The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss

Before we live on Mars, will we need to prove that we can live underground?

This thought experiment and possible path is found in futurist Amy Webb‘s (@amywebb) new book The Genesis Machine: Our Quest to Rewrite Life in the Age of Synthetic Biology, coauthored with microbiologist and geneticist Andrew Hessel. Renowned computer scientist Rana el Kaliouby describes the book as a “roadmap for this interdisciplinary field of synthetic biology that is forever reshaping life as we know it.” 

Part Three of the book explores different futures in the form of fictional, speculative scenarios.

These scenarios describe how the world may develop, given what we know to be true today. These are near-term plausible developments, reasonable extensions of current trend lines, not sci-fi. They are also opportunities to rehearse the future, and these structured thought exercises are used by everyone from military strategists to CEOs. 

Scenario #4, “The Underground,” is excerpted from The Genesis Machine with permission and with light edits for length.

Please enjoy! 

The Underground

For decades, Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, had been insisting that humanity’s best shot at long-term survival was to eventually become a multiplanetary species. He cited elevated levels of carbon pooling in the Earth’s atmosphere, extreme droughts, and the loss of biodiversity as precursors to a looming catastrophe. He began development on a program called Starship in 2016, which was intended to ferry cargo and, eventually, one hundred passengers between the Earth, Moon, and Mars. By 2021, NASA contracted SpaceX to develop a modified Starship vehicle for its Artemis program. Musk focused on building the core infrastructure that would eventually be required to sustain life, whether on Earth or on the Moon, Mars, or even beyond. But Musk realized he could not build an off-planet living environment on his own. Ever the showman, and with his personal fortune approaching $1 trillion, Musk announced an audacious contest called the Colony Prize. He’d award $1 billion to any team that could build and operate an underground, airtight colony of one hundred people for two years. In other words, the ultimate Mars simulation.^1,2,3

Musk knew that for humans to thrive off-planet, regenerative systems would need to be developed at a scale never before achieved.⁴ The International Space Station once housed as many as thirteen astronauts on board, but typically only six or seven lived in the ISS at once. Colonists also needed to grapple with long periods of confinement. The typical ISS mission was about six months.⁵ NASA astronaut Scott Kelly had spent nearly a year in space. Cosmonaut Valeri Polyakov held the record for a single mission, spending an impressive 437 days on the Mir station in the 1990s.⁶ A better example for understanding a hundred-person enclosed society was a submarine––but even here the longest submerged and unsupported mission topped out at 111 days.⁷ Winning the Colony Prize would require keeping the doors sealed tight for more than 700 days.

The contest rules were simple by design. Entrants were to outfit and assemble airtight canisters into a closed living environment. Those canisters, which would begin as empty, modular self-contained spaces that would fit into the cargo bay of a rocket, could be configured as living quarters, science labs, farms, schools, water treatment systems, manufacturing facilities, and anything considered necessary to support a community. Colonies were encouraged to include facilities to support concerts, sports, and other forms of recreation.⁸ Once configured and loaded with supplies, the doors would be sealed and the mission clock started. The goal wasn’t to reinvent Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic dome. It was to invent entirely new networks of modular structures—using something akin to the Minneapolis Skyway System, the world’s largest contiguous system of enclosed structures and bridges—that could scale to eventually become a city. Over time, such a plan would replicate some aspects of life in the days before extreme weather became our new normal.

In addition to container reconfiguration plans and simulations, contest entrants were told to submit a list of potential colony inhabitants, justification for their selection, and a detailed plan to ensure quality of life. There was an important caveat: the colony couldn’t just be made up of a bunch of carefree early twenty-somethings who, back in the halcyon days of the aughts, might have attended Coachella. Every colony had to mirror the full spectrum of society: a mix of families, couples without children and single people. The prize was intended, in part, to test population expansion in a closed system. That meant that facilities to manage pregnancy, delivery, and infant care, as well as various health issues and the various stages of life, had to be built.⁹