Going to Mars will teach us why Earth is our best — and likely only — home

Mars exploration’s biggest gift may be a new way of seeing

When the Apollo 11 Mission brought humans to the Moon, for the first time, their most surprising discovery was a new vantage point. Standing in the lunar dust, astronauts took the first “Earthrise” photos of the “pale blue dot” that is Earth.

That tiny orb life in the middle of the vastness was sobering and transformative. Rather than launching an era of galactic exploration and expansion, going to the Moon helped us see that in Space everything’s far away and mostly lifeless.

I think humans going to Mars will have a parallel — but deeper — effect: it won’t be the beginning of “humanity’s second planet,” it’ll be the shocking revelation that we cannot meaningfully separate ourselves from our planet. We are the biosphere; we live within the Earth, not on it or outside of it; everything we are and have is part of one vast system… one system we’re nowhere near fully understanding, yet, much less being able to replicate elsewhere.

What we won’t find on Mars is the dawn of a new era where nature does what we tell it to and the solar system conforms to our desires. Instead, I think what we’ll find on Mars is a profound insight into the limits of our planet and their meaning to the future of humanity.

The Red Planet (with its ferociously hostile environment and utter indifference to human life) will teach us that we don’t live in the Age of Man, we live in the moment of human recognition of interdependence, a moment when we realize adding entropy to the world is not mastery, and there’s no successful ending for humanity that involves destroying the planet on which we live.

We haven’t conquered nature. We’re small in our planet’s physical scales and time-spans. We can’t even reverse the climate change we’ve set in motion. Being able to successfully terraform another world is millennia out of reach, if it’s even possible.

Going to Mars (if we go) will end not in triumph, but in newfound humility and an awakening to the real meaning of our planetary crisis.

Going to Mars may well be what finally convinces us we’re already home.