Why Go To Moon Or Mars While We Can Still Save Earth?

Colonize Mars Or Save Earth? Why Mars While We Can Save Earth?

Have you ever wondered – Why all are trying to go to Mars? Why do we want to inhabit Mars and recreate Earth-like atmosphere there? Why not just redirect those ideas & motivation towards Earth – Our own planet and revive it? It is Earth that needs our help to replenish itself so that it can support the human race for centuries to come! – Why not save it first? So the prime question here is – Colonize Mars Or Save Earth?

Our Elders taught us:

Invest in Future Undoubtedly but never forget to Save for the bad times

Presently much research is being carried out by people who want to go to Mars and make it a look-alike of Earth. First of all, people just don’t grasp the scale of it. It is an entire planet, not just some wetland that we can reclaim and build a parking garage on top of, it’s a whole planet. Furthermore, planet Earth is perfectly suited to us. Our ancestors and we grew up here tuned to these environments, to these very climates that we have here, on earth. Maybe people

Humankind and their ancestors kept on traversing planet Earth, crossing oceans, spreading across continents in the great tradition of a pioneering spirit to keep going, expanding and spreading out. So maybe people have general thinking about spreading even more and going to Mars. What they do not realize is that it is a whole other thing to go to Mars.
There is nothing to eat, no air to breathe and there is hardly any water. Yes, we are talking about building a bubble and cooking the Martian rocks and getting the oxygen out of it. Well, it is just not so easy, isn’t it? And even if it is, why aren’t we doing that here on earth or use that same technology here on earth?

It is becoming very important to remind people to start taking care of the earth in order for us all to live here. Right now there may be some 7.3 billion people. This might increase to 9B by 2050 or maybe even 10 billion people by the middle of this century. All of these people are going to want something to eat and drink, and that is why it is required to take much better care of our own planet. But it is better not to completely rule out the possibilities of colonizing Mars or Moon.

Even if we don’t want to go to Mars and have a permanent settlement, a colony out there, we do want to have a base there just as humankind has a base in the Antarctic where scientists go and study the Antarctic, learn about the environment, learn about our planet, learn about ice and the Earth’s history and the climate today and the greenhouse gases and the effect of industrial emissions and so on, all these discoveries are made in Antarctica. It would be really astounding if we were to discover evidence of life on Mars, something that was once alive there, the equivalent of what geologists call stromatolite, fossilized bacteria that have turned to stone, and if we found something still alive there.

What has been found on Mars are the recurring slope lineae, which is a geology expression for what look like rivulets, or little rivers. They can also be just rock falls which turned over gravel and hence has a slightly different color than the surrounding rock, but right now people at the National Aeronautics and Space Station NASA, European Space Agency ESA, JAXA Japanese Aerospace Exploration, all believe that it is water. Everybody believes that there must be some subterranean, some under sand/ice melt if there are recurring flows of water every Martian summer.

And it’s obvious that if we have liquid water anywhere on earth there’s something alive. Wherever there is liquid water there is something alive. If there is something alive on Mars, and we could prove it, show it to ourselves with our spacecraft or with human explorers walking around, it would probably change the world. It would be like the discoveries of Copernicus about the earth going around – all the planets go around the sun, not the other way around. Or that of Galileo, that we’re not the only body out in the cosmos. We have got the moon as do other planets, like Jupiter which has its own moons. These other discoveries were so profound.

Why is that we are so bothered about exploring space when we’ve got problems to fix right here on Earth. We, human beings are indeed messing up the environment, wiping out species faster than any natural disaster in the history of planet Earth.

We are all aware of the dangerous experiments that we are doing on the climate of the planet, increasing temperatures worldwide, with devastating consequences, for both ecosystems and human civilization. We are only going to raise temperatures to levels unseen in millions of years unless we get this under control right away.

There are actually islands of plastic garbage getting collected into huge toxic rafts by the currents in the oceans. Pesticides and habitat loss are killing colonies of bees. We are even polluting the space around the Earth with debris that might tear apart future space mission. The science itself is speaking about the mess that we are making here.

For now, space travel is an unwanted business. Presently, there is two major crisis going on at your home planet: global warming and the worldwide economic crisis, the first one being the most severe issue the earth is going through. We sincerely have to take care of our planet before we go roaming other planets.

