NASA’s record-setting astronaut Scott Kelly is getting his gold watch. The veteran who spent a year on the International Space Station after two decades.
But he is not free just yet. Tests on Kelly will continue, with the aim of expanding knowledge of how the human body fares in space over the long term to enable crewed missions to Mars. Initial assessment has concluded that . That’s great news for NASA – and the private companies eager to send people to Mars in the coming decades.
For some, though, Kelly’s achievements are a fillip for much bigger ambitions – colonising the Red Planet as a bolthole for humanity. Should we even think about doing this?
Advertisement
The idea that we can flee messy, complicated Earth and start again somewhere else has long been popular. If we had colonies elsewhere, the argument goes, we could if necessary evacuate a dying Earth to make a fresh start. On this view, is a rational response to the threat posed by the environmental crisis of climate change.
This is a dangerous fantasy. It is a fantasy because nowhere in our solar system is anywhere near so hospitable as the harshest places on Earth. The top of Everest, the driest deserts and the South Pole are all far more conducive to human settlement than anywhere in space.
The challenges of moving people – even a handful, let alone a whole civilisation – to Mars, our nearest neighbour, and then establishing a viable habitat would be enormous. To turn a barren, freezing, airless rock millions of miles away into a place we could call home would take vastly more resources than tackling problems here.
The idea is not just wrong: it is dangerous. We are happy to find any reason not to make the difficult changes required to move to a more sustainable lifestyle. The idea that we have a back-up planet could easily serve as such an excuse. Consciously or unconsciously it tells us we can carry on with destructive habits.
The reality is that our future is here. We hope there will one day be settlements on Mars. But these will be inhabited by a few adventurers, mostly relying on support from Earth, our mother ship. Colonising other planets is not an alternative to looking after this one, but is dependent upon it.
One of the many benefits of space exploration is that it teaches us about our place in the universe. What we have learned so far is how precious Earth is. It is the only place known to have breathable air and drinkable water in abundance, and to have produced life at all, let alone the great variety of life upon which humans depend.
We should continue to explore. But we will only become an interplanetary species if we learn to look after the one habitable planet we have, the one Scott Kelly was come home to.
