More than 50 years ago, scientists sent humans to the nearest celestial body to Earth, the
Moon. There are still plans in place to send humans
to Mars, something many astronauts who have traveled in space believed we would have accomplished
by now. Even though humanity has yet to send anyone
to another location in the universe other than the Moon, many people still believe that
we will become a multi-planetary species in the future, beginning with our red planet
neighbor. Establishing a permanent colony of humans
on Mars is not an option. At least, that’s what some of our generation’s most inventive
and bright minds, such as Stephen Hawking, Elon Musk, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Buzz Aldrin,
and Bill Nye, believe. It is quite difficult to predict how crewed
missions to Mars, which would cost hundreds of billions of dollars each, will benefit
humanity. You’d immediately think of how that kind
of money could help battle cancer or end world hunger. This is due to the fact that humans
tend to be short-sighted. We’re more concerned with what will happen tomorrow than with what
will happen 100 years from now. If humanity survives for another million years,
we will have to boldly travel to places where no one has gone before.
Earth is the only home humankind has ever known.
However, history has shown that survival as a species on Earth is complex and far from
certain. A typical example is dinosaurs: They roamed the planet for 165 million years, but
their fossilized remnants are all that exists now. They were wiped out by a massive asteroid.
Elon Musk stated that humans need to be multi-planet species, and that is why he founded the space
transport company, SpaceX, to make this happen. Curiosity, the potential for humans to provide
more in-depth observational study than robotic rovers, the economic interest in the planet’s
resources, and the possibility that the settlement of other planets could reduce the likelihood
of human extinction are all reasons for colonizing Mars.
We’d need a second Earth because we need to survive if things on our home planet went
wrong. Because Mars possesses carbon dioxide in its
atmosphere, it can be converted into a more liveable planet. This means that we already
have a compound in place containing oxygen; all we need to do now is separate it from
the carbon molecular connection. We could call the planet Earth 2 because it
would be our second home. We must broaden our horizons and evolve into
a multi-planetary species. Scientists should focus on sending humans,
not robots, to Mars since humans can make discoveries 10,000 times faster than the best
spaceship explorers we have today. One significant discovery that scientists
could make is determining whether life exists on Mars. They’ll have to dig considerably
deeper than NASA’s rovers can if they’re going to do it.
According to the Mars life theory, violent impacts might have ejected rocks rich in microorganisms
from the planet’s surface, which then traveled across space to reach Earth.
It is not too much to imagine because we can find Martian rocks on Earth. But none of them
have shown any signs of life. Elon Musk, the founder of SpaceX and Tesla,
plans to colonize Mars using a giant rocket, nuclear explosions, and infrastructure to
transport millions of people there. This was seen as highly ambitious, yet technically
complex in various aspects. Planetary protection measures and the challenges
of terraforming, that is, making a planet habitable by, for example, warming it and
dealing with harsh radiation, were cited as major roadblocks.
The coronavirus pandemic raises an essential concern about interplanetary travel. What
if another pandemic struck, this time when people were in space?
Living on a planet where you can’t breathe is difficult enough, let alone having a highly
contagious sickness spread like wildfire. COVID-19 has shown us that those with weakened
immune systems have a more difficult time recuperating.
Future explorers who attempt to dwell on Mars may develop compromised immune systems.