UAE has tallest building, biggest mall—and now it wants Mars

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates— On Earth, the United Arab Emirates boasts the tallest building, the largest artificial island and the biggest shopping mall, which includes an indoor ski resort and a colony of penguins.

Earth, though, has its limits, so the Persian Gulf nation is looking elsewhere.

If all goes as planned, a century from now it will have built a fully functioning city of 600,000 people on Mars.

“We aspire in the coming century to develop science, technology and our youth’s passion for knowledge,” tweeted Sheik Mohammed bin Rashid al Maktoum, the country’s vice president and prime minister, when he announced the project—known as “Mars 2117”—this year. “This project is driven by that vision.”

The Emirates, as the country is known, has joined an elite club trying to put people on Mars, including the U.S., China, Russia and a consortium of European nations, along with a private effort by the entrepreneur Elon Musk and his California company SpaceX.

The country is grooming a cadre of young scientists and engineers it hopes will collaborate with international scientists and other academics to figure out the best mode of transportation to Mars and options for food and housing once humans arrive.

“We see Mars 2117 as a multinational effort, which would set out to create a coalition of equals working together to fulfill a unified objective,” said Saeed Gergawi, program director of the Mars project.

The proposed settlement doesn’t have a firm name yet, but the City of Wisdom is reportedly one possibility.

The plan, which experts say is plausible with enough investment, reflects an ambition that has long distinguished the nation from many of its Middle Eastern neighbors.

That ambition has been enabled by two things: oil and absolute monarchs.

The oil was discovered in the 1950s, when the seven former British protectorates that now make up the Emirates were inhabited mainly by nomadic Bedouin tribes and the economy ran on fishing, date-farming and camel-herding. It has made the country of 9 million people one of the richest in the world per capita.

The monarchs have been in full control since independence in 1971, imposing a vision of modernity that often seems geared toward outdoing the world’s biggest powers—and sometimes themselves.

The country broke ground last year on a skyscraper that will be at least 3,045 feet, or 323 feet taller than Dubai’s Burj Khalifa, which is the world’s tallest building.

“The new tower sets another challenge in the history of human architecture—a race the UAE deserves to lead,” Maktoum, who is also ruler of Dubai, was quoted as saying. “We strive for new achievements. A new heart for our city and global landmark. Humankind has no ceiling or border but our imagination.”

Maktoum, a 67-year-old poet, equestrian and author with a British education and nearly 8 million Twitter followers, has been a fount of inspirational messages for the Arab world and the driving force behind some of his country’s most extravagant projects. Many of them are in Dubai, the emirate where his family has reigned since 1833.

“If we want to remain within the ranks of the advanced world, we need to match the speed at which the world is developing,” Maktoum wrote in his 2012 book, “My Vision: Challenges in the Race for Excellence.”

For the Dubai leader, a space program is as much about the endeavor as it is about the destination.

Maktoum has described the plan to settle people on Mars as part of a broad effort to build a science and technology sector, inspire young people, reduce the country’s economic dependence on oil and reclaim the region’s historical legacy—which dates to the 8th century—as a center of science and astronomy.

“Mars 2117 is a seed we are sowing today to reap the fruit of new generations led by a passion for science and advancing human knowledge,” he tweeted when he announced the plan.

Colonizing Mars is a challenge like no other humankind has ever undertaken.

Just getting there requires traveling more than 34 million miles, a journey that could take nearly nine months. The average temperature there is 81 degrees below zero.

“We know that there will be several key requirements, for clean air, power generation, waste management and other aspects of city management, which we can map from our current cities,” said Gergawi.

Homes could possibly be built from Martian soil using 3-D printing technology, he said. It would be possible to cultivate fruits and vegetables in greenhouses, and some proteins could be grown in laboratories.

The city “would have to be wholly self-sustaining,” Gergawi said.

He said the political system would probably differ from anything currently on Earth.

“Envisaging utopias is all very nice, but we have so far failed to define and operate a perfect society in thousands of years of modern human evolution,” Gergawi said. “Is Mars a chance to restart a new kind of society? Yes, it is.”

It might be tempting to dismiss such talk as space-age fantasy.

But the country has already invested more than $5.4 billion in space technologies, according to the UAE Space Agency, which was created in July 2014 and aims to develop “a world-class national space sector.”

The agency’s first goal is to send an unmanned weather probe called Hope to Mars in time to mark the nation’s 50th birthday in 2021. The University of California, Berkeley, Arizona State University and the University of Colorado at Boulder are assisting on the project.

Robert Lillis, a physicist at UC Berkeley, said that if any country is going to colonize Mars it is the U.S., because of its experience in space exploration.

“Money and political will is the simple answer for why humans are not already living on Mars,” said Lillis, who worked on the NASA mission that gathered data on the Martian atmosphere with an unmanned probe that orbited the planet in 2014. “Nothing is beyond the technical or scientific scope of getting people to Mars.”

Mike McGrath, former director of engineering at the University of Colorado at Boulder’s Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics, said the Emirates’ other successes make its Mars aspirations seem perfectly reasonable.

“Sometimes it takes somebody new to incentivize people to move forward,” he said.