Doug Hensley
Jul 22, 2017 · 1 min read

If Mars is going to see a self-sustaining colony, or even an outpost such as we now maintain in Antarctica, the “opportunity cost” of doing it will be inconsequential on the scale of the hundreds of trillions of dollars the world economy now produces, much less the future economy that can do Mars. Of course, even a single dollar is not entirely inconsequential, but neither will it, nor a single batch of 100 trillion dollars, save the world. Our problems are big, our resources are vast, and whatever is to be done about our problems will require vast resources.

We’re assuming for the purposes of this column that we don’t get strong AI. That means in particular that we won’t be able to ascertain via robots whether or not there once was, or even still is, life on Mars. Getting the answer seems worth an effort. Much of what seems likely to have been part of the story on Earth is known to have happened on Mars, e.g. water, hot springs, lakes, even oceans. And there are those crystals of hematite lined up in the same way that certain bacteria line them up on Earth, and which in our Earthly experience never, otherwise, line up like that. So the odds are promising.