Colonies on Mars require more than engineering

Elon Musk talks about a city on Mars the way a developer talks about a new subdivision outside Phoenix. The engineering problems are hard, but they are the kind of hard we know how to attack: get there cheaply, make propellant on site, close the life-support loop, shield against the radiation, and eventually warm the place up. There is a technical roadmap. There is a financial roadmap. There is no social roadmap at all.

That missing roadmap is what I want to talk about. I am an aerospace engineer, I spend my days on molten-salt reactor power systems and the long-term energy infrastructure any settlement off Earth would have to carry with it, and I share the technical optimism completely. The hard problems are hard, not impossible. What I do not share is the assumption that the society on Mars will sort itself out once the engineering is finished. The historical record says the opposite. The society is the harder problem, and it does not build itself.

What the history actually shows

Go to the Mormon pioneer cemetery at Winter Quarters, in Florence, Nebraska. The ground holds several hundred graves from the winter of 1846–47, when the Saints driven out of Nauvoo wintered on the Missouri River before going west to the Salt Lake Valley. A great many of the graves are children. Roughly one in twelve of the people who wintered there died that winter.

The Saints went anyway. They went the next year, and the year after, and for twenty years after that, organizing wagon and handcart companies that moved tens of thousands of people thirteen hundred miles to a place the rest of the country had already written off. On the federal maps the Great Basin was part of the Great American Desert—unfit for settlement, skipped over by the wagons bound for Oregon and California. The Saints chose it partly because nobody else wanted it, and partly because Missouri and Illinois had made staying impossible.

This is the pattern that real migration follows. People do not, as a rule, move to worse conditions to chase a dream. They move to survivable conditions to escape unsurvivable ones. The Pilgrims left England because England had become impossible for them. The Irish came during the famine because staying meant starving. The Saints crossed the plains because Illinois had burned them out and an extermination order in Missouri was fresh in living memory. The Vietnamese in the boats and the Cubans on the rafts were pushed by where they had been, not pulled by where they were going. The destination only had to be survivable.

It is a pleasant thing to picture a confident civilization at the height of its powers deciding to spread to other worlds. I do not believe that is how it will happen. Voluntary migration toward dramatically worse conditions, for the sake of an aspiration, is rare. It draws a few individuals. It does not draw a population, and a settlement needs a population.

If human beings ever live on the frozen plains of Mars or float in cloud cities in the air of Venus, it will most likely be because something on Earth made staying worse than going. That is not a thing to look forward to. But it is the honest framing, and it is also the useful one, because it asks the right question: what does the minimum survivable refuge actually require, for people who have already lost—or are losing—what they had?

The social architecture problem

We techy-types do not like to dwell on this, so we mostly don’t. We would never sign off on a hull design that left an airlock standing open. We leave this one open all the time.

A colony on Mars is a closed system. Every person in it depends, every single day, on equipment that other people maintain, on supply chains internal to the settlement, and on a social structure that hands out the work, settles the fights, raises the children, tends the sick and the old, and persuades people to sacrifice for the common good. The hostile environment charges a tax on every member, every day. Air, water, food, heat, radiation shielding—none of it can be taken for granted. The tax gets paid in continuous labor, in freedoms given up, in gratification deferred, and in standing exposure to the risk of death.

A person can carry that load alone for a little while. Nobody carries it indefinitely without a structure that spreads the burden, supplies the motivation, and provides a meaning larger than the personal cost. On Earth the surrounding society does most of that work without anyone noticing. In a colony there is no surrounding society. The colony is the society. There is no fallback.

Look at the settlements of hostile places that actually worked, and every one of them was carried by a tight community that existed before the settlement did. Plymouth had the Separatist congregation. Massachusetts Bay had the Puritan covenant towns. Jamestown survived only when the Virginia Company imposed near-military discipline, and nearly died every time that discipline slipped. The pioneer Saints had the ward and the priesthood quorum and the Relief Society. The Israeli kibbutzim had ideology and an explicit communal vow. The Antarctic stations run on military or quasi-military hierarchy. Even the Space Station rides on rigorous selection, years of training, and a wall of institutional support behind every six-month rotation.

I cannot find a single case in the record where a loose collection of individuals out of a consumer society settled a hostile place without first forming, or being taken into, a tight community. Where it was tried on the loose-individual basis, it failed nearly every time. The environment finds the social weakness, and the weakness compounds until the settlement folds or goes home.

This is the part that never appears in the engineering presentation. A million volunteers out of twenty-first-century industrial civilization will not step off the ships and spontaneously become a society that can hold together across generations. The history is not ambiguous on this point. The community comes first, or it does not come at all.

Which communities could actually do it

So the question is no longer “can we build the ship.” It is: what community exists today that can hold itself together under hostile conditions across generations, and run a high-technology settlement, and shoulder the cost of a hard migration for something bigger than personal comfort?

