Author of Red Mars calls 'bullshit' on emigrating to the planet

Or Antarctica too.

Like, pretty much any of those place has

0) Air at not a near vacuum

1) Liquid water

2) not a lot of radiation

3) appropriate gravity

Why would you want to even live on Mars? You have to essentially live in a very small pressure bunker at some rad-safe depth. Doing so for a little while would be fun and exciting, sure. Homesteading that life? Every one of your kids would opt to leave (if possible) the second they got a chance.

I think I was in a similar boat and where in doubt, I think I powered through for completionist sake. But it's possible you paused right before some of the most interesting stuff in the whole book.

It's not a spoiler to note that the it begins with a flash forward that talks about the fate of a major character. Some of the most interesting stuff starts happening to them and it comes full circle in a way that leads up to that flash forward. And mercifully the constant mentions of regolith lessen the deeper into the series you get.

For starters "Terraforming Mars" is not a prominent feature of Musk's Mars plans. He's repeatedly stated that it's possible to do so, but the things he's consistently said he wants to do are to establish a Mars colony and turn it self-sufficient. Then maybe terraforming as a long-term goal, but the success of his mars colony does not depend on terraforming at all.

On his whole "if you can terraforming Mars, you can terraforming Earth" I would remind you that Musk's ideas for terraforming Mars include "let's nuke the poles", "we could heat the soil to release more CO2" and "after releasing a lot of CO2, we could electrolyze the water in the ice caps to get oxygen". The challenges for reversing global warming on Earth and terraforming Mars are almost polar opposites

deGrasse's most reasonable point is that the ROI of the whole Mars plan is terrible. Probably not zero (selling flights and accommodations for tourists and science institutes is the easy one). But Musk has said he does not want to finance the Mars plan with VC money, for the exact reasons deGrasse is pointing out. Musk's claim isn't that he's doing it because it's profitable but because it's "geopolitically expedient" as deGrasse puts it. How this squares with the recent news of a SpaceX IPO I don't know, but that wasn't a factor back in 2024

A late uncle of mine did his thesis at Arizona on the practical limitations of interstellar travel.

The TLDR of it is that teenagers suck.

They assumed the physics of those days (mostly unchanged) and no faster than light travel [0] and that you can't reasonably cryo-sleep a human or grow them on site[1].

From that, you follow the logic and if you want to run a ship out to some star, it's going to take a long ass time. So much so that you have to have kids, a 'generation' ship. And that's where the trouble starts. Because teenagers are going to teenager, they just will not trust you when you say that the outside of their very little world is deadly. And then when you get there, it's going to take a lot of convincing to reprogram them to jump out and start colonizing.

The only solution is to build a really big spaceship. He reasoned that it's usable surface area needed to be about that of Japan [2]. So you get to a Stanford Torus or the like. That's when you can finally 'trust' that the people living on this thing wont blow up halfway there and can remain 'stable' enough over the (possibly) millennia of travel.

The issue, of course, is that you'd just build all these things for use in the Sol system anyway - why bother traveling?

Something something new lands something exploration something.

Okay, so, like, the end result is that putting human on a new planet in another system is just not happening when you really take a look. That was the essential conclusion to the thesis.

It's too hard, teenagers suck too much, and the 'cheaper' alternatives are too good.

[0] He made a great point that you should not assume that our modern understanding of physics should remain the same when doing really long term calculations like this. We have advanced so much in our knowledge and likely the understandings of other fields will compound much faster in the future.

[1] Same for biology, but they had to start somewhere.

[2] this assumption is a bit much for me even today, but the steps he takes are sound. You can argue them down a lot though, I feel.

Well, that's why it's a good idea to have a place to try things out, so we can learn.

But of course, doing that is highly impractical for many other reasons.