I am the founder and president of the Mars Society. For the past third of a century, I have been among the foremost advocates in the world for human space exploration and settlement of the Red Planet.
In 1990 I set forth the Mars Direct plan, which revolutionized thinking about how to do human Mars missions. I publicized it widely in a series of papers leading up to the publication of my 1996 bestseller, The Case for Mars, which inspired untold myriads of people internationally, including Elon Musk, to make the human settlement of Mars their cause and their passion.
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Now, bought (or more likely rented) by the very substantial financial support Elon Musk has provided his campaign, Donald Trump is offering to make my lifelong dream a reality – but I’m not taking the deal.
Here is the reason why
I’m not sure I want a president who can be bought to support any cause – even if the one of this moment happens to be mine – by anyone with enough cash to put on the line.
Moreover, it is questionable whether Trump will even keep his word to Musk and actually launch such an initiative once he is elected. It is even more doubtful that a United States wildly fractionalized by Trump could sustain a Mars program conceived as his pet project, as with such odiferous partisan branding it would surely face cancellation as soon as the opposition party took either the House or the Senate.
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But let’s leave those matters aside.
Let’s stipulate that, for once in his life, Trump – a man who has made his fortune and career by swindling his investors, his lenders, his customers, his workers, the taxpayers, and the voters – keeps his word, maintains focus, and honestly tries his level best to deliver to his donor.
For those of us who want to see a multiplanetary future for humanity, wouldn’t it be worth it for us to look away from Trump’s imperfections and get with the program?
No, it would not.
Current events are far too serious to turn a blind eye
As I write these lines, thousands of Georgians are rallying in the central square of Tbilisi, protesting the takeover of their country by Kremlin puppets using voter fraud to place their nation under Putin’s iron heel once again.
Events in Moldova are following the same script. Ukraine has been invaded outright, and with inadequate but nevertheless critical support from a shaky coalition of the US and its NATO partners is desperately holding the line.
Rather than criticize the Biden administration for its weakness defending the walls of world freedom, Trump and Vance are calling for deserting them entirely, starting with cutting off all arms aid to Ukraine. This would cause a human catastrophe, with hundreds of thousands of people slaughtered, and a strategic disaster, as with Ukraine’s million-man army deleted from the West’s order of battle, there would be absolutely nothing to stop Putin from seizing the Baltic States.
The fact that these are NATO nations would be no deterrent to invasion. On the contrary, with Ukraine gone, NATO would have no counter move, making the seizure of the Baltics and its concomitant terminal humiliation of the Western alliance all the more enticing.
That’s just for starters, Because the massacres that Russian occupiers would commit in Ukraine and the Baltics would send millions of refugees into western Europe, bringing to power anti-immigrant parties sponsored by the Kremlin.
That is the game plan, and Trump is clearly part of it. To replace its defunct network of communist parties, guided by the thinking of its chief ideologist Aleksandr Dugin, the Kremlin has created a new Comintern of AltRight parties. These include the AfD in Germany, the National Rally in France, similar movements in Hungary, Slovakia, Austria, the Netherlands, and the Trumpist MAGA movement itself. They all share the same DNA, combining extreme xenophobia with fealty to Moscow.
A farewell to the free world
If Trump is elected, we are looking at the pending dissolution of not just “the rules-based international order” – which is an abstraction – but the free world itself.
For the past eighty years we have not had a general war. This is because of the deterrent effect of the free world’s policy of collective security. That will end, and with it will end the golden age of the Pax Americana we have enjoyed, if not properly appreciated, since 1945.
Trump claims that his desertion of the cause of world freedom is necessary appease Putin and avoid war. On the contrary, as it did in the 1930s, the abandonment of collective security to appease aggressors is guaranteed to unleash war.
Then there is the little matter of what Trump proposes to do inside the United States.
Virtually every person who worked closely with Trump in his last administration has denounced him for his dictatorial tendencies and his refusal to accept the rule of law. In his last administration he was restrained by traditional Republicans. Now he has a Supreme Court ruling saying that he does not need to obey the law, a Republican party that has been purged of those loyal to the Constitution, and a vast mob of supporters, liberated from the burden of regarding reality as relevant, who will enable him to do whatever he wants – especially under the emergencies his unleashing of trade war and world war would probably create.
Sharing Putin’s views of reality
Finally, the entire Trump operation has been conducted in parallel with Kremlin efforts to create a post-truth environment worldwide. Like Putin, who claimed that the army that invaded Crimea was not his, Trump does not actually try to convince anyone of anything, but rather frazzles everyone with so many fantastical lies and contradictory statements that no one can believe anything anymore.
The Trump movement requires that its followers distrust all established institutions and scientific knowledge, even to the point of doubting the efficacy of the vaccines that have saved their own lives and that of billions of other people for more than a century.
He claims he can impose a 100 percent tariff on all foreign goods without sending prices soaring or causing a global economy-wrecking trade war. It’s obviously false, and totally crazy, but you must discard your mind and accept it if you want to stay in the congregation. In Trump we trust, is the gospel.
A brave new world?
So here is the thing. I really want humans to go to Mars. But the reason why humans should go to Mars is contrary to Musk’s view that it will ensure we have some survivors elsewhere when the Earth is destroyed.
No, the reason I believe humans should go to Mars is to establish new creative branches of human civilization, composed of free people who, pitting their ingenuity against the challenge of the Martian frontier, will add their inventions and tales to the human story.
Such brave new societies cannot be launched by a nation of slaves. We cannot build a better new world on the ruins of the old. For Mars to be free, Earth must be free.
So I’m saying no to Trump.
Dr. Robert Zubrin is president of the Mars Society www.marssociety.org and author of The Case for Mars and most recently of The New World on Mars: What We Can Create on the Red Planet.
The views expressed in this opinion article are the author’s and not necessarily those of Kyiv Post.
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