TED BODRUM COLLEGE / 9-C
Should We?
Hamit Efe ELDEM
Everyone wants to go to Mars or it seems
feasible to go. But the real question is: ”Shall
we or could we go?”
Elon Musk, NASA with Lockheed Martin, and
now Boeing are all looking towards the red
planet, with heady predictions of missions
during the 2020s.
But at what cost? And could we even survive
any long-term colonisation on Mars?
One of the biggest obstacles standing on
the path of a human colony on Mars is the
price tag. Getting to Mars will be prohibitively
expensive, and figuring out a method of paying
for the project isn’t so easy.
Of course Scientific exploration of Solar
system planets constitutes one of the most
exciting achievements the human race is
realising but the idea of colonising Mars or
other planets or moons is misleading. It yields
an impression in many people’s mind that an
alternative exists to Earth, a unique (so far)
haven of life in the Solar system, currently
suffering from global warming, rising oceans,
extreme weather events, mass extinction of
species and growing risk of nuclear wars.
We worry that the oceans on earth will get too
polluted, or too acidified, or rise up too high.
It’s true that could make life on earth very hard.
But on Mars the only surface water is frozen in
the polar ice caps. We would be hard pressed
to ruin the water on earth so badly that it’s
worse than what’s available on Mars. We also
worry about the level of carbon dioxide we
humans are creating but there is no evidence
of a liveable atmosphere under which plants
or other organisms would survive on Mars.
As Ellen Stofan, former chief scientist of NASA
puts it, “There is no Planet B.” We object to
the mission to colonize Mars. We believe that
it is an incomplete solution to an unlikely
contingency. The window of opportunity for
us to work together to solve our planet’s most
pressing problems is closing, and we must act
before it is entirely shut.
Living in Mars is biologically impossible and
furthermore it is an unethical project. How
about saving our planet before we colonise
Mars?