(Photo by NASA/JPL-Caltech/Univ. of Arizona via Getty Images)
*Could colonizing Mars be a lucrative or potentially profitable venture? originally appeared on Quora: the knowledge sharing network where compelling questions are answered by people with unique insights*.
Could colonizing Mars be a lucrative or potentially profitable venture? Actually I’ve written a chapter in my Case for Moon First about just this. It’s not easy to find much detail for Mars. There’s just the eight page section “Interplanetary Commerce” in Robert Zubrin’s “The Case for Mars”, while books on Lunar settlement and colonization devote many chapters to the topic and there are many published papers also on the commercial value of the Moon.
According to Elon Musk, there is only one way to make a Mars colony profitable, and that’s through licensing of intellectual property - inventions and other intellectual creations. This idea originates with Robert Zubrin who also suggested that a Mars colony could make a profit by selling deuterium. Mars colonization enthusiasts have suggested various other ways a colony might be made profitable, in online forums.
I’ve said before that we should continue with planetary protection of Mars for a fair bit longer and that we shouldn’t just drop it because we want to send humans there. After all, if there is native indigenous microbial life on the planet, that would be one of the biggest discoveries in biology ever, especially if based on a different biochemistry. It might also be vulnerable to Earth life. Some early form of life could be especially vulnerable, such as the RNA-Isbased cells of the RNA world hypothesis, potentially tiny because they don’t use either DNA or proteins. For more on this see my One example of what we might find on Mars…
We shouldn’t prioritize sending humans to Mars, it seems to me, if there is any chance that we can destroy the possibility of such a major discovery in biology by introducing Earth microbes. Then there are many other reasons to be cautious about introducing Earth life until we know what it will do to the planet and know if doing that is beneficial or harmful to whatever is there, and indeed to our future selves and descendants. The problem here is that it is a single interconnected system with the Martian dust storms able to spread microbial spores throughout the planet. We are nowhere near the level of understanding needed to make such a decision about an entire planet, at present, in my view.
But this is relevant whether or not we send humans to the Mars surface. If there is anything of great commercial value on Mars then either.
Elon Musk has said clearly, several times that he doesn't think there will be anything material from Mars that would be worth transporting back to Earth.
"I don't think it's going to be economical to mine things on Mars and then transport them back to Earth because the transport costs would overwhelm the value of whatever you mined, but there will likely be a lot of mining on Mars that's useful for a Mars base, but it's unlikely to be transferred back to Earth. I think the economic exchange between a Mars base and Earth would be mostly in the form of intellectual property" "Another alternative is that Mars could pay for itself by transporting back ideas. Just as the labor shortage prevalent in colonial and 19th century America drove the creation of Yankee Ingenuity's flood of inventions, so the conditions of extreme labor shortage combined with a technological culture and the unacceptability of impractical legislative constraints against innovation will tend to drive Martian ingenuity to produce wave after wave of invention in energy production, automation and robotics, biotechnology, and other areas. These inventions, licensed on Earth, could finance Mars even as they revolutionize and advance terrestrial living standards as forcefully as 19th Century American invention changed Europe and ultimately the rest of the world as well."
Elon Musk is skeptical about space mining generally thinking it probably won't be possible to export from the asteroids - "I'm not convinced there's a case for taking something, say, platinum, that is found in an asteroid and bringing it back to Earth." Of course many think that this will be possible. Myself I just don't know, I've heard the arguments on both sides and remain on the fence here.
Anyway Elon Musk doesn't go into any more detail about the case for or against material exports. Robert Zubrin however has discussed this in a paper "The Economic Viability of Mars Colonization " in the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society from 1995, and later on in the Interplanetary Commerce section of Case for Mars. He first outlines the need for exports to make a Mars colony viable:
"A frequent objection raised against scenarios for the human settlement and terraforming of Mars is that while such projects may be technologically feasible, there is no possible way that they can be paid for. On the surface, the arguments given supporting this position appear to many to be cogent, in that Mars is distant, difficult to access, possesses a hostile environment and has no apparent resources of economic value to export. These arguments appear to be ironclad, yet it must be pointed out that they were also presented in the past as convincing reasons for the utter impracticality of the European settlement of North America and Australia." ..."While the Exploration and Base building phases can and probably must be carried out on the basis of outright government funding, during the Settlement phase economics comes to the fore. That is, while a Mars base of even a few hundred people can potentially be supported out of pocket by governmental expenditures, a Martian society of hundreds of thousands clearly cannot be. To be viable, a real Martian civilization must be either completely autarchic (very unlikely until the far future) or be able to produce some kind of export that allows it to pay for the imports it requires." ..."Mars is the best target for colonization in the solar system because it has by far the greatest potential for self-sufficiency. Nevertheless, even with optimistic extrapolation of robotic manufacturing techniques, Mars will not have the division of labor required to make it fully self-sufficient until its population numbers in the millions. It will thus for a long time be necessary, and forever desirable, for Mars to be able to pay for import of specialized manufactured goods from Earth. These goods can be fairly limited in mass, as only small portions (by weight) of even very high-tech goods are actually complex. Nevertheless, these smaller sophisticated items will have to be paid for, and their cost will be greatly increased by the high costs of Earth-launch and interplanetary transport. What can Mars possibly export back to Earth in return?"
So according to his ideas, the Mars colony is supported on the basis of outright government funding for the early stages of exploration and base building. He thinks that in these early stages you need something over and above ISRU (In Situ Resource Uitilization) for a commercial case unless the base is autarchic - a word which usually refers to individual liberty and governing oneself - but in this context I think he must mean, producing everything it needs, independent of Earth.
So it is rather similar to Elon Musk's idea except that in Elon Musk’s vision, the settlement is supported by private funding from Earth in the early stages rather than government funding.
Zubrin then discusses the possibility of ores on Mars, and we'll come back to this later in this section:
..."Mars may have concentrated mineral ores, with much greater concentrations of ores of precious metals readily available than is currently the case on Earth due to the fact that the terrestrial ores have been heavily scavenged by humans for the past 5000 years. It has been shown that if concentrated supplies of metals of equal or greater value than silver (i.e. silver, germanium, hafnium, lanthanum, cerium, rhenium, samarium, gallium, gadolinium, gold, palladium, iridium, rubidium, platinum, rhodium, europium, etc.) were available on Mars, they could potentially be transported back to Earth at high profit by using reusable Mars-surface based single stage to orbit vehicles to deliver the cargoes to Mars orbit, and then transporting them back to Earth using either cheap expendable chemical stages manufactured on Mars or reusable cycling solar sail powered interplanetary spacecraft. The existence of such Martian precious metal ores, however, is still hypothetical."
In his section on Interplanetary Commerce in “Case for Mars” page 239 and following he also suggests deuterium as an export. I'll look at that below, between the section on geological products and the section on fuel exports.