What this scientist thinks of NASA’s 2035 mission to Mars…

The 2035 Mars space mission is said to cost an estimated US$1.5 trillion.

What are my thoughts on this? That sounds like an aweful lot of money to me — to keep four to six people alive on another planet— in my view it’s money that could be put to far better things, like keeping 7 or 8 billion alive on this one.

To put things into perspective, it’s the equivalent of spending 94% of Australia’s Gross Domestic Product… for what? A dozen or so people to have the trip of a lifetime… at the most? That’s one hell of an expensive postcard!

If I personally had US$1.5 trillion dollars to play with and I wanted to ENSURE the future surivial of the human race, why, do you know what I’d do? I’d buy up all the wilderness areas up in poorer countries. I’d abandon that silly space mission. That’s what I’d do. And this is coming from someone that liked reading Carl Sagan’s cosmos…

So I think that talking about a mission to Mars is incredibly misguided. Don’t get me wrong, people like Carl Sagan who were so passionate about exploring other planets were a *huge* inspiration to me personally as a boy.

It’s just that I think that 1.5 trillion dollars could certainly be put to much better use fixing things up here first (and indeed it should). And then when we have bought ourselves some time (maybe a few more centuries), then we might be ‘ready’ for it.

I think NASA should spend half that amount and send double the number of people to the moon for twice as long. Then use the 750 billion dollars saved on climate change, habitat destruction, biodiversity extinction, renewable energy, etc.

And after reading Pale Blue dot –about a decade ago– I’m even willing to bet that Carl Sagan himself would probably be against spending quite that much in light of all of our Earthbound problems. He always wrote about the probablility of humans’ survival. And I don’t think this is the best way to achieve that goal.

NASA officials showed preliminary mission scenarios, while emphasizing that human exploration of Mars is not planned as a single mission, but a series of three to five expeditions, each with a crew of four to six, lasting about 500 Martian days each

The thing is, our priorities have changed since the 60’s. To me, it’s the most expensive & inefficient way to create the most boring food menu imagineable. Really. I mean, just think about how much those first few thousand lettuce leaves are going to cost! A billion dollars per lettuce leaf. That’s really great NASA. Thanks.

It seems people these days have absolutely no imagination for what it would actually be like to live there. And the way I see it, it’s basically going to be the worlds’ most expensive camping mission. Boring. That’s what it is. What are astronauts going to do experiments on that we can’t do experiments on back over here? No, I mean really. I’d really like to know. Are the ‘results’ really even going to contribute US$1.5 trillion back into America’s economy?

Are 8 billion people suddenly going to become ten or a hundred times more hopeful because of this mission? Unlikely. So what’s the point? I think we can create more hope by spending the money right here and now on planet Earth!

It’s not that I don’t think the mission will generate some kind of ‘results’. They always do generate some kind of results. It’s that I question how valuable the data is going to be to us on a dying Earth. Are they generating US$1.5trillion results? What about if the real ‘cost’ was this planet?

I’m starting to call this trip that they are planning to Mars a “trophy mission”. Why? Because at times it seems like we’re going just for the sake of saying “we colonised another planet” rather than “we colonised Earth’s moon”. We’re going because some American men have some very big egos, or so it seems. Yes, ‘we’ may well go (by ‘we’ I mean less than 12 people).

And, yes, the mission may well be deemed a ‘success’ (if and when the first astronauts land and start gathering Martian data). But at what cost to Earth? If we spend US$1.5 trillion just getting to Mars, then I firmly believe we have failed the Earth mission. do even need to reiterate that Earth is still our main home? Apparantly so.

Have NASA researchers not read the fable about the dog and the bone? You know, the story where the dog sees a bigger bone (which is actually just a reflection of the original bone in his mouth), drops it to pick up the other one, and loses both. Well in this case, I think NASA is going for the MUCH smaller bone… How many oxygen molecules are they talking about anyway? Why? When there are trees here that give it to us for free! I just cannot fathom it any longer…

I am starting to feel like humanity is just a weed. We infect everything without thinking of the consequences and it sickens me to be labelled human today.

What this planet needs, fellow scientists, is *not* colonising or even researching other planets. What this planet *needs* is for people to buy less crap. For people to start acting responsibly. For people to change. I think that if we want to survive as a human species, then we’re just going to have to make to with less. Not more, but less.

But you know, perhaps when we do manage to put a small colony on another planet or a moon or an asteroid or something, we might not take Earth for granted so much. Because then we’d soon realise that without nature, we’d have to somehow generate our own oxygen supply. We’d value soil more. We’d value our oceans. We’d value all organic matter.

You see, if 7.4 billion people were already living on the planet Mars and we happened to ‘find’ Earth just the way it is now –except without all the people– we’d realise that Earth presents a much better opportunity for human survival than Mars ever will. I’m sure we’d all be wanting to leave Martian ‘soil’ and just scarper over to planet Earth… preferably as fast as possible. Yes — Earth. Where oxygen is freely available. Where fresh water rains down freely. Where abundant food grows without the aid of a pressurised gas chambers¹. Wouldn’t we? Yes we would.

If we could all learn to think from that type of perspective, I’m sure everyone would be a little more optimistic about our current situation. We’d take better care of Earth. We’d think twice about all the damage we are doing over here right now.

Switching back, I know that if we don’t change our ways, the same thing is just going to happen on the ‘new’ sister planet. But that would mean this mission won’t have actually ‘solved’ anything, merely delayed it.

So I say ban the whole entire mission. Start looking at the scientific reasons for people’s lack of ability to change in times of dire need. How about spending a mere $150 million on a “social inertia” study? Maybe give people a new drug so that we are less anxious about adopting renewable energy and minimalism… or whatever human ‘condition’ we seem to have now.

So how about humanity wakes up for a change and we focus on a brand new mission? I call it the “Earth 2035 mission”. How about we dream really big and we try to make this planet more habitable by then?

1. And if we were ever so bold as to travel on an interstellar voyage instead of our reddish neighbourly planet, we wouldn’t even be take gravity for granted either. Because knowing what I know, even the presence of a relatively constant gravitational field is just as essential resource in terms of our own survival… but that, my friends, I will have to leave that for another discussion…