Why Not Mars (Idle Words)
February 6, 2023
The goal of this essay is to persuade you that we shouldn’t send human beings to Mars, at least not anytime soon. Landing on Mars with existing technology would be a destructive, wasteful stunt whose only legacy would be to ruin the greatest natural history experiment in the Solar System. It would no more open a new era of spaceflight than a Phoenician sailor crossing the Atlantic in 500 B.C. would have opened up the New World. And it wouldn’t even be that much fun.
I thoroughly, fundamentally, disagree with this… Because the point is not only the destination, but the journey, but preferably by public institutions not private companies.
The lead up and execution of the NASA era of space exploration was littered with innovations which found application outside their own mandate, which drove technology forward across industries. This is exactly the kind of thing that should be done for the Public Good.
- via kottke.org
Pocket Realities 