Moving to Mars might be a bad idea – Sarnia and Lambton County This Week

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Twenty-one years ago, on April 7, 2001, America launched a spacecraft into the cosmos.

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Its mission was to go out and seek new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no spacecraft had gone before.

No wait, my bad, that was the USS Enterprise I was thinking of, which isnt scheduled to be launched until 2245.

The mission of the spacecraft that was launched in 2001 the Mars Odyssey was far less dramatic, but nonetheless significant: to investigate the Red Planets environment, to provide key information on its surface and to map the chemical and mineralogical makeup of Mars as a step to detecting evidence of past or present water and volcanic activity (NASA).

But deep, deep down, we all know the real reason why the Yanks launched the Mars Odyssey 21 years ago to scope out potential new real estate on the solar systems fourth planet.

Colonizing Mars has been a dream of sorts for humanity for centuries, almost a fetish if I may be so bold to say. It has inspired countless books and movies, including The Martian, Arthur C. Clarkes The Sands of Mars, Mission to Mars, Total Recall (that film where Arnold Schwarzenegger travels to Mars and unsurprisingly kills pretty much everyone there), even the sensational so-bad-that-its-actually-good 1965 classic, Santa Claus Conquers the Martians, where ol Saint Nick is abducted by a buncha ungrateful, Yuletide-averse Mars dwellers.

Were so obsessed with Mars that weve even named one of our most delicious chocolate bars after the planet good luck trying finding a Neptune bar, a Uranus bar or a Mercury bar in your local corner store, we dont care much about those planets (we named a car after Saturn and after a relatively unsuccessful run, production was finally halted in 2009).

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Noted contemporary deep thinkers Elon Musk and Donald Trump have openly mused about sending humans to the Red Planet and I feel that it would be a truly tremendous day for humanity if we could somehow trick them both into boarding a spaceship (along with the equally cerebral, murderous, unhinged space cadet Vlad Putin), lock the door behind them then send them on an impromptu scouting mission to Mars, which is nearly 500 million kilometres away. Its not likely to happen, admittedly, but a simple man like me can dream his dreams, cant he?

In any event, Mars is an attractive place to colonize because: a) it is, relatively speaking, not so far away from us (a one-way trip to Mars takes about six to seven months, apparently, which is do-able provided that no one on board the spaceship forgets their wallet at home and has to turn the spaceship around); b) it contains things like carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, water ice and permafrost, stuff that is pretty essential to maintaining life; c) its got a great view of Earth, in real estate parlance; and d) it is big and red and named after the Roman god of war, which is pretty hunky-dory if I do say so myself.

While leaving all our problems behind here on Earth probably seems like a wise idea for the continuation of our species what with climate change, wars, overpopulation, pandemics and our ceaseless degradation of the environment high tailing it to Mars might not be the easy win we think it would be, for a myriad of reasons.

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For one thing, shipping off humans to Mars is going to cost us, in the words of the aforementioned Trump, a huuuuge amount of money.

Colonizing Mars would cost us not millions, not billions, not even trillions of dollars wed probably start talking about quadrillions, thats how expensive its going to get. The fuel costs alone to ship people to the Red Planet would be outrageous (gas was $1.75/litre this week for instance, which means filling up for a single Mars trip would cost us hundreds of millions of dollars. Counterpoint: wed probably earn a lot of Air Miles points).

Also, were starting with nothing on Mars, so wed have to create from scratch the infrastructure of our future domed cities with their moving sidewalks, robot charging stations and automated Starbucks outlets. Wouldnt it be better to invest that money into cleaning up the Earth and making it more inhabitable? Of course it would be, but human nature is stupid and were drawn to this Mars thing like moths to a flame.

Secondly, Mars isnt Earth, so wed probably have to worry about a whole host of other life-threatening occurrences whilst inhabiting the planet, things like starving to death (Mars might not have the most fertile of soil, but apparently dandelions can grow there; unfortunately, after a few years of an all-dandelion diet you probably wouldnt want to keep on living), dying from lethal doses of radiation, running out of oxygen, getting swept up in one of Mars frequently occurring dust storms or freezing to death.

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Not to mention the real possibility that robots will begin outsmarting humans and attempt to terminate us (just like in 2001: A Space Odyssey) after we inhabit Mars because theyll quickly realize that were as dumb and gullible as a bucket of bolts.

Finally, if we look at our past behaviour, why in the world would we want to export all the awfulness weve created here on Earth to a new planet? I can guarantee you that if humanity travels to Mars and somehow we discover some sacred form of life, well immediately bulldoze it and build a strip mall on top of it.

Humans will inevitably start polluting Mars, doing things like leaving our candy wrappers on the ground and not recycling, and in a few hundred years well have to find a new planet to colonize because we absolutely wrecked another celestial body (hello Kepler 442-b!).

So for all the above reasons, at least until we collectively get our stuff together as a species, I truly believe we should forget about moving to Mars and focus on some good old self-loving for Earth.

If humanitys space cadets want to wreck a place, send them to the Moon its just a hunk of rock and metal (filled with green cheese and old golf balls from past human visits) that has almost no atmosphere and little gravity, so let them have their fun up there. Leave Mars for the Martians, I say, and save them the headache of having to clean up after us humans.

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Moving to Mars might be a bad idea - Sarnia and Lambton County This Week