Expanding human life to Mars (and the entire solar system) is a fantastic goal for humanity. Better than just about everything else we could do. To accomplish it, we will solve many problems along the way. I would much rather we advance our technology in the pursuit of Mars than in the pursuit of weapons of war.
> Expanding human life to Mars (and the entire solar system) is a fantastic goal for humanity.
I think you're underestimating how great Earth is, how awful other planets are, and how big the solar system is.
> I would much rather we advance our technology in the pursuit of Mars than in the pursuit of weapons of war.
Colonization generally does not rhyme with peace. It's very likely there will be conflicts over territories. Space exploration and military production always have been tightly coupled. Where I live the space industry is dominated by "Airbus Defence and Space".
I am definitely not underestimating how great Earth is. But we will learn how to make other places comfortable too. The trick is to remember that technology will improve. Living in a tin can on Mars would suck. Living on Mars with fusion power, biological enhancement, nanobot construction, etc, etc, etc is an entirely different story. Personally, I'd love to live on a ship. I'm aware I was probably born 100 years too soon.
We will continue to kill each other at a similar rate regardless of the outcome of colonization. At least, unlike “Manifest Destiny”, there are no innocent sentient beings we will be attacking.
I can think of many, many things that are (1) better for humanity than going to Mars, and (2) somewhere between "exploring Mars" and "building weapons."
The pithy phrase I've seen before is "let's fix this planet up before we go and screw another one up."
There's nothing we can do to "fix" the risk of an unknown/unidentified space object hitting Earth at high speed and ending human civilization other than establishing self sufficient human cities on other objects.
The article's point is not a choice between humanity's going to Mars or not going to Mars. The article makes the case for suspending the mission until we have more information and better answers as to why. These arguments in favor of going to Mars are addressed in the article.
I'm more interested in known quantities than unknown ones. Besides, I'm not the one going to Mars, nor are any of the people who I think deserve to have their lives improved.
It is a known that eventually a planet killing asteroid will hit the Earth (again). We just don't know when.
But, more importantly, it is a misconception to think that the people GOING to Mars will have their lives improved. Life on Mars will take a very long time to become as good as life on Earth. But the tech developed to make living on Mars possible will help people on Earth.
Mars may hold evidence of a greater extinction than any on Earth. Once we've been able to identify what life existed on Mars and how it ended - then it's free real estate.
Until then, it's the best source of evidence on the Great Filter Theory.
The reason you were born on Earth and not on Mars is because Earth is hospitable to life and Mars is anything but. Put complex Earth lifeforms on Mars without a plan on how to terraform a good chunk of it in a way that it stays terraformed and with a large enough cycle that losses can be made up timely and you're merely sentencing them to a complicated form of death. The only earth creatures that can make it on Mars today are unicellar, maybe some exotic lichen or stuff like that. But humans? No, not for a long long time.
Wait, so you mean that not destroying Earth is a worse goal than going to Mars? I would love it if we managed to solve our current mass extinction problem. Probably more than the idea of going to Mars while happily destroying life on Earth, to be honest.
Not destroying the Earth seems pretty critical to everything. Getting the technology to travel to and live on Mars would help that goal. Think of the benefits things like generating power in space and moving heavy industry off of Earth would create.
That's highly debatable. We talk a lot about global warming, which is due to CO2, which in turn is due to fossil fuels. So of course it sounds like it is an energy problem (and generating power in space, if that was actually better in terms of CO2 emissions, could help).
But what we always forget is that the mass extinction we are living right now (i.e. "we are destroying life on Earth") is not a consequence of global warming. Remove all the CO2 from the atmosphere right now, and we are still in a mass extinction. CO2 will just add global warming to the problem, but that's only a bonus.
Agreed. But there are many examples. Take food production, which is one of the largest environment killers. Keeping people alive in space will involve novel food producing technology that might help stop people on Earth from destroying forests for grazing land, etc.