The high-cohesion religious communities are the obvious place to look. So let’s look.

What about the Amish, or the Hutterites? The cohesion is real and the multi-generational track record is excellent. But their identity is bound up in refusing exactly the technological apparatus a colony would have to run on. An Amish settlement on Mars is not a coherent idea. The conservative Mennonites run into the same wall.

What about the Haredi Jewish communities? Strong cohesion, yes. But the cultural energy is aimed at Torah study, not at engineering, and the dominant pattern does not produce physicists and aerospace specialists at anything like the rate a settlement would need.

What about the Catholic religious orders? Technically sophisticated and deeply committed—and small, celibate, and not built to expand. A community that does not have children cannot settle anything.

Then turn it around and ask after the people who already have the engineering: the secular educated professionals, the broad technical workforce of the rich economies. They have the skills and none of the cohesion. They are individualistic, atomized, and reproducing well below replacement. They cannot supply a multi-generational anything.

That leaves a very short list. To be honest, I can think of one community that sits in the intersection, and it is my own.

The cohesion is real and it is documented. The LDS Church runs a welfare system that can feed a family that has lost its income. It runs a missionary program that turns out tens of thousands of young adults a year, trained in disciplined deprivation under organized leadership—which is to say, trained in exactly the thing a colony demands. It has a temple system that anchors the community’s deepest commitments in ritual, and a ward structure that knows the families, visits the homes, and organizes mutual aid as a matter of routine. And the institutional muscle for moving people to hard country exists in living memory: the wagon and handcart companies, the advance parties planting crops for those coming behind, the systematic colonization of the Great Basin from Idaho to Mexico under Brigham Young.

The technology posture is the load-bearing distinction. Latter-day Saint theology authorizes technical work and treats it as part of the work of God. The community turns out engineers and scientists well above the rate its size would predict. BYU’s engineering programs are substantial. The Utah technology economy is full of companies founded or shaped by Latter-day Saints, in software, biotech, and aerospace. The LDS Church itself operates family-history infrastructure at planet scale and broadcasts a global conference in dozens of languages. A lot of the engineers quietly working U.S. defense and aerospace and frontier-technology programs are members. Jon Goff and I are two of them.

High cohesion married to high-technology participation is a rare profile. Most people miss it, because Latter-day Saints don’t lead with their religion at work, because the media caricature of the community looks nothing like its actual professional reality, and because the community itself doesn’t advertise its technical contribution. But the profile is real, and it is closer to what an off-world settlement would actually require than anything else currently on offer.

What the pioneer migration actually demonstrated

The Latter-day Saint migration to the Great Basin, from 1847 into the early 1870s, is the closest thing history offers to organized off-world settlement. The space community doesn’t study it, because it gets filed under “religious history” instead of “settlement logistics.” That is a mistake, because the lessons transfer.

The migration moved roughly seventy thousand people across thirteen hundred miles of barely-mapped country, on a budget the migrants raised themselves, under a leadership that planned the whole operation centrally and executed it through distributed wagon and handcart companies. The system ran advance parties that planted crops for the companies coming behind, supply caches stocked by the previous year’s travelers, scouting reports that updated the route, and disciplinary structures that held order in thousand-person camps over months on the trail. The mortality was real but lower than the surrounding context would lead you to guess. The 1856 handcart disaster—the Willie and Martin companies, perhaps two hundred dead—was the exception, and it was the exception that forced the reforms that made the later companies better provisioned and better timed. Across the two decades, the migration as a whole moved at a death rate comparable to ordinary American mortality of the day. Of my sixteen great-great-grandparents, all but two made the crossing before the advent of the railroad, and some of them made it multiple times as they returned east for missionary service.

On arrival the Saints colonized a region the federal government had marked unfit for agriculture. Brigham Young directed the founding of more than three hundred settlements between 1847 and 1877, calling specific families to specific places with specific jobs—farming the river valleys, mining the mountains, manufacturing in Salt Lake, missions to the native peoples. Each settlement was organized before it existed: a bishop, a Relief Society, a school, an irrigation plan, a farm plan, and a plan for defense. Most of them held. Many of them are cities now.

And the engineering was not trivial. Agriculture in the Great Basin runs on irrigation, and the Saints built the first significant Anglo-American irrigation works in North America, inventing the legal and cooperative frameworks the rest of the West later copied. The roof of the Salt Lake Tabernacle, designed with no modern structural analysis, has stood more than a hundred and fifty years and still gets studied for how well it performs. They built railroads, telegraph lines, woolen mills, sugar-beet processing, and iron foundries, often years or decades ahead of the regions around them.

What made all of it work was the combination we have been circling: cohesion, multi-generational commitment, a theology that authorized the technical work, a willingness to suffer for purposes the community held as transcendent, and central planning executed through distributed hands. Pull any one of those out and the migration either never happens or happens and fails.

What follows from this

Take the pattern seriously and several things follow.

