We're Going to Mars, and We're Bringing the Stars and Stripes With Us

Nice ambition but a long way from practical, particularly when we are a long ways from Terraforming Terra.  We really want to get that right first.

Understand we need a global population greater than 100 billion and today we need the deliberate production of four healthy babies per female.  If we could start tomorrow, we could plausibly yreach 20 Billion in one global generation, 40 billion in two generation and perhaps 100 billion inside five generations.  That is a century.  As well a huge life extension is also in the works.

All the deserts must become wet and well watered by natural precipatation to wash out salinity.  

Mars is worth a visit, but any applicastion will need undergound refugia, which by the by, we need on Earth as well.  We also need to tackle artificial gravity as well for all that.  Doing all that then begs the question of establishing rotating space habitats a mere mile across spinning to provide one g gravity.

And why not hollow out Phobos as well?  The key for Mars and all space will be artificial gravitry.

We're Going to Mars, and We're Bringing the Stars and Stripes With Us

Stephen Green | 3:30 PM on January 20, 2025

AI image prompted by VodkaPundit using a paid version of Grok.

“We will pursue our manifest destiny into the stars, launching American astronauts to plant the Stars and Stripes on the planet Mars," President Donald Trump said Monday in his second inaugural address. Words matter. And those words matter more than most.

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Manifest Destiny is one of those 19th-century concepts — like the Monroe Doctrine that helped keep our hemisphere free of European and Asia predators for two centuries — that became dangerously unfashionable among the America-hating lefties who long-marched through our institutions.

It must have been 30 years ago that I went to see a Thomas Jefferson impersonator who either quoted or paraphrased Jefferson's thoughts that Americans would need several hundred years to fill in the continent from sea to shining sea. That would have been around 1800. Not quite 50 years later, we welcomed California into the union and went about the serious business of filling in the expanse and closing the frontier — a mission accomplished in 1893, according to historian Frederick Jackson Turner.

A year or so prior, I had a conversation somewhat along this line with a coworker of mine in San Francisco. Scott was a good guy, very sharp — Boomer, Air Force vet, gay but not queer, Democrat but not radical — we'd bonded over our mutual love of bad horror movies and anti-PC politics. This was just two years after the dissolution of the Soviet Union when Mother Russia was at her lowest ebb. Scott suggested to me that we buy Siberia. "Americans do better when we have a frontier," he said not at all joking, "and Russia needs the money."

I told him — again, not at all joking — that the whole thing would be "strip malls from end to end within 50 years."

Americans lost something when we closed the frontier... something very American. The frontier challenged us, sometimes killed us, and its untamed geography helped make us the no-bulls**t, freedom-loving people we are, or at least aspire to be. I wonder sometimes if it's no coincidence that the only uniquely American form of statism — progressivism — took root in the national psyche just as we ran out of new worlds to conquer.

With nothing to tame, it's as though we started trying to tame one another, instead. "SAD!" as POTUS 47 might say.

Well, there's a new world to conquer, courtesy of Elon Musk's ambition to take humanity to Mars.

Make no mistake, SpaceX is going to Mars with or without the imprimatur of the United States of America. But by promising to "plant the Stars and Stripes" on Mars, Trump reminded us that Manifest Destiny is not dead, that there are still frontiers to tame, and most importantly, that Americans are still capable of great daring.

Like our British cousins before us, I'm certain that any control we enjoy over our Martian colonists will be both tenuous and short-lived. And that's OK because America is an idea, an idea already carved into (and forged from) one new world and, someday sooner than many reading this today would believe, perhaps another.

Almost six decades years ago we went to the Moon "for all mankind." But Apollo — and I'm not running down Apollo at all here — was essentially a vanity project, a mission to show the world that we were better in vision, technology, and most of all in spirit than the Communists.

But in colonizing Mars, we'll be doing that but also so much more. Trump understands as Musk does that for America to succeed, America has to grow. Musk says he wants to establish a self-sustaining colony on Mars because "We don’t want to be one of those single-planet species that go extinct. If we are a multi-planet species, then the light of consciousness is not extinguished."

And if those brave explorers bring with them the Stars and Stripes, the torch of liberty will shine on, too.