We, the human race inhabiting Planet Earth, have a looming problem that’s hanging over our heads but we choose to neglect addressing it with the required urgency because we have priorities that make no logical sense.
We live
with a population that’s constantly increasing on a planet whose resources are
being depleted just as fast. For this reason, we incomprehensibly devote much
of our mental energies to forcefully and deceitfully grab what we can from each
other, and do so at the same time that we protect what we hoard, which we keep
in reserve to use on a rainy day.
This
destructive tendency is the modern manifestation of the competition for food we
inherited at the beginning of time and by which we ascertained our continued
survival. Unfortunately, we saw the tendency write itself into our DNA, never
to leave the core of what we’re made of despite the dazzling advancements we managed
to score in other areas of knowledge — such as the discoveries we made in
science, the designs we perfected in technology and the philosophical stances
we developed to regulate our daily comportment.
Whereas silly
kind of competitions are already maintaining us in a precarious state of
existence on the one planet that’s capable of sustaining human life, the
superpower states in our midst are thoughtlessly engaged in a mad competition to
be first at reaching Planet Mars, a neighboring planet that may take a thousand
years before it can be adapted to provide the resources that will sustain human
life.
What is
wrong about the competition for Mars is that it entails sending humans to that
planet, and the promise to bring them back alive — all of that being a prelude
to building permanent bases in a distant world. To be sure, the accomplishment is
expected to add tremendous prestige to the superpower that will be first to get
there. But what will be the cost of all this, not just to the winning and
losing competitors, but to all of humanity?
The
reality is that human beings are natives of Planet Earth. They came into being
in a place that provides them with the necessities of life, among these water,
food and a reasonably moderate temperature to live comfortably and develop the
ability to work, produce more of what they need and thrive. When one or more of
these ingredients is diminished, human life cannot be sustained for long, yet
this is what the travellers to Mars will encounter and live with while travelling
there, and what they must get used to when they get there.
To make
sure those travellers will stay alive and be productive long enough to gather
valuable information and send it to Earth, extra efforts will be mounted to
provide them with the comfort to which they were used when living on Earth. And
this is when the cost-and-benefit question pops up, injecting a dose of reality
in the viability of that whole enterprise. Here is the biting question: What
useful information can humans gather on Mars to send back to Earth that modern
instruments cannot do cheaply, more efficiently and more precisely?
The
answer to that question is: nothing. Thus, we must conclude that the reason why
there is a stampede among the big powers to go to Mars, is for the prestige
effect they expect will accrue to them by accomplishing such a feat. But the
reality is that while they will gain something small, humanity as a whole, will
lose a great deal. That’s because such efforts will put a strain on the
resources of the Earth, diminish them at a time when the exploration of space could
be refashioned to yield tremendous benefits for the entire human race.
What the
big powers are missing is the fact that they have it within their scientific
and engineering knowledge to bestow exponentially more useful benefits on
humanity than they do competing to be first at reaching Mars and win the race.
The reality is that the proof is already ln to the effect that our galaxy is
filled with solar systems containing planets that can potentially be inhabited
by us.
The
problem is that these systems are lightyears away from us. Thus, to get there just
to do as little as explore the neighborhood and send the information to Earth,
will be impossible to accomplish in any reasonable amount of time, the way that
things stand at this moment. And so we must think up solutions that now seem
too difficult to pull off in space travel—all the more reason why we must start
working on them as soon as possible—especially when we consider that the
resources of Planet Earth are dwindling at a relentless pace.
What we
need to do is concentrate on speeding up the kind of research that aims to
invent and build a propulsion engine for the spaceships of the future. It’ll be
an engine that will deliver speed, doing so using the resources it gathers from
space itself wherever the ship will find itself.
The ship
will travel at a speed that will reach at least one tenth that of light which
should take it to our neighboring solar system Alpha Centauri in about 43 years,
explore it for about 2 or 3 years, and send the information back to Earth in
4.3 years for a total of about 50 years. This alone should convince you there
is no time to waste.
Thus, rather than engage in a cutthroat competition outdoing each other, the powers of Planet Earth (big and small) should get together and work at finding ways to go to the planets, all of which are out there begging us to visit them, colonize them and inhabit them.