The purpose of this essay was to raise awareness of mankind’s destructive relationship to life on Earth in a provocative way and suggest that the exercise of trying to bring life to Mars might teach us a lesson we seem otherwise unable to learn.

Although it’s thrilling to imagine terraforming other planets, I’ve pulled this down for two reasons:

(1) My writing failed to differentiate between “civilized” humans and the indigenous cultures, now largely decimated, who previously maintained sustainable cultures for millennia.

(2) Given the increasing rate of climate change it now seems clear that the hard lessons of survival we might have found on Mars are headed directly for us here on Earth, and soon.