Wavepacket Blog

Wavepacket Blog
displaying only one specific post

Sun Aug 5 17:00:31 2012
Mars is Dumb
Why the persistent fascination?

The Red Menace
Image courtesy of NASA

Tonight, in just a few hours, NASA will attempt to land the Curiosity rover on Mars, in what will be one of the more remarkable engineering feats of the decade.

It is very exciting. I'm going to watch the live feeds if I can, and I certainly wish all the teams luck.

That said, why is everyone so interested in Mars? Compared to other bodies in the solar system, it doesn't really have much to recommend it.

Former President George Bush declared that NASA's next mission should be to land people on Mars by 2020, although I'm not sure why. His plan was scrapped in 2010 (I noted that at the time: Space Plan).

Fortunately for us all, Bush is still working on his plan.

Manned missions to Mars have been very popular for some time. I can see why landing people on Mars looked cool in 1960, when it looked like everyone would have personal rocket ships by 1990. But as the realities of space flight--and science--have set in, a Mars landing looks increasingly expensive, dangerous, and meaningless.

As I've noted before ( No Moon), manned missions are currently considered suicide and we don't have a feasible way to get human beings to get to Mars orbit and back, not even counting the problems of landing and then taking off again.

Why are people so keen to get to Mars? Some of the ideas I've seen so far...

1. We may someday terraform Mars and live on it. This is bogus for many reasons. We are generations away from terraforming anything. Mars doesn't have enough gravity to hold an atmosphere (it's current atmosphere is about 1/1000th of Earth's atmosphere--it is basically vacuum). And Mars has no magnetosphere, so anything running around on the planet will be constantly zapped by high-energy particles from the Sun.

Mars will never be habitable, except for bunkers buried deep underground, or space stations, and we can do that anywhere.

2. There may be life on Mars. At this point, almost all planetary scientists believe we'll discover life all over the place. Maybe not multicellular life, but certainly basic single-cell organisms. Nonetheless, being the first to prove that life exists somewhere else will be a huge career boost for whoever does it.

However, Mars is not the best place in the solar system to look for life: Europa is. Europa, the ice-covered moon of Jupiter, is believed to contain oceans of water that could harbor life.

If you are looking for life, past or present, Europa is a much better choice than Mars.

Still, people are gaga about Mars. The latest proposal is to send people to Mars with a one-way ticket. The theory is that people will be willing to live on Mars as the first inhabitants, even though they won't be able to get home or even reproduce.

I'm all for people being free to do what they want, so if people want to go, more power to them. Still, do the volunteers realize that living in Antarctica instead would be thousands of times easier?

Fortunately, there appear to be more sane targets for space exploration, such as asteroids. Asteroid-based missions have more potential to be immdiately useful, such as mining or learning how to deflect a killer asteroid.

So although I hope tonight's landing will be successful and exciting, I also hope people start to realize Mars isn't where we should be spending all of our time and limited exploration money.

Comments

Related:
  science
  economics

Unrelated:
  books
  energy
  environment
  geopolitics
  lists
  mathematics
  predictions

Links: