"The Significance of the Martian Frontier,"
by Robert Zubrin 

It was 100 years ago, 1893, at the annual conference of the American 
Historical Association, that a young professor of history from the then 
relatively obscure University of Wisconsin got up to speak.  Frederick 
Jackson Turner's talk was scheduled as the last one in the evening session, 
preceded by a series of excruciatingly boring papers on topics so obscure 
that kindness forbids even the reprinting of their titles.  Nevertheless, 
for some unexplained reason, the majority of the conference participants 
stayed up to hear him.  Perhaps somehow a rumor had gotten afoot that 
something important was about to be said, if so it was correct, for in one 
bold sweep of brilliant insight Turner laid bare the source of the American 
soul.  It was not legal theories, precedents, traditions, national or racial 
stock that was the source of the egalitarian democracy, individualism, and 
spirit of innovation that characterize America, it was the existence of 
the Frontier.

"...to the frontier the American intellect owes its striking characteristics.
That coarseness of strength combined with acuteness and inquisitiveness; that
practical, inventive turn of mind, quick to find expedients; that masterful
grasp of material things, lacking in the artistic but powerful to effect 
great ends; that restless, nervous energy; that dominant individualism, 
working for good and evil, and withal that buoyancy and exuberance that comes 
from freedom - these are the traits of the frontier, or traits called out 
elsewhere because of the existence of the frontier.  Since the days when the 
fleets of Columbus sailed into the waters of the New World, America has been 
another name for opportunity, and the people of the United States have taken 
their tone from the incessant expansion which has not only been open but has 
even been forced upon them.  He would be a rash prophet who should assert 
that the expansive character of American life has now entirely ceased.  
Movement has been its dominant fact, and, unless this training has no effect 
upon a people, the American energy will continually demand a wider field for 
its exercise.  But never again will such gifts of free lands offer themselves.  
For a moment, at the frontier, the bonds of custom are broken and unrestraint 
is triumphant. There is not tabula rasa.  The stubborn American environment 
is there with its imperious summons to accept its conditions; the inherited 
ways of doing things are also there; and yet, in spite of the environment, 
and in spite of custom, each frontier did indeed furnish a new opportunity, 
a gate of escape from the bondage of the past; and freshness, and confidence, 
and scorn of older society, impatience of its restraints and its ideas, and 
indifference to its lessons, have accompanied the frontier.  What the 
Mediterranean Sea was to the Greeks, breaking the bonds of custom, offering 
new experiences, calling out new institutions and activities, that, and more, 
the ever retreating frontier has been to the United States directly, and to 
the nations of Europe more remotely.  And now, four centuries from the 
discovery of America, at the end of a hundred years of life under the 
Constitution, the frontier has gone, and with its going has closed the 
first period of American history."

Turner was unstoppable.  America's greatest leaders were all men of the
frontier - Washington, Jefferson, Jackson, and Lincoln, he said, and the 
great struggles of American history have all hinged ultimately upon the fate 
of frontier.  The attempt by the British crown to close the frontier drove 
the revolution.  The Civil War began in the frontier territories and it was 
the fight for the future of the frontier, not abstract issues of State's 
Rights or morality, that sent tens of thousands marching into battle at 
Shiloh and Gettysburg.  Most importantly, Turner showed how the very 
character of Americans, their philosophical outlook, and their society are 
all based upon the frontier.  The frontier creates a perpetual labor shortage 
in the settled areas, which drives up wages and thus technological innovation.  
With people in short supply, each one is valued more preciously, putting a 
premium on popular education and elevating the general estimate of the human 
dignity of the common man.  So long as the frontier exists, the factory 
worker back East always has another option in the West, and even if he does 
not choose to exercise it, he has to be treated with the respect due to 
someone who can quit - who works by choice, not duress.  So long as the 
frontier is open and new fortunes can be made, the establishment of a closed 
aristocracy is impossible.

