'Mars can't save you,' says Kim Stanley Robinson

FEW authors have shaped our collective imagination of Mars like Kim Stanley Robinson.

- FLYLEAF

His Mars Trilogy — Red Mars (1992), Green Mars (1993), and Blue Mars (1996) — remains a towering achievement in science fiction, weaving science, politics, and environmental philosophy into an epic vision of what Mars colonisation could look like.

But three decades later, with Mars once again capturing the public imagination — not through literature, but through the ambitions of billionaires —I asked Robinson a simple, pressing question: Do you really believe that humans will eventually go to Mars? Or is this whole conversation a distraction from the far more urgent task of saving Earth?

His answer was clear: “Mostly the latter. Given the situation on Earth, Mars is largely a distraction.”

It’s a sobering stance from the author most associated with a detailed and optimistic vision of Mars. While he acknowledges that space exploration has profound value — “Space science is Earth science,” he said, quoting a classic NASA line— the idea of sending humans to Mars is another matter entirely.