It’s not missing technology that kills the (pretty silly) idea of “Mars colonization” - it’s missing ecology.
They can’t even maintain functioning civilization in Antarctica… yet they “dream” of doing so in a place that’s hundreds of times more hostile to human life.
One of the things standing in the way of an"civilization" on Antarctica is that it’s illegal to build a civilization on Antarctica. We could absolutely do it, assuming we were willing to fight a war and the resources were worth it
Oh, right… that is what has stopped the Phony Starks from building capitalist Utopia in Antartica - it has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that it’s utterly inhospitable to human civilization at all.
It prohibits countries from claiming sovereignty over territory beyond Earth, but the colonies themselves can still be sovereign. Assuming the treaty continues as it is it just means that countries won't be able to draw borders around vast lifeless regions on Mars or the Moon and claim jurisdiction over them, they'll still be able to build cities there and the cities will be theirs to control.
Treaties like these lapse or get amended over time as the realities of life make them obsolete, though. I expect that once there are cities on Mars there'll be borders as well.
Every exploration into hostile environments heavily relies on goods and services imported from the rest of Earth. Biosphere 2 is as far as I know still the only time we ever tried to actually build a completely independent ecological system, but that was 30 years ago, in a non-hostile environment, only run for a short amount of time, still had tons of problems and would still be missing a lot of stuff to be truly self sustaining for long time periods (e.g. no industrial facilities).
We absolutely will not be shipping containers of food to Mars.
We absolutely will be. You have no concept of the amount of energy and resources needed to feed a single human being on Earth for one meal, let alone a whole colony on another world without a breathable atmosphere and possibly toxic dirt for an indeterminate time. Farming under the best of conditions is extremely energy consuming, then there's the need to either import hardware from Earth that is specially made for Mars or go old fashion and do a lot of it by hand. There is no where else in the solar system where you can just throw seeds at the ground in large enough quantities and feed whole cities. I do homesteading, my dad tried to be totally self sufficient foodwise when I was a teen. Guess what? Turns out that's really, really hard to do. And that's under the ideal conditions of Earth.
But you didn’t have NASA level technology. There is a lot you can do to increase food production using less space if you’re willing to pay the upfront and energy costs.
This is one of those things that will need baby steps.
— using local water and dirt are probably a minimum for any non-trivial stay
— yes we really need to be able to grow our own food, at least if we want to scale up from a temporary base for a handful to something larger or more permanent. Again, this is one of the things we probably need to go there to find out: is it possible to grow a lot of our own food?
It’s doubtful we’d ship past the initial landing and support phases, which was my point. It’s likely we’d send several ships out for any permanent presence, but 18 months is just too long and too much investment between trips.
If you send say 20 people to Mars, let’s do the math. An average person requires approximately 2 to 3 lb of food per day. 18 months = 6,500 days x 20 people = 131,000 pounds of food, or about 65 tons. You could probably drop the weight significantly by freeze drying it and recycling the water.
In any case, 65 tons isn’t a whole lot - that’s about what, half of a starship payload? Zubrin’s a case for Mars likewise discussed the need to bring all of your food supplies over with you.
Now over many years you could build up enough buy a waste and build a recycling system to start recycling to buy a waste in a greenhouse, but we don’t know how viable like greenhouse on Mars will be for growing food. It’s likely going to have to be more of a grow lab/vertical farm setup. Very energy intensive.
Biosphere 2 is a great story and I wish there were more follow ups. They tried to set up favorable initial conditions and then seal the hatch. They found that the environment inside shifted and became inhospitable. The crops they planned on didn’t all sustain. Then they called it all off.
What if they had allowed the biosphere to keep shifting until it found its equilibrium point, and then set about finding advantages in that? Crops that would sustain in that?
An iterative process could build on mistakes and learnings. A one-shot, naive, all-or-nothing attempt where your starting conditions have to be just right… no wonder that it failed, but where was the next iteration? Why give it all up instead of tuning? I know it’s about money, but I wish someone with money cared enough to keep this thread going.
“The vast majority of Biosphere II was built out of concrete, which contains calcium hydroxide. Instead of being consumed by the plants to produce more oxygen, the excess carbon dioxide was reacting with calcium hydroxide in the concrete walls to form calcium carbonate and water.”
