Watch: ‘Mars Calling: Manifest Destiny or Grand Illusion’

One of my favorite YouTube channels, SpaceRip, has released a new documentary exploring the prospect of colonizing Mars. While there are plenty of Mars documentaries these days, I particularly enjoyed this one for its focus on facts and historical timelines, as opposed to outright hype.

The one-hour documentary, ‘Mars Calling: Manifest Destiny or Grand Illusion’, basically provides an overview of humanity’s relationship with the planet, spanning the earliest records in history up until now. This historical timeline covers ancient observations (around 100AD), 17th-century science and speculation, and 21st-century studies. We are shown how the public in each of these time periods was influenced by the media that sprung out of these observations. As many of us know now, much of the speculation around Mars between the 17th to 19th century was either embellished or outright wrong, but respectable in its imagination.

As the documentary touches on our modern interactions with Mars, we are shown many of the leading endeavors to reach it. This includes SpaceX’s plans for colonizing the red planet, which includes funding parts of the mission through their Starlink project. The documentary also explores the relatively lesser known projects such as Robert Zubrin’s Mars Direct idea. Ultimately, many of these ideas envision terraforming the planet to better match the conditions of Earth.

Check out the documentary posted below and see if you learn anything new about Mars. Be sure to subscribe to the SpaceRip channel for some of the coolest space science documentaries on YouTube.