Terraforming by Hans Zimmer

Picture this. A conference stage, dramatic lighting, someone in a black turtleneck walks out. The speakers start to rumble with that deep, chest-rattling bass you know from every Christopher Nolan trailer. (If you want the exact track, it's literally called "Terraforming", from Hans Zimmer's Man of Steel score. I couldn't make this up.)

The speaker pauses for effect. "What if we could terraform Mars... with blockchain?"

BRAAAAM.

The audience loses it. VCs reach for their chequebooks. Twitter goes wild. Even Zimmer couldn't have scored it better.

The pitch

I should admit that the pitch is mine. I was thinking out loud one day and the logic went like this. Bitcoin mining generates heat. Mars needs heat. So ship mining rigs to Mars, run them on solar power, and warm up the planet while securing the blockchain. Wasted energy, now with a purpose! It's synergy! It's revolutionary! It's complete nonsense scored by a full orchestra!

It sounded like something I could raise money for, and when I ran it past a few people, almost everyone was on board. Nobody asked a single question about physics.

Then the idea started growing on its own, the way these things do. NFTs for Martian land rights. A DAO to govern the colony. Smart contracts for terraforming milestones. A "Proof of Warming" consensus mechanism. Every new buzzword made it 20% dumber and 50% more fundable.

The Hans Zimmer effect

You know that moment in a Nolan movie where the music swells and suddenly even the most ridiculous plot point feels profound? That's what was happening to my idea. The idea stayed exactly as good as it was on day one, and the soundtrack kept getting louder.

I think a lot of tech works this way. Every pitch is a movie trailer now. You can't just make transportation a bit better, you need to TELEPORT THROUGH THE METAVERSE. You can't just help with climate change, you need to REVERSE ENTROPY WITH QUANTUM BLOCKCHAIN. The bigger the brass section, the fewer questions people ask.

We've all seen the recipe:

1. Take a real problem (Mars is cold)
2. Add whatever's trending (blockchain)
3. Sprinkle in some loosely understood physics
4. Say "paradigm shift" at least twice
5. Add dramatic music

The metaverse was "what if Second Life, but with tokens." A good chunk of Web3 was "what if the internet, but slower and more expensive." Quantum anything was "normal computing, but S P O O K Y." And right now there's a startup somewhere putting an LLM in a toothbrush. Each one follows the same score: a mysterious opening, building tension, an epic crescendo at the funding round, and then a quiet outro playing over an abandoned GitHub repo.

The thermodynamics of it

So let's do the math nobody in my little focus group asked for.

The entire Bitcoin network draws somewhere in the ballpark of 15 to 20 gigawatts. Mars receives something like 20 million gigawatts of sunlight, all the time, for free. Move every mining rig on Earth to Mars and you'd be adding roughly a millionth of the heat the Sun is already delivering. The Sun has been at this for four billion years, and Mars is still cold.

And it gets worse. My rigs were going to run on solar power, which means they'd be catching sunlight that was about to land on Martian rock and warm it, and turning it into... heat. With a few Bitcoin as a side effect. Energy doesn't come from nowhere. I'd basically invented a very expensive way to put sunlight through a computer before it hits the ground.

Mars doesn't really have a heating problem anyway. It has an atmosphere problem. The air is less than one percent as thick as Earth's, so whatever heat it gets leaks straight back out to space. You could run a data centre the size of a continent there and it would still be cold. At this rate, warming Mars with mining rigs takes somewhere around the heat death of the universe, give or take a halving.

But who needs physics when you have a compelling narrative and a Hans Zimmer score? The real hot air problem isn't on Mars. It's at tech conferences.

The score we actually need

What bothers me about the whole thing is that serious people are working on how humans might one day live on Mars: making oxygen, growing food, building shelter, and figuring out how to thicken an atmosphere. It is slow, careful work that takes decades and does not fit in a pitch deck, which also makes it much harder to get excited about than my rigs.

Maybe instead of Hans Zimmer, we need Harry Gregson-Williams. He scored The Martian, a movie about surviving on Mars with duct tape, potatoes and a lot of very boring arithmetic. Less "BRAAAAM", more "let's work out how many calories this potato is."

That does not trend, but it is the version that actually works.

The next time someone (including me) pitches you a planet-sized idea, ask them one question: can you explain it without the background music? If an idea needs a Hans Zimmer score to sound reasonable, it probably is not.

P.S. I still think "Proof of Warming" is a great name. I just don't have a planet for it. But hey, the pitch deck looked amazing.