I mean, Biosphere 2 failed because it was started by a cult that mismanaged the shit out of it, then Steve Bannon took over and outright killed the company. A lot of the really crazy shit that happened was a result of corporate power struggles. The first Biosphere experiment lasted two years and is considered overall a success, probably because Steve Bannon wasn’t there.
Before it collapsed, they actually did one better over the previous experiment and achieved self-sufficiency in food production. Colonists would need equipment shipped in until a manufacturing supply chain could be set up locally, but mostly Biosphere 2 serves as a cautionary tale of letting Steve Bannon and cults run things.
Even the claims of stir craziness were kind of overblown. They got evaluated, everything they experienced was consistent with everything that was known about long-term isolated group environments. They’re a rough experience.
It was a fine enough experiment in the early 90’s, but there are incorrect assumptions about how it would apply to space travel. For one, the Biosphere project is considered a “failure” because they set themselves the goal of creating a completely self-contained bubble that needed no outside inputs, and yet at various points systems in the sphere needed repair and replacement, which is completely normal and absolutely what would happen in space. No space company worth anything would let a mining colony collapse because a carbon scrubber broke and “hAhA yOu NeEd oUtSiDe InPutS tO kEeP lIviNG JuSt LiKe tErReStRiAl cOloNieS.” No, they’d ship in a new scrubber and keep the line moving.
They would ship in a new scrubber but could they? We have to assume that a colony might need to self subsist for long periods, at least as long as Biosphere 2 was running, because of the practical considerations in shipping replacement parts to Mars.
Yeah, absolutely they could. It’s a very romantic notion to, I dunno, send thousands of people to fuck rust on Mars until they die for absolutely no reason, but the reality is that they’re not gonna put the money into a colony off Earth until they know they can set up a shipping route and there’ll be something valuable coming back. That means regular trips to said colony.
If they put it on Mars, it’s because they realized all that rust is really valuable or something. More likely it’ll be the asteroid belt. But there will be regular shipping.
That’s a good point. There is at least as much to learn from Antarctica as from Mars. Maybe less maybe more, but certainly more relevant since it’s on Earth. Plus easier to get to than Mars. Yet we can’t scrounge up enough to keep a larger presence there.
Sometimes I can’t shake the feeling that we are living in another dark age. We need a real renaissance to shake it.
I've been hearing this "we need a new renaissance" spiel since the 80s. It really sounds like "I've got no ideas, so I'll distract with mentioning a time that is revered for it." to me nowadays.
"We need a new renaissance" is a dog whistle for "we need a white culture (Rome was a good example) to dominate and destroy the societies adjacent to it again, so that while they are recuperating, rebuilding and repopulating, we will assert our white cultural dominance and leverage that to impose our ideals and religion into every facet of other cultures and then call it a renaissance".
Notice how you never read about the Islamic renaissance or anything from India, Asia or Africa, or even South American native cultures when "renaissance" is mentioned?
Maybe some use as dog whistle but I am not. The color or creed of the people who were around during periods of progress is irrelevant to me. I care about the progress.
And Rome had more people of color in positions of power and influence than we can even dream of today. However they did have slaves. Lots of white, Germanic slaves. Google it and chew on that while you think about your accusations of racism.
Do not colonize other planets. They suck. They have all the downsides of space habitats (needing sealed environment, etc), while also adding more (breaches now let in toxic dust instead of vacuum, cannot control gravity via spin, etc).
Just build O’Neil cylinders. If you can’t do that, maybe work on stabilizing the ecosystem we evolved to live in. Nowhere will ever be better than here, folks.
There is so much about the cylinder concept that hasn’t been thought out, it’s just an insane undertaking even if it could all work. It started as a joke, but hey maybe one day someone will prove it to be a better reality.
Is anyone really thinking we just need to reach Mars, then immediately set up a colony? No, reaching there is obviously only a first step, but once we can reach it, we can try things to see if we can live there. For myself, I’ve been saying we need to hurry up and reach Mars because we have like 100 years of work before we can establish a colony so let’s get started
We don’t know if a self-sustaining population is possible anywhere other than Earth. However we know lack of gravity is one issue we don’t have a workaround for. Mars is the only “large” gravity we can possibly reach with our current level of technology
I think the far-more realistic scenario is we create a colony of robots, first for experiments, then (if possible) to build out a colony that can eventually be inhabited by humans.
