SEVERAL INFLUENTIAL PHILOSOPHERS and environmentalist thinkers argue that terraforming Mars and other planets, making them suitable for humans and other Earth life, would be immoral. As we near a day when terraforming is actually possible, the arguments against it are worth reviewing and rebutting.
“Trying to change whole planets to suit our ends is arrogant vandalism,” Monash University philosopher Robert Sparrow asserts in a 1999 essay, saying the desire to do so reflects “aesthetic insensitivity and hubris.” Sparrow maintains that “we must show that we are capable of looking after our current home before we could claim to have any place on another.”
In a special 2019 issue, neuroscientist Lori Marino likewise claims that “our species is not capable of living on any planet sustainably.” Another contributor to that issue of the journal, University of Texas anthropologist John Traphagan, agrees. “We are not capable of enacting a successful colonization of another planet,” he writes. “The fact that we have destroyed our home planet is prima facie evidence of this assertion.”
