Opher Ganel
Sep 3, 2018 · 3 min read

Very nicely written and thought-provoking piece. However, I heartily disagree with all of your arguments against sending humans to Mars, and doing so as quickly as we can reasonably do it.

  1. We have too many problems here on Earth to waste our efforts on sending humans to Mars: Humanity will always have many fires to tend to, so putting human exploration of our solar system off until we have everything handled means it will never happen.
  2. Potentially devastating Martian microflora or suffering devastation from same: As mentioned by other commenters, NASA uses extreme measures for “planetary protection” to reduce the likelihood of contaminating other bodies in the solar system. The same would be true when sending a human crew to Mars. It is the very fact of the hostile environment that will require humans to live within shells to protect them from the lack of breathable atmosphere, extreme dryness, radiation, etc., and that protection should prevent cross-contamination by any microflora.
  3. The $100B cost over 20 years is better spent on Earth sciences: Also as stated by other commenters, there is no guarantee (or even likelihood, I’d argue) that the $5B/year needed to make a crewed mission to Mars possible would instead be used for Earth sciences. We’ve seen historically that when we undertook the previously unimaginable challenge of putting a man on the moon by the end of the 1960s, NASA’s budget increased to over 4% of the federal budget. Once that goal was attained, NASA’s budget shrank to the point that it is now about 0.6% of the federal budget. It is the vision and challenge of doing the seemingly impossible that will make the funds available that would otherwise be wasted on pork-barrel projects like the Alaskan “bridge to nowhere” and similar items of dubious or no value.
  4. We can continue robotic exploration of the solar system including Mars: Yes, we can and should do this. It is a matter of “and” not “or” that we should continue to do robotically everything we can, while sending human crews to do everything that those can do.
  5. Logistical problems: Obviously, all logistical problems would have to be resolved or the mission wouldn’t go. This is part of what’s needed to send the crew, not a reason not to do so.
  6. The ethics of a potential one-way trip for the crew (including radiation, isolation, etc.): Throughout human history, explorers took on incredible hazards, and many gave their lives as a result. Think of the exploration of Antarctica as an example. This is something that humanity has always been able to do, because there were the few who were willing and even eager to go. As long as we don’t force anyone to go, there’s no ethical problem involved.
  7. We shouldn’t do it for simple pride and curiosity: Really?! One could argue that those are the only two reasons anything significant ever gets done by humans. Certainly it was national pride that drove the Apollo missions, and curiosity is what has driven all scientific research and exploration of the unknown.

In short, none of your arguments is a valid reason to not go, or even not go as soon as we can realistically do so.

I don’t think that mass emigration is likely to be plausible anytime in the next few centuries, so this should not be considered as a relief valve for over-population of the Earth, but it should be done as part of our continuous challenge to ourselves as human beings to push the boundaries of the doable, and explore beyond what we can see and do already.

And yes, it will give us another basker in which to put some of humanity’s eggs, in case some catastrophe takes out all of humanity on the Earth, or so severely hurts us here that we lose our technical and technological base and regress to the stone age.

    Opher Ganel

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    Consultant | physicist | systems engineer | writer | small-business coach for solo professionals (opherganel.com) | avid reader | amateur photographer & artist