If we’re going to get anything useful out of mining (other than just building material), it’s going to be incredibly sparse. I think we need to start asap working on robotic mining vehicles to wander around collecting and refining useful stuff. By the time we send people, we ought to have spent years collecting tankfuls of oxygen and water, caches of refined ores, piles of bricks and pavers (maybe even sheds/garages), maybe even sheets of crude solar cells, miles of wire.
Navigation and communication will be crucial, so we need to lead with a constellation of gps/communications satellites so no matter where you are, you know your location, can reliably contact your base, and even all back to earth. We’ll want many automated weather and seismic stations that need to send a flood of data somewhere
No fetuses have gestated in low gravity. That sounds like something we could do animal trials on.
But wow, getting a live sheep into space, and fed, and exercised, and cleaned, all for months… that alone is a big undertaking. Just to get a single data point that’s about another species.
I wonder what is known or not know. I’ve read about experiments with lower plants and animals but not what the results were, nor whether we’re ready to try more complex life
Everything I’ve ever seen about plants indicates that they grow abnormally in zero g. Life is complex and made up of many different chemical processes. All it takes is for gravity to have an effect on one of them and life goes awry. It’s humbling how fragile we are, how narrowly adapted when it comes right down to it. I remember learning that we can’t share most viruses with pets because their bodies are a few degrees of temperature off from ours. I thought wow, viruses are not very robust if they are attuned to living in such a very narrow set of conditions. But honestly we’re no different.
Is someone actually proposing that we’re simply going to dump would-be colonists on Mars with a shovel and some O2 tanks then wave goodbye? Like, no shit we still need to work things out but that just means it’s unknown, not impossible.
This book seems unnecessarily pessimistic. I don’t know why I would spend money on doomscrolling, Kindle Edition.
Plugging our ears and going “NYAAAAAA” isn’t going to help. We need pragmatists to ask hard questions to cover all the bases, and force us to anticipate problems. Being aware of potentially fatal issues isn’t “doomscrolling”.
The authors aren’t saying that we should never, ever try to colonize Mars. They’re only saying that there are a LOT of questions to answer before we try.
You don’t think all the scientists and engineers working around the world on this problem aren’t aware of the potentially fatal issues? The last thing they want is to be the reason people die in space.
Elon Musk talks a lot of shit, but the actual scientists are busy considering the real problems, dangers, and solutions to getting to and colonizing Mars.
Jesus Christ you people really have no idea how space works, do you?
The guy can’t just send up his own spacecraft anymore than Lockheed Martin and Raytheon can declare war on Russia.
SpaceX sells spacecraft to NASA for them to use in the same way LM sells F-18’s to the Navy for them to use. At no point in time does Elon just get to unilaterally send civilians to Mars even if Starship was fully capable.
Everything SpaceX craft do in space is under the charter and dictation of NASA, and at the current point in time, exclusively for government/military missions. Not his own flights of fancy.
Seems like you’ve missed the things he’s literally said about literally sending his own spaceship to Mars. For all mankind is a great show but Jesus Christ y’all.
You don’t think all the scientists and engineers working around the world on this problem aren’t aware of the potentially fatal issues?
Scientists catalog what we know and don't know and try to chip away at the list of things we don't know. The whole point of the book and this article is that there is way more stuff we don't know than we realize and most discussion of space colonization tends to forget the parts we don't know.
The article even pointed out some very showstopping issues:
No one has been conceived in low gravity, no fetuses have developed in low gravity, so we simply don’t know if there is a problem. Astronauts experience bone and muscle loss and no one knows how that plays out long term
I was shocked to learn that no one really knows how to construct a long-term habitable settlement for either the Moon or Mars. Yes, there are lots of hand-wavy ideas about lava tubes and regolith shielding. But the details are just… not there.
For instance, supposedly space will end scarcity… and yet, any habitat in space will naturally have only a single source of food, water, and, even more urgent, oxygen, creating (perhaps artificial) scarcity.
Space colonization may happen, but it's incredibly doubtful that it'll happen in our lifetimes.
Mars is actually full of oxygen. The surface is covered in oxidized iron, and trillions of tons of carbon dioxide makes up its atmosphere. Plus all the ice.
We can't breathe oxidized iron or carbon dioxide. We'd need to convert it into breathable oxygen and the mechanism would have to be foolproof and have redundancies. And that still leaves plenty of other problems.
But my main point was to everyone in this thread criticizing the authors for being pessimists. This isn't just naysaying or complaining. The authors are pointing out all of the necessary research we still have to do before a space colony can be feasible.