The Turner thesis was a bombshell, which within a few years created an 
entire school of historians who proceeded to demonstrate that not only 
American culture, but the entire worldwide western progressive humanist 
civilization that American has generally represented in its most distilled 
form was the result of the Great Frontier of global settlement opened to 
Europe by the Age of Exploration.  It was the Great Frontier that shattered 
the static, stultifying, irrational, dogmatic, and completely stratified 
world of medieval Christendom, unchaining thought, hope, and imagination 
to revolutionize the world.

Then the question arises, with the end of the frontier, what happens to 
America and all it has stood for?  Can a free, egalitarian, democratic, 
innovating society with a can-do spirit be preserved in the absence of 
room to grow?  Maybe the question was premature in Turner's time, after all, 
even with the vanishing of the line of settlement, most of the country was 
still empty.  In any case, a popular culture based on 400 years of frontier 
individualism does not die instantly, and the children of America's last 
generation of pioneers could take America through World War II and on to the 
Moon.  But what of now? What do we see around us now but an ever more 
apparent loss of vigor of American society, increasing fixity of the power 
structure and bureaucratization of all levels of society, impotence of 
political institutions to carry off great projects, the cancerous 
proliferation of regulations affecting all aspects of public, private and 
commercial life, the spread of irrationalism, the banalization of popular 
culture, the loss of willingness by individuals to take risks, to fend for
themselves or think for themselves, economic stagnation and decline, the
deceleration of the rate of technological innovation and a loss of belief in
the idea of progress itself.  Everywhere you look, the writing is on the wall.
Without a frontier from which to breathe life, the spirit that gave rise to 
the progressive humanistic culture that America for the past several 
centuries has offered to the world is fading.  Once again, the issue is not 
just one of national loss.  Human progress needs a vanguard, and no 
replacement is in sight.

The creation of a new frontier thus presents itself as America's & humanity's
greatest social need.  Nothing is more important, because apply what
palliatives you will, without a frontier to grow in, not only American 
society, but the entire global civilization based upon Western enlightenment 
values of humanism, reason, science, and progress will ultimately die.

I believe that humanity's new frontier can only be on Mars.  Why is this the
case? Why for example can it not be on Earth, on or under the oceans, or
perhaps in such remote regions as Antarctica? And if it must be in space, why
on Mars? Why not on the Moon or in artificial satellites in orbit about the
Earth?

It is true that settlements on or under the sea or in Antarctica are entirely
possible, and their establishment and access would be much easier than that 
of Martian colonies.  Nevertheless, the fact of the matter is that at this 
point in history such terrestrial developments cannot meet an essential 
requirement for a frontier, to wit, they are insufficiently remote to allow 
for the free development of a new society.  Put simply, in this day and age, 
with modern terrestrial communication and transportation systems, anywhere on 
Earth the cops are too close.  If people are to have the dignity that comes 
with making their own world, they must be free of the old.

Why then, not the Moon?  The answer is because there's not enough there.  
True, the Moon has a copious supply of most metals and oxygen, in the form of
oxidized rock, and a fair supply of solar energy, but that's about it.  For 
all intents and purposes, the Moon has no hydrogen, nitrogen, or carbon 
(They're present in the Lunar soil in parts per million quantities, somewhat 
like gold in sea water.  If there were concrete on the Moon, Lunar colonists 
would mine it to get its water out.), and these are three of the four 
elements most necessary for life.  You could bring seeds to the Moon and 
grow plants in enclosed greenhouses there, but nearly every atom of carbon, 
nitrogen, and hydrogen that goes into making those plants would have to be 
imported from another planet.  While sustaining a lunar scientific base under 
such conditions is relatively straightforward, growing a civilization there 
would be impossible.  The difficulties supporting significant populations in 
artificial orbiting space colonies would be even greater.

Mars has what it takes.  It's far enough away to free its colonists from
intellectual, legal, or cultural domination by the old world, and rich enough
in resources to give birth to a new.  The Red Planet may appear at first 
glance to be a desert, but beneath its sands are oceans of water in the form 
of permafrost, enough in fact, if it were melted and Mars' terrain were 
smoothed out, to cover the entire planet with an ocean several hundred meters 
deep.  Mars' atmosphere is mostly carbon-dioxide, providing enormous supplies 
of the two most important biological elements in a chemical form from which 
they can be directly taken up and incorporated into plant life.  Mars has 
nitrogen too, both as a minority constituent (3%) in its atmosphere and 
probably as nitrate beds in its soil as well.  For the rest, all the metals, 
silicon, sulfur, phosphorus, inert gases, and other raw materials needed to 
create not only life but an advanced technological civilization, can readily 
be found on Mars.

