Tag: gravity

By Futurist Thomas Frey

The Question Nobody’s Asking About Mars Colonization

We obsess over getting to Mars—the rockets, the habitats, the life support systems. But here’s the question nobody’s seriously grappling with: what happens to humans born and raised on Mars?

Not tourists. Not astronauts rotating back to Earth. Actual Martian-born humans who spend their entire lives in 38% Earth gravity, breathing different air, eating different food, experiencing 24.6-hour days, enduring radiation levels that would kill Earth-born humans, and developing under fundamentally different physical constraints.

They won’t be “humans living on Mars.” Within a generation or two, they’ll be something else—a divergent branch of humanity adapted to Martian conditions in ways that make them incompatible with Earth. And Earth-born humans arriving on Mars will face a brutal choice: rapidly evolve or die trying to maintain Earth-normal biology in an environment fundamentally hostile to it.

This isn’t science fiction speculation. It’s straightforward biology. Change enough environmental variables and you get different organisms. Mars changes essentially everything about human development.

Let me walk you through the critical variables that differ between Earth and Mars—and why these differences mean Mars-born and Earth-born humans will have almost nothing in common physiologically, psychologically, or culturally within just a few generations.