers would see the wisdom of buying good, quality products designed to last. But right now, the economic incentives just cut too strongly in the other direction. So that's where law and regulation come in: to change the incentives.

• Germany’s waste policy explicitly expanded producer responsibility through laws including the 1996 Closed Substance Cycle and Waste Management Act and later circular economy legislation (Federal Ministry for the Environment).
• The EU’s Circular Economy Action Plan is explicit about products that last longer and are designed for reuse, repair, and high-quality recycling (Europa.eu).
• Japan’s Basic Act for Establishing a Sound Material-Cycle Society frames circularity as comprehensive policy with fundamental principles and systematic implementation (Japanese Law Translation).
• China’s Circular Economy Promotion Law similarly frames a circular economy as a state objective, tied to saving resources and protecting the environment (Ministry of Ecology and Environment).

Regulation can function as a forcing mechanism for innovation. This has precedents outside circular economy branding. The U.S. Clean Water Act made it unlawful to discharge pollutants from a point source into navigable waters without a permit, turning normal dumping into regulated behavior (EPA). Superfund, or CERCLA, created federal authority and liability rules for hazardous waste releases, forcing responsible parties to clean up or reimburse the government (EPA). These are acts of governance, but they also change the technological and economic framework. Law can change what companies are allowed to do. In response, technology and practice reorganize around the new constraints. And then our expectations shift, too. Once it was routine for companies to dump toxic wastes into lakes and rivers. Today, Harvard undergraduates are appalled to learn that was ever true.

Climate policy can work the same way. California’s AB 32 required reducing greenhouse-gas emissions to 1990 levels by 2020, about a 15 percent reduction relative to a business as usual projection (CA.gov). What at the time felt as an ambitious target, turned out to be feasible and was converted into enforceable policy. It was promoted by an unlikely Republican governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and by Democratic legislator Fran Pavley. As perfectly illustrated in this example, the change is often driven by, of course, movie superheroes, but also by people who are much less known.

Now, back to Mars.

Mars remains a great playground for far-fetched thinking. But we should not conflate two different uses of imagination:

• Mars as a place to push science forward and sharpen our thinking, including governance thinking.
• Mars as a narrative tool that postpones the immediate work of decarbonization and institutional redesign.

In the context of climate politics, Mars is often just a red herring. It gives the mind somewhere else to look while the actual problem stays messy and nearby.

P.S.: The fallback argument is that Mars is still worth it because it will "inspire generations." That may be very much true. In the abstract. But it is not a neutral claim in the current political economy of space.

If the point were genuinely inspiration and shared knowledge, public Mars science would be treated as essential infrastructure, not as optional.

Perseverance has collected and cached samples in sealed tubes on Mars, explicitly aimed at possible return to Earth (NASA). NASA’s Mars Sample Return campaign is as a multi-mission effort that would bring carefully selected Martian samples to Earth for the first time (NASA). No spacecraft mission has ever returned samples from Mars to Earth. That is why the first time mattered.

As of early January 2026, Science reported that Congress’s FY2026 deal backed the White House effort to end the program, and described Mars Sample Return as dead (Science.com, Scientific American).

So here we are. The samples sit abandoned on Mars, while the loudest Mars rhetoric shifts to private inevitability and prestige.