The United States has, today, all the technology needed to send humans to 
Mars.  If a "travel light and live off the land" strategy like the Mars 
Direct plan were adopted, then the first human exploration mission could be 
launched within ten years at a cost less than 20% of NASA's existing budget.  
Once humans have reached Mars, bases could rapidly be established to support 
not only exploration, but experimentation to develop the broad range of 
civil, agricultural, chemical and industrial engineering techniques required 
to turn the raw materials of Mars into food, propellant, ceramics, plastics, 
metals, wires, structures, habitats, etc.  As these techniques are mastered, 
Mars will become capable of supporting an ever increasing population, with an 
expanding division of labor, capable of mounting engineering efforts on an 
exponentially increasing scale.  Once the production infrastructure is in 
place, populating Mars will not be a problem - under current medical 
conditions an immigration rate of 100 people per year would produce 
population growth on Mars in the 21st Century comparable to that which 
occurred in colonial America in the 17th Century.  Within a century, an 
engineering capability could be created on Mars with the capability to 
literally transform the planet, if not to a fully Earth-like environment at 
least to the warm, wet conditions of Mars' primitive past, making a desert 
world into a new home for a new spectrum of descendants of terrestrial life.

Mars can be settled, and the fact that Mars can be thus settled and altered
defines it as the New World that can create the basis for a positive future 
for terrestrial humanity for the next several centuries.

Why Humanity Needs Mars

"We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created 
 equal, and endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights, among 
 them life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness..."
 _______ Declaration of Independence, 1776

"Everything has tended to regenerate them; new laws, a new mode of 
 living, a new social system; here they are become men."
 _______ Jean de Crevecoeur, "Letters from an American Farmer," 1782

To see best why 21st Century humanity will desperately need an open frontier 
on Mars, we need to look at modern Western humanist culture and see what in 
it makes it so much more desirable a mode of society than anything that has 
ever existed before.  Then we need to see how everything we hold dear will be 
wiped out if the frontier remains closed.

The essence of humanist society is that in it human beings are valued, that
human life and human rights are held precious beyond price.  Such notions 
have been for several thousand years the core philosophical values of Western
civilization, dating back to the Greeks and the Judeo-Christian ideas of the
divine nature of the human spirit.  Yet they could never be implemented as a
practical basis for the organization of society until the great explorers of
the age of discovery threw open a New World in which the dormant seed of
medieval Christendom could grow and blossom forth into something the likes of
which the world had never seen before; something so wonderful that for 400
years millions of men and women all over the world have abandoned everything
they had, traveled thousands of miles, braving incredible dangers and 
hardships to make themselves parts of it, and millions of others have 
conspired and fought, often against tremendous odds, to bring it to their 
homelands.

The problem with Christendom was that it was fixed, it was a play for which 
the script had been written and the leading roles both chosen and assigned.  
The problem was not that there were insufficient natural resources to go 
around - medieval Europe was not heavily populated, there were plenty of 
forests and other wild areas - the problem was that all the resources were 
owned.  A ruling class had been selected and a set of ruling institutions, 
ideas and customs had been selected, and by the law of "Survival of the 
Firstest," none of these could be displaced.  Furthermore, not only the 
leading roles had been chosen, but also those of the supporting cast and 
chorus, and there were only so many such parts to go around.  If you wanted 
to keep your part, you had to keep your place, and there was no place for 
someone without a place.

The New World changed all that by supplying a place in which there were no
established ruling institutions, an improvisational theater big enough to
welcome all comers with no parts assigned.  On such a stage, the players are
not limited to the conventional role of actors, they become playwrights and
directors as well.  The unleashing of creative talent that such a novel
situation allows is not only a great deal of fun for those lucky enough to be
involved, it changes the view of the spectators as to the capabilities of
actors in general.  People who had no role in the old society could define
their role in the new.  People who did not "fit in" in the old world could
discover and demonstrate that far from being worthless, they were invaluable 
in the new, whether they went there or not.