MOXIE is a Scale Model for a Future Big MOXIE
To launch from Mars, a small crew of human explorers will need 25 to 30 tons of oxygen, or about the weight of a tractor-trailer! To make that much oxygen would require a 25,000 to 30,000 watt power plant. The Perseverance power system only provides about 100 watts, so MOXIE can only make a small fraction of the oxygen that a future "Big MOXIE" would need to make.
In the first link you provided, NASA themselves say we'd need a 25,000 watt power plant to scale that up. That's not trivial.
Again, what the authors are pointing out is that space colonization is probably scientifically possible, but will take a lot of research and then investment. MOXIE is a great tech demo, but its not a solution by itself.
Which is why you don’t hear NASA going “yep we’re good to go! No scientifically obtained issues to worry about!” Also sometimes you have to answer the questions through physical experimentation, which is why we send science teams before we send spacecraft full of colonists.
Books like this fall under the same grouping as those who hate Elon Musk so much that they have to also think space travel is dumb/bad as well because they can’t remove the douchebag from the field his company operates in.
Space colonization is the future, it doesn’t matter if it’s ten years or a thousand. We are going to leave this planet. Case closed. The earth will not sustain us forever even in our wildest renewable energy/living fantasies.
The point of books like this is to underline areas where we're still woefully ignorant to guide future study. This isn't just complaining. It's taking stock of what we still need to learn.
A City on Mars ends with a kind of call to action. The point is that we have a tiny space station, and we have the potential to build a lot of experimental facilities on Earth where we can investigate some of the practical problems. Let’s get the biology and engineering right before we send people to Mars.
The authors aren’t against colonization. They’re against hasty, uninformed, reckless attempts.
Your comment seems to demonstrate a fundamental misunderstanding of the actual people/money that would be involved with any space colonization attempts. They’ll do exactly an equivalent of the ridiculous things you describe to expend the least amount of resource to secure the most profit in strip-mining natural resources from these places.
The level of automation necessary for manufacturing in space is going to be very close to removing humans from the process entirely. Taking it that one step further and having robots manufacture robots would eliminate all the issues with keeping flesh-and-blood human bodies alive.
Honestly I sometimes think the best legacy humans can hope for is giving birth to AGI. Machines would be much better suited to forming a solar or galactic civilization than biological entities ever would be. If we’re lucky, humans or meta-humans would still be around as what essentially amounts to pets.
Im a little bit disappointed, i was expecting things that where only possible because of research made in space, not things that were developed because NASA thought they were needed for astronauts.
Edit: seeing the reaction, sorry if my disappointment disappoints you. We can very well use this argument to justify war
i mean shoot, mars is actually kinda worse than the moon in some ways. Like, the worst of both worlds except ‘worlds’ pertains to ‘celestial bodies in general’. You have the same ultrafine toxic razor sharp dust that gets everywhere, sticks to everything, and destroys mechanical joints on contact, but on MARS it gets blown around by dust storms that blot out the entire sky sometimes for months or years on end, whereas on the moon it only redistributes and resettles due to electrostatic repulsion (due to solar radiation).
Mars’ atmosphere is just thick enough to be a hassle for creating risk of burning up on reentry but still too thin to reliably drag-brake so you end up having to thread a much more annoying needle with respect to approach velocity, whereas on the moon it’s just straight up active thrust descent every time you’re landing.
In both cases, living on the surface is a sucker’s game and the only viable option would be to tunnel down beneath into the regolith where a sufficient rock barrier will block enough of the solar and cosmic radiation to not drastically shorten your lifespan.
Furthermore the energy cost to get a payload from earth to mars is LITERALLY ASTRONOMICAL whereas escaping the moon’s relatively weak gravity well to reach almost anywhere else in the solar system (including mars) is dwarfed by the oomph it takes to climb out of the earth’s gravity well in the first place alone.
I’d go so far as to say that a mars colony would never be viable until and unless we have a viable lunar colony
but make no mistake, a lunar colony is mandatory if we ever want to explore the rest of the solar system or not have all our eggs in one basket as a species. the moon is practically MADE OF the infrastructure we’ll need across the entire solar system,some assembly required. The amount of Aluminum and Silver waiting for us in that silicate regolith will be instrumental, especially because smelting and building up there will be drastically cheaper than manufacturing shit down here and then having to carry it ALL THE WAY UP ALL OVER AGAIN.
and like, that isn’t even factoring sending any of what’s produced back to earth, because even that might be a waste of effort when everything we could ever BUILD outside our gravity well is worth more being up there just by virtue of the fact that we didn’t have to pay through the nose to SEND IT.