This whole question is a false dilemma fallacy. Why is it that we have to choose between space exploration and saving the planet? Why is it not possible that we do both? In 2014, the world spent nearly $750 billion on cigarettes. Elon Musk feels that he can start sending colonists to Mars for less than $10 billion, where NASA’s total budget is less than $20 billion. Instead, why not make the whole world to stop smoking, and spend $20 billion on colonizing Mars and the other $730 billion on renewable fuels and cleaning up the negative impact on the environment, which can definitely reduce poverty and give people access to clean water

As per records, Americans spend almost $27 billion on takeout pizza. We spend an awful lot of money on things that could be redirected towards a vibrant and healthy industry of space exploration and towards reducing our environmental impact. World Space agencies spend billions of dollars on space exploration every year – no one is questioning the motive behind. Of Course, it will be a matter of pride for us all if we succeed in colonizing outer space but the prime concern here is – shouldn’t the same billions of dollars be plugged into saving our existing planet Earth first and then embark the outer space exploration journey?

The other side of this story is that it might actually turn out that space exploration is the best way to save the Earth. Blue Origin’s Jeff Bezos says that we already know that Earth is the best place in the Solar System. Why not keep it that way. Mars might be an adventure to colonize and a fascinating place to visit, but we would still want to swim in rivers, climb mountains, walk-in forests, watch birds, sail in the ocean. There is a very simple reason for the need of colonizing the moon, according to Bezos, who believes that “Humanity’s very survival relies on colonizing space, starting with the moon”.

Bezos’s Blue Origin & team recently unveiled a lunar-lander vehicle, called Blue Moon, designed to deliver a variety of payloads to the moon. The ultimate goal eventually is to help humans establish, “sustained human presence” on Earth’s moon: Bezos states in a presentation at Amazon’s Re: Mars tech conference. In his view, the reason we have got to go to space is to save the Earth. We need to keep moving if we are going to continue to grow this civilization – and this has to be continued; something our grandchildren will work on and their grandchildren and so on. This is not something that only this generation is going to accomplish

But the way we’re exploiting our surrounding, the natural environment, is going to take all that away from us. I completely agree with Bezos where he says that we should move all the heavy industry off Earth and up into space. We can also use solar collectors to gather power and mine asteroids for their raw materials. Isn’t it a much better thought to keep Earth as pristine as possible? For that, we actually have to go into space and learn how to survive and run that industry, from there.

It might be that we’ve already crossed the point of no return. There is a great science fiction story by Spider Robinson called “In the Olden Days”. It is about how modern society turned its back on technology and lost the ability to ever recover. Humanity has used up the entire technology ladder that nature had put in front of us; the chunks of iron just sitting on the ground, the oil bubbling out of the Earth and the coal that was easily accessible. Now, we have come to a position where it takes an offshore drilling rig to get at the oil. These are the resources that the Earth took millions and even billions of years to accumulate for us to use, and transcend. To think about it, if we have any other species evolving intelligence and opposable thumbs, they won’t have those easily accessible resources to jumpstart their own space exploration program.

According to Elon Musk, we have to protect the cradle of consciousness. We have to assume that the Earth is the only place in the Universe that evolved intelligent life until we find proof otherwise.

Even if we succeed in searching out biosignatures of life on nearby extrasolar earth, we won’t be capable of journeying there anytime soon. Thus, we should become more and more appreciative of what Earth offers and why we should be doing more to protect it; including its disappearing species of rhinos, elephants, tigers, lions, dolphins, and whales.
The present generation is certainly the tip of the spear that is ever slowly moving its way into the cosmos. But it is also notable that we live in an era of strange dichotomies, where we remain fixated on finding life off-planet when we still haven’t cataloged all of our own Earth’s biota.

The biggest current blindside is that we simply do not care about planet Earth. The odds remain in our favor in terms of calamitous impactors. Things we learn from cleaning up our own planet Earth and preserving its flora-fauna will only assist us when terraforming the world next door. But before fretting about terraforming Mars or any other planet in our Galaxy, we should deal with our own environmental issues here first.

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Keywords: Colonize Mars Or Save Earth?, Inhabitation of Mars, Mars or Earth, Why Go To Moon Or Mars While We Can Still Save Earth?