Back on Mars – – houseplant edition

 [Picking up where we left off with our long neglected CSI:Mars thread.]

The way we discuss and think about the future of space has come to be dominated by a nonsensical mixture of magical heuristics, sci-fi tropes, inappropriate analogies to colonialism and the "settling" of the American West, and often libertarian ideology. This is perhaps nowhere more evident than with supposedly serious speculations about man's future presence on Mars.

Take for instance the following paragraph from the endlessly embarrassing Atlantic article:

What’s more, the power to generate and distribute something as basic as oxygen will give what Cockell called “levers of control” to specific, corruptible individuals. At one point, this inspired Cockell to create a tongue-in-cheek poster to illustrate one of his papers: alluding to classic British posters from WWII, its slogan read, “Grow Houseplants For Liberty.” “The idea,” he said, “is that the more people who grow plants on Mars in their habitats, the more oxygen that’s produced for the Martian atmosphere, and the less that needs to be produced by machines. There’s quite an interesting potential link between agriculture, plant growth, and freedom.” The more you control your own oxygen supply, in other words, the less the Martian state—or a predatory private oxygen firm—controls you.

Here, as in many discussions of the settling of Mars, oxygen takes on a role analogous to that of water in an old cowboy movie with and added element of mysticism layered on. In these narratives, plants often take on a magical quality and in this particular case, a strange political significance. Having a houseplant becomes an act of resistance, a way of declaring your independence from a tyrannical power.
Controlling the populace through oxygen supply has been a central plot point in countless science-fiction stories, but oxygen is only the beginning of your worries in this situation.

Almost none of these popular "what life will be like on Mars" articles come anywhere near addressing just how inhospitable the planet is. This is a freezing world with an incredibly thin atmosphere constantly bombarded by radiation. Given the amount of shielding necessary for surface dwellings, most of the habitats will have to be buried using heavy equipment. Once in place, everything necessary for sustaining life temperature, food, water, air pressure, will be dependent on extremely elaborate systems requiring constant maintenance. The idea that just having a fern in the corner will give you some extra measure of independence is absurd.

Of course, the entire conversation is even sillier when you take into account that despite the ubiquitous artists' renderings of space miners tapping away, even if someone comes up with a viable business model based on Martian mining, virtually all of the surface work will be done by robots who don't mind the high radiation, the intense cold or the near vacuum.  Given this and the difficulty and expense of transporting  humans and keeping them alive under these conditions, we'd expect a skeleton crew of absolutely essential workers. Less like the wide open mining camps of space operas, and more like a deep sea rig only with no shore leave.