by John M. Crisp
Last week NASA announced the names of the four astronauts who will crew Artemis II, a 10-day mission planned for November 2024. The expedition will boost humans out of an Earth-bound orbit for the first time since 1972 and put them into orbit around the moon, in preparation for subsequent missions that will include lunar landings.
Experienced astronaut Christina Koch, who will be the first woman to reach the moon, is thinking beyond the lunar surface. During her 328-day stay at the International Space Station, she read aloud from a children’s book titled “Hey-Ho, to Mars We Will Go.”
Visionary Elon Musk isn’t bothering with the moon. He has announced his goal to colonize Mars by establishing a city of 1 million people on the Red Planet by 2050.
In some respects, travel to the moon and other planets seems logical and thoroughly consistent with our history. Civilization has often been driven by the inherent human instinct to explore, discover and colonize, then to exploit, exhaust and move on. It’s the most natural thing on Earth.
But what about in space? Does it make sense to assume that this historical pattern can or should be maintained?
On the other hand, if our ancient ancestors had entertained such doubts, would humans ever have left their caves? Or crossed the Atlantic, conquered the New World and pushed our American frontier all the way to the West Coast?
Assuming that these were all good things — a pretty big assumption — it still may not follow that the moon and Mars are logical stepping stones for humankind’s advancement to the stars and beyond.
For one thing, we humans evolved to live in a particular and perhaps unique niche in the universe. It’s easy to imagine that the Earth is a fit place for us to live because it has the resources — water, air, food — that we need to survive. But, really, it’s the other way around. We live here because we evolved out of and along with the resources that were available, and it’s not clear how much sense human life makes outside of the rarified place that produced it.
When he set sail from Europe, Columbus didn’t know what was on the other side of the Atlantic, but he was pretty sure that the resources in the so-called New World — water, land, spices, gold — would be the things that humans need and want. Can we be as sure about Mars, which, compared to North America, is a truly alien world?
Visionaries such as Musk imagine that humans will develop the technologies needed to survive on Mars, and they may be correct. But a million people on Mars? Why?
Here are a couple of dubious rationales for going to Mars:
First, as our growing population inevitably pushes the Earth closer to the limits of its resources, whether we say it aloud or not, we’ve come to think of Mars as a safety valve or a lifeboat, a place where humankind can continue after we’ve exhausted our planet. But this unpromising proposition should be treated with considerable skepticism. And it doesn’t address the larger question of whether it’s possible to be human in any meaningful way so far outside the niche in which we evolved.
Second, one thing that hasn’t changed since Columbus is the connection between human exploration of space and competition among nations to get there first. Once we were frantic to beat the Russians into space. Now we’re more likely competing against the Chinese. But planting the flag for God and country was never a very good reason to explore uncharted lands.
Skepticism about sending humans into space is not anti-scientific. Columbus had to cross the Atlantic to see what was here, but our ability to explore remotely has grown tremendously. In fact, the real secrets of our universe are on such an unimaginably immense scale and distance that they can be more effectively and efficiently explored without having to take humans along.
Could humans learn to live on Mars? Maybe. Wouldn’t it be better to learn to live on Earth first?
