While this article gets the basic facts right, I think it misses the bigger picture.
Also while I have absolutely zero desire to emigrate to Mars right now, I think it might be a different story once I reach retirement age.
I look at it this way: As a healthy 70 year old you have little to fear from cosmic radiation on the journey or on Mars itself (a cancer will not be able to kill you fast enough, nor are your reproductive plans effected), and at 1/3 the gravity in a virtually disease free environment, Mars will probably give you an additional 20 years of healthy and interesting life-time building up a colony there.
On the other hand, on earth you can be pretty sure to go into rapid decline (as a male at least) and probably be finished off by some virus soon after.
Of course orbital or asteroid habitats (to be converted to generation ships for interstellar travel) might be even more worthwhile as “retirement homes”, but our technology isn’t quite there yet, compared to a relatively more easy Mars colony.
It’s cool we actually are able to land and do things at all on Mars, but why? Planet we live on is in desperate need of us getting our shit together and not hog resources and send it out into space. All those smart people working on marvelous pointless “cool stuff”.
Idk, having a hard time seeing any benefit to anyone except for the national wow-factor.
Sure, but that is a very limited view. There are 7 billion people on earth and literally millions of them are working on much worse stuff than trying to build a Mars colony. Same for money spend, there is trillions wasted on arms and other actively harmful stuff. Maybe we start by asking why one of the richest companies on earth (Google) is a f*cking advertisement (and surveillance) company, which is about the most useless waste of money and smart people one can find.
Building a mars colony might not be the most useful thing, but it is in relative terms quite cheap and inspires people. It is also a form of exploratory research and like many other forms of research doesn’t have any immediate benefits and thus your argument would apply to those as well.
Anyways, it is a bit tiresome to hear the exact same argument every time someone mentions space exploration. The argument isn’t even wrong, it just hits miles of the target.
Two-, or rather millions of wrongs don’t make a right. And the goal of sending folks to mars is a futile, pointless effort. Pissing away money and more importantly resources both material and human.
It is as stated a hell hole with a lot of dust - yes there are things to be discovered but really I do think I could state with certainty that discoveries will be of no significant importance to planet earth and the input far out weighs the output.
Yes but there are other things much more futile and wasteful that should be addressed first.
Also there is a lot of non-futile reasons for space exploration. Human beings are not so one-dimensional as you seem to think.
For example this magazine has some good articles on leftist thoughts why space exploration is desirable.
