Image: SpaceX
The day humans set foot on Mars for the first time is a historic moment at rare scale. Something that took millions of years of cumulative evolution to get to that point.
What's cool about this type of historic moment is that we get to know about it in advance, at least with varying degrees of confidence. There are many other consequential historic events that change the world forever that come by surprise, and they tend to be much less fun.
Given the rate of acceleration of AI and also the recent SpaceX IPO I decided to simply take it as a given that we will get to Mars, and wanted to understand what the timeline was from here, what the main bottlenecks are, and who's working on what.
Through this I came across a fellow Australian's blog, Casey Handmer, who it turns out has been thinking a lot about this for the better part of a decade, and written some amazing articles on what it means to get to a self sustaining civilization, Autarky, and how we should be thinking about the prioritization of things to be shipped to Mars to get to Autarky as fast as possible. It also turns out he has quite smartly picked the primary bottleneck to work on which is synthetic fuel production, which is needed to get people back home (although is entirely focused on Earth for now). Check out that company called Terraform.
Even further out, I've been imagining "Breath day", the first day where people can take off their helmet on Mars and not die a terrible death. The scale of terraforming to achieve that day seems to be a multihundred year journey at minimum, and a huge amount of hurdles to solve before that can even be considered. But nonetheless fun to imagine.
This train of thought was also a good excuse to use some of my own personal research tools to gather as many sources and insights as possible from many pockets of the internet. To my surprise I couldn't make it as far as I thought with ChatGPT and Claude's deep research tools, and somewhat to my annoyance and curiosity led to building some of my own tooling on that front.
Research runs — researcher.now
Persona sessions — persona.energy · AI personas, not the individuals
My current best prediction for the day we land on Mars is April 17, 2040. Which at the time of writing is 13 years from now. Kind of far but also not far at all. It's been a refreshing perspective shift to consider the next decade or so and grounding it on a known unknown milestone like this.
You can see the output from Researcher and Persona on mars.design.
Mars Landingmars.design ↗My intent is to continue treating that site as a kind of personal library and playground for the various aspects of making Mars our second home at varying levels of granularity and timescale, doing my best to find and aggregate a lot of the amazing thinking that's already out there.
As an aside, I also find it pretty surprising that there are no good prediction markets for this yet. One main reason is that it's an aggressively long time horizon which tends to be ineffective. Another reason is that getting to the day market granularity at that timescale typically leads to fragmented liquidity. There's some great designs like Distribution Markets from Dave White at Paradigm, but from what I could see it had not been implemented yet.
Written by me, deployed via my agent.
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