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Mars: meaningless step for man, giant waste for mankind



 
 
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Old April 3rd 04, 02:09 PM
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Default Mars: meaningless step for man, giant waste for mankind

http://www.theage.com.au/articles/20...?from=storyrhs

Only robots, not humans, should explore space - if it has to be explored at
all, writes Anne Applebaum.
The first colour pictures from the NASA space probe expedition to Mars have
now been published. They look like - well, they look like pictures of a
lifeless, distant planet. They show blank, empty landscapes. They show
craters and boulders; red sand.

Death Valley, the most desolate of American deserts, at least contains
strange cacti, vicious scorpions, the odd oasis. Mars has far less than
that. Not only does the planet have no life, it has no air, no water, no
warmth. The temperature on the Martian surface hardly rises much above minus
18 degrees, and can drop more than 100 degrees below that.

Mars, as a certain pop star once put it, is not the kind of place to raise
your kids. Nor is it the kind of place anybody is ever going to visit, as
some of the NASA scientists know perfectly well. Even leaving aside the
cold, the lack of atmosphere and the absence of water, there is the deadly
radiation. If the average person on Earth absorbs about 350 millirems of
radiation every year, an astronaut travelling to Mars would absorb about
130,000 millirems of a particularly virulent form of radiation that would
probably destroy every cell in his body.





"Space is not Star Trek, " said one NASA scientist, "but the public
certainly doesn't understand that."

No, the public does not understand that. And no, not all scientists, or all
politicians, are trying terribly hard to explain it either. Too often,
rational descriptions of the inhuman, even anti-human living conditions in
space give way to public hints that more manned space travel is just around
the corner; that a manned Mars mission is next; that there is some grand
philosophical reason to keep sending human beings away from the only planet
where human life is possible. One actual Star Trek actor, Robert Picardo,
the ship's holographic doctor, enthused this week that "we really should
have a timetable to send a man to Mars . . . Mars should be part of our
travel plans." Naive, perhaps, but fundamentally not much different from
President George Bush's grandiloquent words after the Columbia disaster:
"Mankind is led into the darkness beyond our world by the inspiration of
discovery and the longing to understand. Our journey into space will go on."


Mars, as a certain pop star once put it, is not the kind of place to raise
your kids.
But why should it go on? Or, at least, why should the human travel part of
it go on? Crowded out of the news this week was the small fact that the
troubled international space station, which is itself accessible only by the
troubled space shuttle, has sprung a leak. Also somehow played down is the
fact that the search for "life" on Mars - proof, as the enthusiasts have it,
that we are "not alone" in the universe - is not a search for sentient
beings but rather a search for evidence that billions of years ago there
might possibly have been a few microbes. It is hard to see how that sort of
information is going to heal our cosmic loneliness, let alone lead to the
construction of condo units on Mars.

None of which is to say that it is not interesting or important for NASA to
send robotic probes to other planets. It is interesting in the way that the
exploration of the bottom of the Pacific Ocean is interesting, or important
in the way that the study of obscure dead languages is important. Like space
exploration, these are inspiring human pursuits. Like space exploration,
they nevertheless have very few practical applications.

But space exploration is not treated the way other purely academic pursuits
are treated. For one, the scientists doing it have perverse incentives.
Their most dangerous missions - the ones involving human beings - produce
the fewest research results, yet receive the most attention, applause and
funding. Their most productive missions - the ones involving robots -
inspire interest largely because the public illogically believes they will
lead to more manned space travel.

Worse, there is always the risk that yet another politician will seize on
the idea of "sending a man to Mars," or "building a permanent manned station
on the moon" as a way of sounding far-sighted or futuristic or even
patriotic. President Bush is allegedly considering a new expansion of manned
space travel. The Chinese are embarking on their own manned space program,
since sending a man to the moon is de rigueur for would-be superpowers. The
result, inevitably, will be billions of misspent dollars, more lethal
crashes - and a lot more misguided rhetoric about the "inspiration of
discovery," as if discoveries can only be made with human hands.

- Washington Post

 




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