I don’t want to live on this planet anymore. Let’s move to Mars!

Interplanetary colonization is gonna happen. Elon Musk said so. And even though the SpaceX interplanetary rocket won’t be ready for another decade, there’s a lot we can do to prepare ourselves right here on Earth.

For starters, those long hours spent playing Fallout 4 will pay off. Mars doesn’t have a global magnetic field or dense atmosphere to protect inhabitants from the sun’s radiation, so residents can expect a year-round nuclear winter. Instead of pressurized glass domes, we’ll reside in underground bunkers. Cartoon Martians are often colored green, although a more accurate depiction would be a crispy-fried brown.

If we really want to prepare for life on Mars, we need to get people accustomed to underground living. We can start right now with the Bay Area and its severe housing shortage. Zoning laws place limits on building heights, but they don’t say anything about building depths. Sure, San Francisco lies on the San Andreas fault, but our Martian fallout shelters will also be constructed near areas of seismic activity. That’s where hydrogen is generated; that’s the stuff life is made of. So let’s start building rabbit warrens under the city. If you enjoy living under Market Street, you’ll love Mars.

I used to have one of those plastic ant farms as a kid, where you get live ants in the mail and watch them architect their subterranean homes. Sometimes I would shake my ant farm upside down to collapse all the ant houses. Whatever, it created jobs, Keynes said so. When I find my way to Mars, I swear those ants will come back to haunt me.

See Also:
Who Wants a Ticket to Mars? –Bloomberg