There is a sinister irony in the way humanity is always looking for the next place to conquer. We don’t stop at borders, we invent them, only to cross them. And in the process, we have become accustomed to hunting for nothingness – to seeking out spaces to declare uninhabitable, dead, virgin of any meaningful life. The declaration is an act of permission: if there is no life, destruction becomes simple extraction.
The latest and grandest example hovers above us, red and cold: Planet Mars. It is presented to the world as a frozen, sterile sphere, a perfect game board for scientific curiosity and, more importantly, for colonial ambitions. But behind the discourses of “research” and “the future of humanity” looms the shadow of the real engine: resources.
But what if this colonization, launched under the banner of research, were to stumble upon a subtle ecosystem, perhaps microbial, or even a more advanced form of life, hidden beneath the ice caps or in the reddish soil? The human mission would inevitably begin under the guise of research, but once the value of extraction would outweigh the ethical imperative, priorities would become clear. The investors and consortia that finance these giant leaps would never allow themselves to publicly declare the discovery. How would they justify the destruction of unknown extraterrestrial life? It would be a PR disaster. Thus, Mars must officially remain lifeless. Whatever existed there would be erased, buried under the stock price and under the red dust
This vision, although set in a cosmic future, is only a pale reflection of what has happened, is happening, and will continue to happen right here on Earth. To understand the Martian future, we need only turn to the best example of justified expansion: America.
When the British, Dutch, Portuguese, and French colonies made their way to the newly discovered continent, they saw not a civilization but a resource void. They saw forests to clear, metals to extract, and land to cultivate. The fact that civilizations already existed in these lands, organized into tribes, with their own laws, spirits, and systems of life, was simply... irrelevant. They were labeled "primitive" and therefore inferior, and their environment, although alive, was treated as a barrier to progress.
Through wild deforestation and the unbridled extraction of natural resources, not only was the environment of those populations destroyed, but their inevitable decline was accelerated. It was a lesson learned and perfected: declare space empty or occupied by insignificant life, and you can justify any destruction in the name of “civilization” or “profit.”
The Red Waters of the Present
If you look closely at the impact that some organizations have today, the parallel becomes disturbing. We don’t need to look for spaceships to see the destructive power of big interests.
There are entities, so powerful and so well-disguised under the veil of legality, that act with almost total impunity. They do not seek new land, but exhaust the old. The waters of rivers and oceans turn red, not with blood, but with chemicals and waste, poisoning everything around their activities.
This poison does not just affect fish or wildlife; it affects the human communities that depend on those sources of life. Let us not delude ourselves: just as reports of gold or oil discovered in tribal lands were hidden, so too are reports of the true level of toxicity in soil or water today.
The cycle is always the same: an area is designated as a "sacrificial zone," whether it is an Amazon rainforest or a future Martian crater. The living beings that inhabit it, be they human tribes or alien microbes, become mere variables that profit cancels out.
This is not about a future catastrophe, but about an ongoing reality. It is about how power, armed with an insatiable hunger for resources, rewrites the rules of life, transforming any space, be it a lush continent or a barren planet, into a resource waiting to be exploited and, ultimately, destroyed. The only difference is the scale. The question is not whether we will destroy life on Mars, but how long it will take us to finish what we started on Earth.