The New World destroyed the basis of aristocracy and created the basis of
democracy, it allowed the development of diversity by allowing escape from
those institutions that were imposing uniformity, it destroyed a closed
intellectual world by importing unsanctioned data and experience, it allowed
progress by escaping the hold of those institutions whose continued rule
required continued stagnation, and it drove progress by defining a situation 
in which innovation to maximize the capabilities of the limited population
available was desperately needed.  It raised the dignity of man by raising 
the price of labor and by demonstrating for all to see that human beings can 
be the creators of their world, and not just its inhabitants.

Now consider the probable fate of humanity in the 21st Century under two
conditions, with a Martian Frontier and without it.

In the 21st Century, without a Martian Frontier, there is no question that
human diversity will decline severely.  Already, in the late 20th Century,
advanced communication and transportation technologies have been eroding the
healthy diversity of human cultures on Earth, and this tendency can only
accelerate in the 21st.  On the other hand, if the Martian Frontier is opened,
then this same process of technological advance will also enable us to
establish a new branch of human culture on Mars and eventually worlds beyond.
The precious diversity of humanity can thus be preserved on a broader field,
but only on a broader field.  One world will be just too small a domain to
allow the preservation of the diversity that is needed not just to keep life
interesting, but to assure the survival of the human race.

Without the opening of a new frontier on Mars, continued Western civilization
faces the risk of technological stagnation.  To some this may appear to be an
outrageous statement, as the present age is frequently cited as one of
technological wonders.  In fact, however, the rate of progress within our
society has been decreasing, and at an alarming rate.  To see this, it is 
only necessary to step back and compare the changes which have occurred in 
the past 30 years with those that occurred in the 30 years preceding and the 
30 years before that.  Between 1903 and 1933 the world was revolutionized; 
cities were electrified, telephones and broadcast radio became common, 
talking motion pictures appeared, automobiles became practical, and aviation 
progressed from the Wright Flyer to the DC-3 and Hawker Hurricane.  Between 
1933 and 1963 the world changed again, with the introduction of color 
television, communication satellites and interplanetary spacecraft, 
computers, antibiotics, SCUBA gear, nuclear power, Atlas, Titan, and Saturn 
rockets, Boeing 727's and SR-71's.  Compared to these changes, the 
technological innovations from 1963 to the present are insignificant.  
Immense changes should have occurred during this period, but did not.  Had we 
been following the previous 60 years technological trajectory, we today would 
have videotelephones, solar powered cars, maglev trains, fusion reactors, 
hypersonic intercontinental travel and regular passenger transportation to 
orbit, undersea cities, open-sea mariculture, and human settlements on the 
Moon and Mars.  Even more indicative of technological decadence than the 
nonappearance of these innovations, is the fact that a fundamental advance 
in technology in an area basic to the total process of production that was 
already emerging in 1963, namely nuclear power, has been blocked in its 
implementation by political forces dedicated to preserving the technological 
status quo, in the process raising technophobia to the status of a 
fashionable political and philosophical creed.

It is important to understand this.  The widespread introduction of 
commercial nuclear power in the Western world was not stopped by the small 
groups that duel with the industry in public hearings and courtrooms.  
Whatever one might think of the pluses and minuses of nuclear power, the fact 
remains that the anti-nuclear activists have only been allowed to have their 
way with commercial nuclear industry because the world's dominant financial 
institutions currently hold the mortgages on literally trillions of dollars 
worth of coal, oil and gas reserves, all of which would be severely devalued 
should a replacement source of energy come on line.  Such investments have 
caused these financial institutions and their governmental allies to develop 
a preference for stagnation in energy technology that is extremely difficult 
to overcome.  Indeed, nuclear technology is only supported by the powerful 
in the Western world today for the decisive military applications of nuclear 
weapons and nuclear submarines - in the case of deployment of such 
instruments no advice from Sierra Club is requested.  Analogous paradigms 
hold true in other important areas of the economy, so that practically the 
only areas where notable technological progress is occurring currently is in 
products such as home computers that do not compete directly with previously 
well established industries.  As the interlocking of terrestrial institutions 
of political and economic power becomes ever more intimate and incestuous 
in the 21st Century, this trend towards technological stagnation can only 
deepen.