First, the engineering case is not the binding constraint. The binding constraint is social, and the social constraint is being almost entirely ignored in the public conversation. A serious settlement program will either bring strong-cohesion communities in on purpose, or it will fail, or it will end up inherited by whichever community inside the first settlement turned out to actually have the capability.

Second, the arithmetic favors the cohesive communities even when they start as a minority of the settlers. Strong transmission down the generations, plus replacement-level-or-above fertility, plus a closed system, equals eventual majority. A Mars settlement that starts as a Musk-style mixed founder population, with some fraction of Latter-day Saints or some comparable community in the mix, will most likely, given enough generations, become a settlement run by the descendants of that sub-community. That isn’t a boast. It’s arithmetic, working on communities instead of individuals.

Third, the kind of community required is unusual enough that planning ought to name it. The current model—open volunteer recruitment, on the assumption that a working society will simply emerge—has no historical precedent for success. The model that has succeeded is the chartered community: an existing tight-bonds group, leadership and structures intact, transplanted whole. Plymouth was a chartered community. The Great Basin settlement was a chartered community. Israel was, in its way, a chartered settlement undertaken by a people who had organized themselves for the purpose.

Fourth, religious or quasi-religious motivation matters more than secular space advocacy wants it to. The work will be hard, the rewards distant, the costs immediate, and the meaning is not going to come out of the labor itself. A community that can supply transcendent meaning has an advantage that no salary and no flag can replace. Secular space advocacy does not enjoy hearing this. The record says it anyway. LDS colonists on Mars will build a temple there and feel spiritually anchored.

A speculative note

I will be the first to say that the Latter-day Saint community has not been pointed toward space settlement by its leadership. The emphasis right now is on missionary work to the living, proxy temple work for the deceased, and on individual discipleship. I think it highly unlikely that the leadership ever calls the community off the planet. But then I remember that I have already watched things come to pass in this century that I would never have believed. The latent capability is real. Whether it is ever switched on depends on a direction that has not been given.

The capability, though, exists. The same community that made Utah out of a refugee migration in the 1840s could in principle make a lunar or Martian settlement out of a far smaller starting population, given a comparable timeline and a comparable commitment from the active membership. The LDS Church has demonstrated, more than once, that it can absorb a major new direction when leadership calls for one—the gathering to the West, the temple-building, the worldwide missionary effort, the global expansion of the organization. Each was an enormous investment of the community’s resources and attention, undertaken when it was called for, and largely accomplished.

I make no prediction. I only observe that among the communities now on Earth with the demonstrated ability to settle a hostile place across generations, the Latter-day Saints are one of the very few—and may be the only one—that pairs that cohesion with the high-technology posture that life off Earth would demand.

What the space community should do

There is a practical implication in all of this, and it is mostly homework.

Study the social architecture of historical settlement, harder than we have. Plymouth, Massachusetts Bay, the pioneer Saints, the kibbutzim, the long list of settlement projects that succeeded and the longer list that failed—that is the empirical record any honest settlement planning has to rest on. Most space advocacy treats it as irrelevant, or never learned it. It is neither irrelevant nor unknowable.

Be honest about the kind of society a colony will need, and about which communities can actually supply it. The current talk of recruiting willing individuals is unhistorical and unserious. The settlement that lasts will be the one that arrived as a community, or that formed one fast enough to live through the first hard winter. Planning that ignores this is planning to fail. And Mars is one long winter.

And understand that the communities who could supply the social architecture have their own purposes, their own theology, and their own clocks. They are not commodity inputs to be hired onto someone else’s project on someone else’s terms. If you want them, the terms will have to take seriously what they are and what they require. That is uncomfortable for a secular program to hear. The alternative is to keep designing a Mars city on the assumption that the society will take care of itself, which it will not.

A closing observation

Standing at Winter Quarters, looking at those graves, I saw something I had not quite seen before. The people buried there did not go West because the Salt Lake Valley sounded nice. They went because staying in Nauvoo had become impossible, because the community they belonged to was strong enough to organize an impossible journey, and because the meaning they shared was enough to carry the cost. The destination only had to be survivable. The push, the community, and the meaning did the rest.

That, I think, is what settlement off Earth will look like, if it ever happens at the scale the visionaries imagine. Not a triumph of individual ambition, but the work of communities bound by something larger than themselves, going to hard places because the difficulty had become preferable to the alternative, and holding together across generations by the same means human beings have always used under hard conditions. The engineering will be necessary. The engineering will not be enough. The communities that can supply what the engineering cannot are the ones who will decide whether the cities ever rise.

I do not know whether a city on Mars will ever be built. If one is, I suspect it will be built by people who already know how to build cities in cold red deserts, and who already know the building takes more than blueprints and propellant. The pattern is old. The Saints know it because their ancestors lived it. I hope that these thoughts help you see why I think that is important to our future in space.