I wrote about how we're already colonizing Mars, for Slate's Future Tense series.
Here are two paragraphs that I didn't end up including in the final version:
If science is the quest to understand nature, one kind of “faraway” nature that is especially susceptible to exploration—and reverence or protection, but also annihilation—is wilderness. Mars is nothing if not a glowing red wilderness prize: thus the “extreme environments” highlighted by NASA. In a recent Atlantic article, Shannon Stirone pointed out that Mars isn’t some adventurous hike in the desert, or a long sought paradise; rather, it’s a hellhole. Still, the stretched panorama shots and fuzzy landscapes beamed back from the rover reveal a recycled fantasy of wilderness: Mars as a rugged open place just beckoning to be explored, conquered, and (at least potentially) inhabited.
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Imagine if instead of collecting space rocks and leaving defunct rovers and wreckage on Mars, and bombarding internet users with photoshopped pictures, imagine if a different kind of mission took place. Picture one more human journey to the Red Planet, the most ambitious yet, with a rover the size of a shipping container—or better, a garbage truck. We might nickname this rover Frankie, after another literary figure who was tasked with cleaning up a mess made in the name of science. The objective: Land on Mars, retrieve every piece of Earth trash—every heatshield, each shredded parachute, all the outmoded rovers—and launch the rover again, detonating it and its amalgam of contents in deep space. We leave tracks, but no junk. And we stop going to Mars, at least for now. For a long now, while we focus instead on Earth. While we really learn how to live on a planet together as a species, alongside myriad other creatures. Earth: this planet that has been our sublime home—and may still be for some time, if we care, if we care for it enough.
