Because it’s better to have a backup than to put all your eggs in one basket.
Leave Mars alone. It is deeply immoral to send people there now. People have no business going there until we have thoroughly explored it and ruled out the possibility of indigenous microbial life. By studying such life, we may prove a second Genesis or prove the theory of panspermia. Either would have profound implications for our knowledge of the abundance of life in the universe. If we contaminate Mars, which sending humans would inevitably do, we may have to go all the way to another star system before we get another chance at answering these questions.
Let the billionaire space cadets stick to the asteroids and the Moon. Leave Mars the Hell alone. If after a few centuries of exploration we’ve thoroughly ruled out the presence of indigenous life, only then can we consider putting actual human beings on the surface.
It’s much easier and more effective to do science with people and labs in-situ than with slow, complex robots. The first people to land on mars will be scientists. We won’t be in a position to mess up the martian environment for generations. Stop spreading fear and propaganda. If finding life is what you’re after, Europa, Enceladus, Titan and Ganymede are much safer bets than Mars. Those worlds are completely inhospitable to humans, so there’s little to no chance that we mess them up. I’d much rather we start colonizing the moon, due to the relative ease of access, but due to its low gravity (and razor-sharp regolth particles) it isn’t a great place for humans.
I’d argue it’s actually immoral not to colonize mars. There will be no future humanity if we blow ourselves up here without a sustainable city elsewhere in the solar system.
A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush. We have a viable planet that can sustain life right now. And if we take care of it, it can sustain life for a much longer time.
Also Mars is inhospitable to humans as well
You cannot sterilize a human laboratory. Even our gut bacteria represent an unavoidable risk. Much better to build robots that we can stick entirely in an autoclave and sterilize, from surface to core, before sending to the Mars surface.
And there is a severe contamination risk. We know of bacteria that exist deep with the crust of Earth that, if you were to transport them to far beneath the Martian surface, would be able to live just fine. We know of extremophile bacteria that live in rocks on the surface of the most arid deserts of Earth that could likely survive just fine in a similar Martian environment.
You need to be thinking on the scale of millennia here. I think Mars should be explored by humans in Mars orbit, tele-operating humanoid robots on the Martian surface. Think Avatar except regular robots. Look at the state of how humanoid robots are developing right now, with remote presence via haptic suits or similar. Think of where that technology will be in a hundred or two hundred years. It’s very plausible that we will be able to operate such a machine in a way that feels indistinguishable from actually being there. And humans in Mars orbit would be able to operate them in real time.
I’m sorry, but your vanity is not worth the sacrifice of a world. Your pride is not worth us giving up what may be our one chance at finding a second Genesis in this star system. Realistically, it will take literally thousands of years of development of a human colony on Mars before it could credibly serve as a true backup to Earth, able to actually survive the destruction of Earth. Realistically, if you want a backup of Earth, you’re much better doing it in some mile-deep bunker on Earth, in a deep ocean settlement, or on the surface of the Moon. It will take a thousand years of development to turn Mars into a true backup of Earth. And I’m not even talking terraforming here, just the time to build up the population and truly independent supply chains. Waiting a few centuries to make sure we’re not ruining our one shot at this is not worth your pride. Yes, that means we in our time lose the glory of landing the first human on Mars. But that is a sacrifice we make for our children and our children’s children. We do not have a right to take that risk, just for our own vainglorious pride.
And yes, there may be other chances of life around Sol, but we have no idea of the habitability of those ice shell moons. We don’t know if life can even get going in such an environment, as we don’t really know how life got started on Earth. We do however know that life got started here, and we do know that early conditions on Mars were much more similar to the conditions on Earth’s surface than some ocean world buried under miles of ice. Mars is the only other terrestrial world in this star system that could plausibly have extant life near its surface. We should not sacrifice what may be our only chance to find it, for the sake of our vanity.
Leave. Mars. Alone.
Damn people have no room for nuance here. The Elon hate is eclipsing rational discussion here and your getting mad down votes. Sucks.
Mostly, I agree with you.
But, I do have a really really big fear that once Elon gets space x in a position to be NASAs only outsourced transportation contractor, they will have a monopoly on hardware and NASA will have a budget that got reduced to pennies of what it is now…
He’s gonna extort them to let him do whatever he wants or he’ll take his toys and go home. The first people on Mars will be scientists, but musks bullshit will be right behind them and he won’t have to listen to a fucking thing they tell him.
I hope that doesn’t happen but realistically there’s nothing we will be able to do to stop it if he wants to.
IMHO it’s his end goal. His reason for being trumps piggy bank right now. He’s positioning himself to be untouchable as a space transportation company in 15 to 25 years. Spacex will be the most valuable company ever if it happens. Asteroid mining is going to be a multi trillion dollar industry and he wants to be the company that develops the infrastructure and can get out there and actually become capable of actually doing it. But this last bit is just a hunch