Petition for Human Exploration of Mars

jonwiley writes "The Mars Society and thinkMARS have teamed up to create a web-based petition for those who support the human exploration of Mars. Their goal is 1,000,000 signatures by November 2000 and they plan to present the petition to Congress, the President, and to other world leaders. "

Comments

Two Sense

[omarius]

All I gotta say is that they BETTER get a handle on METRIC to ENGLISH CONVERSION before MY ASS would volunteer for THAT ride. . .

-Omar@wheeee!.*crash*.com

"Fuck the Doomed"

[FreeUser]

Just kidding. (The subject is a line from "Where the Buffalo Roam" starring Bill Murray that I've always wanted to use. Thank you for giving me the perfect opportunity to do so. :-) )

Seriously, while taking care of the weak, poor, and less fortunate makes us all feel nicely warm and fuzzy, doing so at the expense of your future posterity is not only stupid, it is IMHO criminally negligent of your own children's future.

The resource of Earth are finite and rapidly being depleated. The choices which face us are fairly stark: either accept an ever sinking standard of living, or find more resources elsewhere. I suppose a third option would be to hope for a magic new technological breakthrough a la' Star Trek's replicator, but, just as occasionally someone wins the lottery, death by lightning strike is far more probable. And frankly, there is little else that would suffice: recycling cannot result in 100% recovery, so even in the best, most eco-sensitive world, with a population that stops growing, we will be sharing (or, more likely, killing each other over) an ever shrinking pie.

While space is hardly a panacea for all the world's problems, the space program, including manned space exploration, is a critical first step in building a sustainable infrastructure for exploiting the cheap energy and mineral wealth of the solar system. It is, in its infancy, expensive, dangerous, and requires some level of sacrifice, but it is nevertheless very important that it be done. Space provides opportunity for additional living space, very cheap energy from the sun, and sufficient mineral wealth to sustain economic growth and prosperity for millenia. Not that this alone will automagically solve all our problems, but at least it will help provide us with the means to do so, which staying planet bound to Earth will not.

The effort to reach Mars has allot of value. It will push technologies and demand resources (and infrastructure) that will facilitate commercial and industrial uses of both near-earth and martian space. Possible medium-term benefits include moving much of our industry into space and away from the Earth's biosphere and microwaving very inexpensive energy back to earth. Long term benefits are too numerous to mention, but include the possiblity of seeding a new biosphere on mars and creating a wealth of new living space in space habitats with access to inexpensive energy and minerals.

To squander all of today's limited wealth feeding the world's poor is to condemn everyone in future generations to a much lower (and ever decreasing) standard of living, until one day the exploited Earth is home only to the impoverished, rightfully cursing their shortsited forfathers for condemning them to their fate.

The approach currently being taken is the correct one -- spend some money alleviating some of most acute the problems of the world, while spending some on building an infrastructure that can sustain and assure future generations of opportunity and wealth. While we may argue over how much should be spent on one versus the other, the contention that we should spend all of our wealth on quick and temporary bandages for today's problems while ignoring the investments necessary for a prosperous future defies all reason and common sense.