ON MARS

In 2019, I found myself at an astronomy club night — the Mid-Cheshire Astronomical Group, a group I'd been attending for a while. The guest speaker that evening was Professor Martin Braddock, and at some point during the session he asked the room a question that I'd heard many times before but had never quite answered to my own satisfaction: what do you think are the biggest challenges of colonising Mars?

It's the kind of question that sounds simple until you sit with it. I went away and did what I do — I started thinking carefully, mapping the problem, talking to people, reading. Not scientists or engineers, mostly, but lay people: curious, thoughtful individuals who approach the question from everyday experience rather than technical expertise. I wanted to understand what the human concerns were. The philosophical ones. The ones that don't appear in engineering specifications.

What I didn't know at the time was that Martin was doing the same thing at scale — collecting views from over 800 members across 22 UK-based astronomical societies and scientific groups, feeding that crowd-sourced data into a formal academic methodology, and writing a paper. By some utter randomness of the universe — which, given the subject matter, seems appropriate — my reflections and contributions became part of that paper. My name appears on the byline.

I'm not a scientist. I'm a CISO and a philosopher. My contribution was perspective, not data. But the experience left me with a much sharper set of views on the question — and a growing scepticism that I want to set out here alongside a summary of what the research actually found.

Before summarising what the research found, I want to be honest about where I stand. I think Mars colonisation is a fascinating thought experiment and an extraordinary technological challenge. But I am deeply sceptical that it is — or should be — a near-term human priority. Here is why, in three parts.

Despite my scepticism about the enterprise itself, the research process was genuinely interesting — and the methodology was rigorous in ways that distinguished it from most public discourse on the subject. The paper used Cognitive Work Analysis, specifically Work Domain Analysis, to build a structured model of what Martian colonisation would actually require. Not the rocket science, but the human systems: what would people need to do, value, manage, and be, to survive and eventually thrive on Mars.

The crowd-sourcing element is what gives the study its particular texture. Rather than consulting only domain experts, the team asked amateur and semi-professional astronomers — over 800 members across 22 groups in the UK — to identify what they believed were the five biggest challenges. The results were clustered into themes and pressure-tested against the formal model.

The responses were clustered into five major challenge themes. What struck me — and what the paper notes with some surprise — was how clearly the crowd prioritised the human and biological challenges over the purely technical ones.

The Work Domain Analysis produced an abstraction hierarchy — a layered model of what a Mars colony must accomplish, at five levels from functional purpose down to physical objects. What emerges from this structure is not a list of technologies. It is a portrait of a civilisation that must be built from scratch, in the most hostile environment humans have ever attempted to inhabit, by a small group of people who cannot leave.

The model for the first 50 years identified 14 values and priority measures including maximising physical and mental health, minimising waste through recycling, establishing a code of conduct demanding equality, and — perhaps most importantly — demonstrating return on investment. Without continued Earth support, financial and political, the colony does not survive its infancy.

The paper's human factors analysis of the Mars One habitat is particularly grounding. The proposed structure: a tubular habitat, 5 metres diameter, 25 metres long. Six sub-system modules. Two inflatable units providing living and functional space. Total living area: roughly 1,000 square metres for four people. That is approximately the floor area of a large house, shared between four people who cannot go outside without a spacesuit, for the rest of their lives.

The paper argues — correctly, I think — that the skill profile required of Martian colonists is closer to a medieval blacksmith than a modern specialist: broad, practical, repairable, improvised. Not because we want generalists but because in a supply chain that operates at planetary distances, the person who can't fix the water recycler is a person who dies. Specialisation is a luxury of abundance. Mars offers none.

The evening at the astronomy club, and everything that followed, gave me something I didn't expect: not answers, but a much sharper sense of the right questions. What is Mars colonisation actually for? Who benefits, and at whose cost? What do we owe the people we would send? What do we owe the people on Earth whose resources we would redirect?

The research is real and valuable. The methodology is sound. The questions it raises about human factors, psychology, and societal design in extreme environments are genuinely important — with applications well beyond Mars. I'm proud to have contributed to it, even in a small way.

But I remain sceptical that Mars colonisation is where humanity's energy and resources should currently go. Not because the challenge isn't extraordinary — it is. Not because it isn't technically fascinating — it is. But because we live on a planet that is beautiful, habitable, and currently under serious threat from our own behaviour. The pale blue dot deserves our attention first.

Going to Mars while failing to look after Earth strikes me as analogous to building a magnificent extension on a house that is on fire. Admirable craftsmanship. Questionable priorities.