As the Western liberal order continues to unravel, can you really blame anyone who wants to get off this planet? Since space travel became technologically feasible in the twentieth century, many thinkers — from Arthur C. Clarke to Buckminster Fuller — envisioned the human colonization of other planets as all but inevitable.

“Man will not always stay on Earth,” wrote Soviet rocket scientist Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, “the pursuit of light and space will lead him to penetrate the bounds of the atmosphere, timidly at first, but in the end to conquer the whole of solar space.”

In their heydays, both the American and Soviet space programs funded research into Mars colonization, viewing it as the next logical step for humanity. In the past two decades however, people have started to pin their hopes for intergalactic travel on private groups instead of public agencies.