The case against sending humans to Mars

This article, Mars Sux? - by Jonathan V. Last - The Triad (thebulwark.com), popped up in my e-mail yesterday, and it pretty well sums up how I feel about the goal of manned missions to Mars. I have long felt that to pursue that goal is a waste of money and resources, and is indulging a vain hope that humans could ever live on the red planet. The author of the Bulwark article, Jonathan V. Last, quotes extensively from essayist Maciej Ceglowski to make his case.  From the article:

Here JVL is quoting from Ceglowski:

"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...."

"Sticking a flag in the Martian dust would cost something north of half a trillion dollars, with no realistic prospect of landing before 2050. To borrow a quote from John Young, keeping such a program funded through fifteen consecutive Congresses would require a series “of continuous miracles, interspersed with acts of God”. Like the Space Shuttle and Space Station before it, the Mars program would exist in a state of permanent redesign by budget committee until any logic or sense in the original proposal had been wrung out of it. . . ."

"How long such a program could last is anyone’s guess. But if landing on the Moon taught us anything, it’s that taxpayer enthusiasm for rock collecting has hard limits. At ~$100B per mission, and with launch windows to Mars one election cycle apart, NASA would be playing a form of programmatic Russian roulette. It’s hard to imagine landings going past the single digits before cost or an accident shut the program down. And once the rockets had retired to their museums, humanity would have nothing to show for its Mars adventure except some rocks and a bunch of unspeakably angry astrobiologists. It would in every way be the opposite of exploration."

Ceglowski contends:  contends "...that there is nothing humans could achieve on Mars that could not be done both better and more cost-effectively by robots. And also that the recent discovery of Earth’s deep biosphere makes our home planet infinitely more interesting:

"When new sequencing technology became available at the turn of the century, it showed the number of [microbe] species might be as high as one trillion. In the genomic gold rush that followed, researchers discovered not just dozens of unsuspected microbial phyla, but two entire new branches of life."

"These new techniques confirmed that earth’s crust is inhabited to a depth of kilometers by a ‘deep biosphere’ of slow-living microbes nourished by geochemical processes and radioactive decay. One group of microbes was discovered still living their best lives 100 million years after being sealed in sedimentary rock. Another was found enjoying a rewarding, long-term relationship with fungal partners deep beneath the seafloor. This underground ecology, which we have barely started to explore, might account for a third of the biomass on earth."

"At this point, it is hard to not find life on Earth. Microbes have been discovered living in cloud tops, inside nuclear reactor cores, and in aerosols high in the stratosphere. Bacteria not only stay viable for years on the space station hull, but sometimes do better out there than inside the spacecraft. Environments long thought to be sterile, like anoxic brines at the bottom of the Mediterranean sea, are in fact as rich in microbial life as a gas station hot dog. Even microbes trapped for millions of years in salt crystals or Antarctic ice have shown they can wake up and get back to metabolizing without so much as a cup of coffee."

From JVL: "And because we don’t understand microbes especially well, Cegłowski thinks we ought to be really worried about dropping them off on an alien planet. But all of that pales next to the opportunity cost: NASA spent more on their Moon and Mars programs in 2022 than the total budget of the National Science Foundation. And in 2024, they plan to start launching pieces of a new space station, the Gateway, which by the laws of orbital bureaucracy will lock us in to decades of having to invent reasons to go visit the thing."

"Somehow we’ve embarked on the biggest project in history even though it has no articulable purpose, offers no benefits, and will cost taxpayers more than a good-sized war. . . . And yet this project has sailed through an otherwise gridlocked system with the effortlessness of a Pentagon budget. Presidents of both parties now make landing on Mars an official goal of US space policy. Even billionaires who made their fortune automating labor on Earth agree that Mars must be artisanally explored by hand."

From JVL:  "The whole thing is getting weird. Cegłowski thinks that this weirdness stems from the reality that our Mars obsession has become a form of religion. It is—this man is a deeply funny writer—a “faith-based initiative.”

"It is part of a transhumanist worldview that holds mankind must either spread to the stars or die. Elon Musk, the Martian spiritual leader, has talked about the need to “preserve the light of consciousness” by making us a multiplanetary species. As he sees it, Mars is our only way off of a planet crawling with existential risk. And it's not just enough to explore mars; we have make it a backup for all civilization. Failing to stock it with subsistence farming incels would be tantamount to humanity lying down in its open grave."

The whole article is interesting and worth a read.  I feel that sometimes people are mixing up the real planet Mars and its place in the solar system with the sci-fi fantasy Mars that everyone grew up reading about and watching movies about.  I did my share of reading sci-fi about Mars (and Venus, and magic Goldilocks planets in unknown galaxies) in my youth.  My favorite was Ray Bradbury's  The Martian Chronicles.   It was a collection of short stories which were commentaries on the human condition more than a discussion of actual space exploration.