The Mars Delusion

Certainly, there is no denying the rhetorical appeal to horizonless aspiration. Yet for all Zubrin’s enumeration of thrust-to-weight ratios and chemical formulae, the defining currency of this notional colony, and the keystone of its author’s unwavering faith in its feasibility, is human genius. In Zubrin’s telling, the first Martians will face a proposition not dissimilar to that which confronted early humans as they expanded out of Africa, a migration enabled less by Earth’s benevolence than the force of our species’ ineluctable resolve. Atavistic allusions to the colonization of North America, shorn of any ethical or genocidal wrinkles, crop up in almost every chapter.