Once there’s a fully space-based supply chain up and running using materials from the asteroid belt, I strongly question the utility of a Moon colony. Any resource you could find on the Moon that would be necessary to get us out there would also be available in the asteroid belt, and once there’s a pipeline of extraction, processing, and manufacturing in space, there’d be no reason to make an extra stop on the SURFACE of the Moon except to drop off resources for people already living there. It’d be an economic atavism at that point.
Now, using planets and moons for their gravity to park space stations and perform slingshot-type maneuvers, that makes a lot of sense. But we’re all still so stuck in our 20th century imaginations of space colonization being like, idk, settling the Plains but on Mars we can’t think through what a space-based economy would actually look like.
The book’s exploration of what cIty oN mArS would look like is insipid at best. If people settled Mars for some insane reason, it would look like the Expanse – miserable, desperate, nobody lives on the surface, and as soon as the space based economy hits a certain point of development it would be pointless and everyone would realize it. You might have rich people building vacation homes there for the views, that’s it.
Why tf would you figure out how to cope with Lunar and Martian regolith when you could just not?
Settlers routinely sacrifice their health to be part of the first wave of people to stake a claim on fresh territories, considering how insane that got during more or less every colonization effort in past history I strongly doubt that harming human health will be a barrier to the whole thing, for better or worse. (I think mostly for worse tbqh, but I still see it happening unless climate change ruins everything, or nuclear war, etc)
The most not caveat is we don’t know how much gravity is how necessary. We know that microgravity in orbit is too little and not really sustainable. Is gravity on the moon enough more for long term health? Is that on Mars? That’s just two of the questions we can’t know until we get there
So you build spinning space stations instead of settlements on the martian or lunar surface. Likely close to the same material cost, if not cheaper, while allowing us to actually choose the amount of gravity to generate. We don’t know if martian or lunar gravity would even be sufficient to avoid negative health affects.
But gravity may be useful in many applications. We don’t really know how to effectively manufacture many things in microgravity at the moment. The moon would still be important for early space infrastructure.
Edit: In addition, the moon will be useful for mining and resource extraction for a long time, most likely, due to its proximity to earth and size.
The gravity problem is also best solved away from the surface of any celestial bodies. Massive spinning space stations would be much more pleasant to live in in almost every way. Unless a planet or moon has a good reason to land on it (e.g. material to be mined) it makes much more sense to simply build a habitat away from the gravity well and build smaller work camps on the surface that can be supported by the main habitat(s).
The problem is that such space stations are very complex to build and maintain, and can more easily catastrophically fail. It’s certainly an option, but it may not be worth it.
Of course, all of this is speculation, but my point is mostly that if we don’t have sufficiently advanced space construction capabilities, surface habitats and infrastructure on the moon may be preferable.
You do realize that Martians abandon Mars because the protomolecule opens up worlds that are already habitable, so terra forming becomes pointless? It has nothing to do with infrastructure or economy, Mars is supposed to be an eventual second home, not a place to mine. They leave because interstellar travel becomes a reality before Mars becomes viable.
Unless we discover that Charon is actually a Mass Relay, Mars is the best possible second place for humans.
Titan is too cold and the atmosphere would require a full changeover, and the Galilean moons are constantly bombarded with radiation, Venus could support a floating colony but thats tenuous at best. Mars is basically it, if we can develop the tech to turn it into a reasonable place to be.
Yeah, but the point is that if you want the real-world equivalent to the habitable worlds opened up by the protomolecule as regards Mars, that’s actually just the entire rest of the outer solar system, especially the moons and asteroid belt. They’re exactly as habitable as Mars will ever be in actual reality. Mars stops mattering except as an orbital pitstop as soon as there are places that are just as good if not better developed farther out, in smaller or non-existent gravity wells.
Mars has no active geology, therefore no Van Allen belts, therefore the only shielding you get is if you bury yourself. And to generate the energy required to artificially generate Van Allen belts that can actually protect us from cosmic rays… first, it’s a preposterous amount, second, it’s energy rent you have to pay in perpetuity to get an inferior environment anyways and zero resources that aren’t available in greater abundance in cheaper gravity wells, because you’re not realistically going to be spinning up the core anytime soon. Then you need to initiate planetary-wide processes to erode the toxic regolith. The numbers just do not add up.
