Should We Go to Mars?
Who's this We?
I'd go to Mars if I had the chance.
Once I dreamed of being an astronaut. I steeped myself in science fiction for decades. Mars is almost a familiar place. I can easily imagine settlements there.
I'm fascinated by the rovers and the photos they send back.
Recently I saw pictures of rippled sedimentary rocks on Mars - pretty conclusive evidence that water once flowed there.
I think it's important to explore and expand what we know. I'm into E O Wilson's idea of consilience: the idea that in science all knowledge is mutually coherent and self-rienforcing. The broader our knowledge base is, the more sure we can be of all of it.
Also the technological benefits of building a settlement on Mars would be huge. I imagine pretty large spin-off effects in terms of psychology and political philosophy
We have this metaphor of "spaceship earth" and spaceship earth is in trouble in lots of ways from wars to global warming and on to environmental destruction. We need a liferaft (following that metaphor). Mars is seen as that liferaft.
Problem is, there are 8 billion of us here. There's no way a high proportion of us will escape.
Yet we have billionaires building spaceships in the hopes of getting some of us to Mars. The billionaires wax poetic about "saving humanity" so that if we botch the Earth a spark of humanity will be left to expand into the universe.
The We in the title refers to that spark of humanity.
I don't like that idea. It's basically saying that We go on even if 8 billion of us die in a cataclysm of some sort.
It's the sort of attitude that wars depend on. We continue no matter how many soldiers die.
And capitalism depends on it too. We get rich no matter how miserable the workers are.
What do you think?
I present regular philosophy discussions in a virtual reality called Second Life.
I set a topic and people come as avatars and sit around a virtual table to discuss it.
Each week I write a short essay to set the topic.
I show a selection of them here.