Unless of course, there is an alternative uncontrolled domain that drives
progress from the outside, and this is what the Martian Frontier will provide.
Consider a nascent Martian civilization: its future will depend critically 
upon the progress of science and technology to which the colonists will 
therefore enthusiastically contribute.  Thus just as the inventions of 
produced by the "Yankee Ingenuity" of frontier America were a powerful 
driving force on world-wide human progress in the 19th Century, so the 
"Martian Ingenuity" born in a culture that puts the utmost premium on 
intelligence, practical education, and the determination required to make 
real contributions will make much more than its fair share of the scientific 
and technological breakthroughs that will dramatically advance the human 
condition in the 21st.  A prime example of where this is likely to occur 
is energy production.  Mars does have one major energy resource that we do 
currently know about; deuterium, which can be used as the fuel in nearly 
waste-free thermonuclear fusion reactors.  Earth has large amounts of 
deuterium too, but with all of its existing investments in other, more 
polluting, forms of energy production, the research that would make possible 
practical fusion power reactors has been allowed to stagnate.  The Martian 
colonists are certain to be much more determined to get fusion on-line, and 
in doing so will massively benefit the mother planet as well.  Fusion power
will also lead to fusion propulsion, making possible spaceships that will 
carry hundreds of passengers and thousands of tons of payload rapidly back 
and forth between Earth and Mars, thus accelerating the rate of colonization 
and opening up the possibility of emigration to Mars to more and more people.  
Not only would such technology cause travel times between Earth and Mars to 
shrink from months to weeks, but travel times to the outer solar system would 
be reduced from years to months, and even voyages to the stars could become 
possible on a time scale of decades instead of millennia.  Thus by acting as 
a driver on technology, the Martian Frontier can become a gateway to the 
practically infinite hinterland that lies beyond.

The parallel between the Martian frontier and that of 19th century America as
technology drivers is, if anything, vastly understated.  America drove
technological progress in the last century because its western frontier 
created a perpetual labor shortage in the east, thus forcing the development 
of labor saving machinery and providing a strong incentive for improvement of 
public education so that the skills of the limited labor force available 
could be maximized.  This condition no longer holds true in America, in fact 
far from prizing each additional citizen, immigrants are no longer welcome 
here and a vast "service sector" of bureaucrats and menials has been created 
to absorb the energies of the majority of the population which is excluded 
from the productive parts of the economy.  Thus in the late 20th Century, and
increasingly in the 21st, each additional citizen is and will be regarded as 
a burden.  On 21st Century Mars, on the other hand, conditions of labor 
shortage will apply with a vengeance.  Indeed, it can be safely said that no 
commodity on 21st Century Mars will be more precious, more highly valued, and 
more dearly paid for than human labor time.  Pay rates will be higher on 
Mars, workers will be treated better, and public education will be driven 
much harder than ever was the case on Earth.  Just as the example of 19th 
Century America changed the way the common man was regarded and treated in 
Europe, so the impact of progressive Martian social conditions will not only 
be felt on Mars.  Put simply, a new standard will be set for a higher form of 
humanist civilization on Mars, and viewing it from afar the citizens of Earth 
will rightly demand nothing less for themselves.