Then there’s the 38% Earth gravity, which A - is likely to be as unhealthy as a spun-up semi-microgravity environment B - isn’t strong enough to retain any atmosphere thick enough to support humans, which means not only do you have to pay a continuous gargantuan energy rent just to one day walk on the surface without being killed by cosmic rays, you also have to import atmosphere which you’re guaranteed to have to replace.
I enjoy the Expanse, but in spite of its hard science reputation it’s honestly about as realistic as Star Trek in a lot of ways. Terraforming Mars is a fun thought experiment but Jules Verne level out of date at this point. Take it as an unrealistic backdrop for a very fun geopolitical space drama, not a realistic exploration of how space development would actually go. They needed a third power to make the politics complicated. Nobody’s ever gonna breathe the free air of Mars, that’s a fantasy, and that’s knowable today, which means it’ll never be invested in seriously.
Wow, so a couple people who breathlessly believed the hype and would have been at risk of being part of the first wave of settlers if they lived maybe 100 years from now did a shred of research about what colonization literally is and is like, and realized that it’s so much more complicated and worse than the state-sponsored story about what colonization looks like, and that doing that all over again in space would be so much more complicated and in many ways worse than on Earth, and the upshot of the story of the book is that these people only just now learned anything about this subject, and I’m supposed to want to give them THIRTY DOLLARS for the privilege of reading what amounts to a college-level book report that doesn’t offer anything that hasn’t been extensively reported and discussed already?
Can I write entire books about ridiculously uncontroversial things and charge more than thirty bucks for it, too?
I suppose it depends on how good of a writer you are.
Some writers can say things we all know so well that it’s like we’re finally understanding it for the first time. Some writers have a knack for delivering facts or prose with the perfect dose of humor; it’s not what they say, but how they say it that is valuable.
I suppose the question of what merits a book has is more complicated than just “does this book push the envelope of human knowledge”, huh?
Sometimes books are valued for their original informational content alone. Sometimes books are valued for conveniently anthologizing disparate works. Sometimes books are valued for the entertainment quality of the writing. This is a book which endeavors to offer information and context about a hot topic to a general audience in an informative but entertaining way. I can guarantee that you’ve spent over $30 on something less valuable.
I have a couple of books by Zach Weinersmith and they are entertaining and interesting.
I believe you’re missing the point of this book. I also believe you’re being a bit of a prat. I don’t know, however, if those two things are connected.
No, I mean it’s an interesting topic to me and the review makes it come across like a coloring-book level engagement with the subject. They straight up sound like hacks.
Mars has no magnetosphere so it’s very hard to have a breathable atmosphere.
The moon’s barely got gravity, and our bodies need it.
A space station would be a good start so long as it spins so we can have the semblance of gravity.
No one knows if you can turn a profit mining asteroids.
If mining techniques reach the same level of advancement as on Earth? I don’t see why not. I also don’t see why bother to send ore back other than to pay-off some initial investment.
(One of) the biggest obstacles in space is leaving Earth’s gravity well, so sending mining machines to the asteroids would be interesting. Then maybe move the ISS to a La Grange point instead of destroying it, use it as a base to turn that ore into a spinning space station.
Mars has no magnetosphere so it’s very hard to have a breathable atmosphere.
I don't know why this has become such a common talking point about why colonizing Mars is hard, it really has no significant impact.
For starters, it's only meaningful for terraforming. Regular realistic colonization involves setting up domes or tunnels, none of that's affected in any way by Mars' magnetosphere or lack thereof.
As for terraforming, the lack of a magnetosphere means that Mars will "leak" atmospheric gasses due to solar wind sputtering over periods of time that are short on geological scales but are vastly longer than anything a human civilization will care about. If Mars were to magically have an Earthlike atmosphere appear on it today it'd be millions of years before it became unbreathable by this process. The human species has only existed for a tenth that long, and our civilization has only existed for a hundredth of that. If anyone still cares a million years ago they can just top the atmosphere back up again by whatever method they put it there in the first place.
Or, if you really have your heart set on that magnetosphere, build one.
Just finished the trilogy last week. Amazing books, a bit dry at times but overall a very enjoyable read about what the politics and technology might look like to terraform and colonize Mars.
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