What If We Have to Leave Earth and Go to… I Don’t Know, Mars?
Recently, I came across an AI-generated reel on social media. It showed a young woman leaving Earth to go and live on Mars. Permanently. In the reel, she knew she would never return. What stayed with me, though, was something she said about the children who would eventually be born there. Mars would be their normal. They would never know what it felt like to live on Earth.
Of course, the whole thing was fictional. AI-generated. Someone's imagination turned into a reel. But it made me strangely fearful.
Imagine being born into a world where you had never felt rain.
Never walked barefoot on grass.
Never stood under a tree.
Never seen an ocean except in old photographs and videos.
Earth would be something your parents told you stories about.
And perhaps it affected me because I have always been fascinated by the universe.
As a child, I had an animated movie called Galaxy Express 999, where the protagonist travelled from one planet to another on a train. A train through space! I was completely intrigued. Other planets represented adventure, possibility, and everything we hadn't discovered yet. Decades later, I still feel that excitement about space exploration.
But that little AI reel somehow changed the question in my head.
From:
What if someday we could live on another planet?
to:
What if someday we had to?
Maybe it is because of everything we keep seeing around us: devastating floods, wildfires, hurricanes, extreme heat, and droughts. Some are natural disasters, some are being intensified by our changing climate, and then there are the problems we create ourselves: pollution, deforestation, wars, overconsumption.
And suddenly, leaving Earth doesn't feel like such a fascinating adventure. It feels like running away from home.
Mars Can Be an Adventure, Not an Escape Plan
The interesting part is that living on Mars is no longer confined entirely to science fiction.
We already have rovers exploring its surface. We know Mars once had liquid water. Scientists are studying how humans might survive long-duration space missions, and Perseverance's MOXIE experiment even demonstrated that oxygen could be produced from carbon dioxide in the Martian atmosphere.
As a scientist, and as that child who once imagined trains travelling between planets, I find all of this incredible. I absolutely think we should explore. Go to the Moon. Go to Mars. Send spacecraft farther. Ask ridiculous questions. Find out what is out there.
Human curiosity is something worth celebrating.
But exploring another planet and abandoning our own are two very different ideas. Because Mars isn't exactly waiting for us with green fields and fresh air. It has no breathable atmosphere. It is extremely cold. Radiation is a major concern. Humans living there would need extraordinary technology simply to breathe, drink water, grow food, and step outside safely.
We would spend billions, perhaps trillions, trying to create tiny pockets of habitability on a planet fundamentally hostile to human life.
Meanwhile, look at what we already have.
A planet where oxygen exists all around us.
Where water falls from the sky.
Where plants grow from soil.
Where oceans regulate climate, forests store carbon, insects pollinate crops and countless interconnected systems quietly keep us alive.
Perhaps instead of asking only:
How can we make Mars habitable?
we should be asking much more urgently:
How do we keep Earth habitable?
If we can figure out how to manufacture oxygen on Mars, surely we can put extraordinary scientific effort into protecting the air we already breathe.
If astronauts can recycle water because every drop matters in space, perhaps we can remember that every drop matters here too.
If humanity can engineer a machine, send it millions of miles through space and land it on another planet, we certainly have enough intelligence to build cleaner energy systems, more resilient cities, protect ecosystems and find better ways to live with the planet rather than continuously taking from it.
None of this is simple, of course. Climate change will not disappear because we plant a few trees or remember to carry reusable bags. These are enormous systemic problems involving governments, industries, communities and individual choices.
But surely running away cannot be the solution.
Earth isn't a disposable first home that we abandon when things become difficult. It is our motherland in the most literal sense.
Every human being who has ever existed began here. Every civilization, every language, every piece of music, every scientific discovery, every childhood memory, and every love story we know belongs to this tiny planet.
Maybe someday humans really will live on Mars.
Maybe children will even be born there.
But I hope the girl in that fictional reel never becomes our reality, someone looking back at Earth knowing she can never come home.
I hope future generations travel to Mars because they are curious.
Because they want to explore.
Because humanity wants to know what lies beyond our little blue planet.
Not because we ruined the only home we had and needed somewhere else to go.
As a child, I loved the idea of travelling from one planet to another. I still do.
I just never imagined that one day the most important part of that journey might not be reaching another planet. It might be making sure we can always come back home.
Comments