The frontier drove the development of democracy in America by creating a
self-reliant population which insisted on the right to self-government.  It 
is doubtful that democracy can persist without such people.  True, the 
trappings of democracy exist in abundance in America today, but meaningful 
public participation in the process has all but disappeared.  No 
representative of a new political party has been elected president of the 
U.S. since 1860, neighborhood political clubs and ward structures that 
allowed citizen participation in party deliberations are gone, as are the 
camp meetings and torchlight election parades.  With a re-election rate of 
95%, the U.S. Congress is about as susceptible to the people's will as the 
British House of Lords, and regardless of the will of Congress, the real 
laws, covering ever broader areas of economic and social life, are 
increasingly being made by a plethora of regulatory agencies whose officials 
do not even pretend to have been elected by anyone.  Judges are still elected 
in many places, but the elections generally feature little public involvement, 
so that rather than representing any concept of justice as understood by the 
public, the judicial system has come to function largely as an autonomous 
legal caste.  Clearly, if it is not to continue its ongoing degeneration 
into sham, democracy in America and elsewhere in western civilization needs 
a shot in the arm.  That boost can only come from the example of a frontier 
people whose civilization incorporates the ethos that breathed the spirit 
into democracy in America in the first place.  As Americans showed Europe 
in the last century, so in the next the Martians can show us the way away 
from oligarchy.

There are greater threats that a humanist society faces in a closed world 
than the return of oligarchy, and if the frontier remains closed in the 21st 
Century we are certain to face them.  These threats are the spread of various 
sorts of anti-human ideologies and the development of political institutions 
that incorporate the notions that spring from them as a basis of operation.  
At the top of the list of such pathological ideas which tend to spread 
naturally in a closed society is the Malthus theory, which holds that since 
the world's resources are more or less fixed, population growth must be 
restricted or all of us will descend into bottomless misery.  Malthusianism 
is scientifically bankrupt and all predictions made upon it have been wrong, 
because human beings are not mere consumers of resources.  Rather we create 
resources by the development of new technologies that find use for them.  
The more people, the faster the rate of innovation, and this is why contrary 
to Malthus, as the world's population has increased, the standard of living 
has increased, and at an accelerating rate.  Nevertheless, in a closed 
society Malthusianism has the appearance of self-evident truth, and herein 
lies the danger.  Because if the idea is accepted that the world's resources 
are fixed, then each person is ultimately the enemy of every other person, 
and each race or nation is the enemy of every other race or nation.  The 
inevitable result is the creation of tyrannical regimes to restrict 
population growth, such as that now prevailing in China, or worse, the 
development of Nazi style genocidal governments as various populations become 
convinced that their vital self interest requires the elimination of those 
other races that are allegedly competing with them for the world's finite 
resources.  Only in a universe of unlimited resources can all men be brothers.

It is not enough to argue against Malthusianism in the abstract, such debates
are not settled in academic journals.  Unless people can see broad vistas of
unused resources in front of them, the belief in limited resources tends to
follow as a matter of course.  Unless the frontier is re-opened, the
probability is high that humanity will create hell for itself in the 21st
Century.

Is the world that humans live in changeable or is it fixed?  Are we the 
makers of our world or just its inhabitants? In a society that is growing 
into a frontier the creative role of humans is self-evident, and the dignity 
of man is raised accordingly.  Nineteenth century Americans, building cities, 
draining swamps, and digging canals could have no doubt as to humanities role 
as improvers of creation.  Today much of what they saw as progress is cited 
by many as environmental destruction.  Despite abundant scientific evidence 
that evolution is intrinsic to nature, a belief is spreading that nature as 
it is at the moment is sacrosanct, and that humans should not have the right 
to change it.  An open frontier on Mars would not merely restore the 19th 
Century American humanist views in such matters, it would raise it to 
unprecedented heights,  because in the process of terraforming Mars we will 
not merely be taming a wild world, but bringing a dead one to life.  What 
greater affirmation of the positive nature of the human creative spirit could 
there be?

The Never Ending Renaissance

"We have come recently to boast of a global economy without thinking of its
implications, of how unfortunate we are in finding it.  It would be more
cheering if news should come that by some freak of the solar system another
world had swung gently into our orbit and moved so close that a bridge could 
be built over which people could pass to new continents untenanted and new 
seas uncharted.  Would those eager immigrants repeat the process they 
followed when they had that opportunity, or would they redress the grievances 
of the old Earth by a new bill of rights...?  The availability of such a new 
planet, at any rate, would prolong, if it did not save, a civilization based 
on dynamism, and in the prolongation the individual would again enjoy a spell 
of freedom....

