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 stocks that were the source of the egalitarian democracy, individualism, and spirit of innovation that characterize America. It was the existence of 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," Turner proclaimed. He added, "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..."
The Turner thesis was a bombshell. Within a few years it had launched an entire school of historians who proceeded to demonstrate that not only American culture, but the entire western progressive humanist civilization that America 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.
Turner presented his paper in 1893. Just three years earlier, in 1890, the American frontier was declared closed: The line of settlement that had always defined the furthermost existence of western expansion had actually met the line of settlement coming east from California. Now, a century later, we face the question that Turner himself posed -- What if the frontier is gone?
Perhaps the question was premature in Turner's time, but not now. Currently we see around us an ever more apparent loss of vigor of American society: increasing stagnation 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 irrationality; popular culture's increased banality; 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.
The creation of a new frontier presents itself as America's and humanity's greatest social need. Nothing is more important. 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 die.
I believe that humanity's new frontier can only be on Mars.
Mars has what it takes
Why Mars? Why not Earth -- under the oceans, or perhaps in such remote regions as Antarctica? And if it must be in space, why Mars? Why not the moon or artificial satellites orbiting 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, 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. In this day and age, with modern terrestrial communication and transportation systems, no matter how remote or hostile the spot 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 not then 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 -- three of the four elements necessary for life. (They are present in the lunar soil in parts per million quantities, somewhat like gold in seawater. If there were concrete on the moon, lunar colonists would mine it for its water.)
You could bring seeds to the moon and grow plants in enclosed greenhouses on the surface, 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.
Though the Red Planet may appear at first glance to be a desert, 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 percent) 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 also 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 were adopted, the first human exploration mission could be launched within ten years at a cost less than twenty percent 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 is remote and can be settled. The fact that Mars can be 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.
Mars beckons
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 no value will be placed on those aspects of humanity that differentiate us from animals, nor will value be placed 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 400-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 not only need technology, but the scientific outlook, creativity and freethinking 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.
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