The target of practical and experimental space travel in the 21st century is destination: Mars. We’ve been dreaming of the red planet since we invented a God of War to explain its violent color. Since sending the Rover, we’ve been even more curious about pressing our boots into the red dust and seeing what secrets it holds. The possibilities for scientific advancement and sci-fi stories are both endless with what we can learn from the wind and rock of the red planet.
But what would happen if Mars suddenly vanished? All that ambition and discovery, just gone. That’s a deceptively simple question that challenges our ability to envision the future. The quantum possibilities of humanity’s social and technological development hang in the balance of the answer.
Our history tells us nothing about this unprecedented event except that we would never be the same. How so? Let’s find out.
The Gravity Effect: How Would the Solar System Change?
If the red planet up and disappeared, how would that affect the fields of gravitation that bind our solar system? Due to their locations, the disappearance of any planet would have effects unique to what its gravity influences while it exists. So where does Mars fit in?
Mars sits on one side of the Asteroid Belt with Jupiter on the other. Most of these asteroids are far enough away from Jupiter’s gravity. However, something called “gravity resonance” can occur where their orbit becomes an exact fraction of Jupiter’s. This means that the same gravitational pull of Jupiter and the Sun at the same point in space may pull the asteroid out of its stable orbit.
When this happens, Mars steps in and turns that asteroid into a stone in a tiny god’s slingshot, hurtling it towards the sun. In other words, towards us! That’s right — Mars is the reason that ever so often, there’s a 1 in 1 million chance the Earth will be destroyed by a space rock.
Thankfully, no longer worrying about asteroids would be the biggest effect Mars’ disappearance would have on Earth in a physical sense. It’s too far away to affect us directly with its gravity, so we probably wouldn’t even notice it except for one tiny, insignificant, human-history-defining thing. Belief.
The Belief Problem: The Consequences of a Missing Planet
See, the thing is, we don’t know of anything that can make a planet disappear. We’re assuming that it wasn’t destroyed by a collision with a rogue planet or something — it just vanished. And in that case, we would spend years and years trying to figure out how and why.
“Did aliens teleport it to another system? Or destroy it instantly? Was the planet a spaceship that simply left? An act of God? We’d have no way of knowing what happened. And that means that belief would run rampant as to what the disappearance of Mars means for us.”
Because if Mars disappeared, and we didn’t know how, how would we know that Earth won’t disappear too? It would only be a matter of time before that became the question in the mind of the entire human race.
This means that Mars’ disappearance now factors into predicting the chaos of the millions of possible futures resulting from such a panic, from wars to the death of religion to a brand new global unified space program. Yes, don’t you see? If the human race believed that earth could disappear at any time, the single most important endeavor we would have, if we realized it, would be colonies on other planets, ensuring that humanity survived even if Earth disappeared.
To accomplish this, we would have to rally with the other nations of the world, create a unified space program, and send human civilization to the stars.
The Takeaway
We don’t know of any way that a planet like Mars could just disappear. The physical effects wouldn’t hurt us too much — in fact, they would lower the chance of Earth getting hit by an asteroid. However, the changes in humanity’s beliefs, the religious panic, and social upheaval would create an unpredictable network of change, resulting in many potential futures. In at least one of them, we might even achieve world peace.
Maybe one planet isn’t such a huge price to pay.
Written By Jarrell Chalmers