"It would be very interesting to speculate on what the human imagination is
going to do with a frontierless world where it must seek its inspiration in
uniformity rather than variety, in sameness rather than contrast, in safety
rather than peril, in probing the harmless nuances of the known rather than 
the thundering uncertainties of unknown seas or continents.  The dreamers, 
the poets, and the philosophers are after all but instruments which make 
vocal and articulate the hopes and aspirations and the fears of a people.

"The people are going to miss the frontier more than words can express.
 For four centuries they heard its call, listened to its promises, and bet 
 their lives and fortunes on its outcome.  It calls no more...."
 _______ Walter Prescott Webb, "The Great Frontier," 1951.

Western humanist civilization as we know and value it today was born in
expansion, grew in expansion, and can only exist in a dynamic expanding state.  
While some form of human society might persist in a non-expanding world, that 
society will not feature freedom, creativity, individuality, or progress, 
and placing no value on those aspects of humanity that differentiate us from
animals it will place no value on human rights or human life as well.  Such a
dismal future might seem an outrageous prediction, except for the fact that 
for nearly all of its history most of humanity has been forced to endure 
static modes of social organization, and the experience has not been a happy 
one.  Free societies are the exception in human history, they have only 
existed during the four centuries of frontier expansion of the West.  That 
history is now over, the frontier that was opened by the voyage of Christopher 
Columbus is now closed.  If the era of western humanist society is not to be 
seen by future historians as some kind of transitory golden age, a brief 
shining moment in an otherwise endless chronicle of human misery, then a new 
frontier must be opened.  Mars beckons.

But Mars is only one planet, and with humanity's power over nature rising
exponentially as they would in an age of progress that an open Martian 
frontier portends, the job of transforming and settling it is unlikely to 
occupy our energies for more than three or four centuries.  Does the settling 
of Mars then simply represent an opportunity to "prolong but not save a 
civilization based upon dynamism?"  Isn't it the case that humanist 
civilization is ultimately doomed anyway? I think not.  The universe is vast; 
its resources, if we can access them, are truly infinite.  During the four 
centuries of the open frontier on Earth, science and technology have advanced 
at an astonishing pace.  The technological capabilities achieved during the 
20th century would dwarf the expectations of any observer from the 19th, the 
dreams of one from the 18th, and seem outright magical to someone from the 
17th.  The nearest stars are incredibly distant, about 100,000 times as far 
away as Mars; yet Mars itself is about 100,000 times as far from Earth as 
America is from Europe.  If the past four centuries of progress have 
multiplied our reach by so great a ratio, might not four more centuries of 
freedom do the same again? There is ample reason to believe that they would.  
Terraforming Mars will drive the development of new and more powerful sources 
of energy; settling the Red Planet will drive the development of ever faster 
modes of space transportation.  Both of these capabilities in turn will open 
up new frontiers ever deeper into the outer solar system, and the harder 
challenges posed by these new environments will drive the two key technologies 
of power and propulsion ever more forcefully.  The key thing is not to let 
the process stop, for if it is allowed to stop for any length of time society 
will crystallize into a static form that is inimical to the resumption of 
progress.  That is what defines the present age as one of crisis.  Our old 
frontier is closed, the first signs of social crystallization are clearly 
visible.  Yet, progress, while slowing, is still extant; our people still 
believe in it and our ruling institutions are not yet incompatible with it.  
We still possess the greatest gift of the inheritance of a four hundred year 
long Renaissance, to wit, the capacity to initiate another by opening the
Martian frontier.  If we fail to do so, our culture will not have that 
capacity long.  Mars is harsh, the people who settle it will need not only 
technology, but the scientific outlook, creativity, and free-thinking 
individualistic inventiveness that stand behind it.  Mars will not allow 
itself to be settled by people from a static society; those people won't have 
what it takes.  We still do.  Mars today waits for the children of the old 
frontier, but Mars will not wait forever.

Like an aircraft moving down a runway, western civilization used the freedom
afforded by the open frontier to accelerate itself to takeoff speed.  The end
of the runway has now been reached.  If our journey is to continue, we must 
now take courage and fly.

END OF TEXT
