Why go to Mars?

This is an extract from Robert Zubrin's article in New Atlantis, The Mars Dream Is Back — Here’s How to Make It Actually Happen. It's a long piece, and covers several topics, so I will post more extracts later.

There are three reasons to send humans to Mars: for the science, for the challenge, and for the future.

1. For the Science

The early Earth and the early Mars were twins. Both were warm, wet, rocky planets with atmospheres dominated by carbon dioxide. Earth evolved life. If the theory is correct that life emerges naturally from chemistry through a process of complexification that occurs whenever conditions are right, then life should have evolved on Mars too. We need to know if it did, and if so, what forms it took. We now know from observations made by the Kepler Space Telescope that, out of the stars that are like our Sun, an estimated one in five have roughly Earth-size planets orbiting in their habitable zones. This means there are perhaps as many as 80 billion such planets in our galaxy alone. If life evolves wherever there is a decent planet, it means life is everywhere. Furthermore, since the entire history of life on Earth is one of development into diverse forms, including those manifesting ever greater capacities for activity, intelligence, and accelerated evolution, if life is everywhere, intelligence is everywhere. If we find evidence of past or present life on Mars, it means we are not alone. This is something that thinking men and women have wondered about for thousands of years. It is worth risking life and treasure to find out.

Moreover, while there are forceful arguments that can be made why life must be based on complex hydrocarbon molecules and aqueous chemistry, there is no a priori reason why life must necessarily employ the same DNA–RNA information system utilized by all life on Earth. In trying to understand the phenomenon of life, biologists today are like untraveled people who, having encountered only the Latin alphabet in their homelands, think it is what alphabets are. But in fact, it is possible instead to achieve the same purpose using the Cyrillic or Arabic alphabets, or even Chinese characters, which not only look different, but operate according to an entirely different set of principles. What alphabet does life elsewhere use? The question is of more than academic importance. Biotechnology is going to be one of the main engineering sciences of the twenty-first century and many to follow. It is nanotech made real. A different bioinformation system could offer engineering possibilities as much greater in comparison to DNA–RNA as silicon computers are to ones based on vacuum tubes, electric relays, or mechanical Babbage machines.

Fossil hunting to find evidence of past life on Mars will involve, as it does on Earth, hiking long distances through rough terrain, using intuition to search for subtle clues, doing heavy digging and pickaxe work, and performing delicate work to reveal traces of past life pasted between pages of hardened sediments now turned to rock. Finding current life will require wide-ranging field exploration followed by setting up drilling rigs to access liquid water a kilometer or more underground, bringing up samples, and analyzing them in a well-equipped lab on the Martian surface. These tasks are light years beyond the capabilities of robotic rovers. Only human explorers can achieve them. If we don’t go, we won’t know.

2. For the Challenge

Nations, like individuals and institutions, grow when they challenge themselves and stagnate when they do not. A humans-to-Mars program would pay us back with massive generation of intellectual capital by inspiring millions of young citizens to develop their talents with a bracing challenge: Learn your science and you can be an explorer of new worlds! In the 1960s, the Apollo program issued precisely that challenge. What followed was a doubling in the number of our science and engineering graduates, whose innovations have since repaid us the program cost many times over. With the scientific professions now open to young women and minorities in a way that was simply not the case in the Sixties, the social impact of a bold Mars exploration program would be even greater today.

Forcing NASA to engage in a brave Mars program is precisely what is needed to transform the agency into an effective instrument for supporting all of the nation’s goals in space. NASA today is like a peacetime military with plenty of talented and enthusiastic junior officers but whose upper ranks have become filled by dead wood. It must be thrown into the heat of battle in order to purge it of its McClellans and find its Grants.

Finally, it is by rising to the challenge of Mars that we can demonstrate both the courage and the excellence that we need to show if we are to maintain world leadership. Americans were the first to fly to and the first to reach the Moon. The world needs to know that it is still true that Americans are the ones who can do — and who dare to do — what others can only dream of. So we need to be the first to Mars.

3. For the Future

Philosophers who claim that we are living at the end of history could not be more wrong. We are living at the beginning of history. A thousand years from now there will be hundreds of new branches of human civilization thriving not only on Mars, but on scores of planets orbiting stars in this region of the galaxy. What language will they speak? What traditions and values will they hold dear?

Only people who choose to be parents get to have descendants. Only those nations that take part in the settlement of space will get to put their stamp upon the future.

Of all the worlds beyond Earth currently within our reach, Mars is by far the most viable candidate for human settlement, as I’ve shown in detail in The New World on Mars: What We Can Create on the Red Planet (2024) and elsewhere. On the Moon, outside of a few ultracold craters at its South Pole, water exists only in concentrations of a few parts per million diffused in its soil. In contrast, Mars has oceans of water, including vast amounts in liquid form deep underground, continent-sized regions of frozen mud ranging from five to sixty percent water by weight, and massive formations of pure water ice glaciers, containing perhaps as much water as the American Great Lakes or more, extending from the North Pole down to 38 degrees N, the latitude of San Franscico on Earth. The Moon is lacking in any meaningful supply of carbon or nitrogen, elements essential for life. Mars, with an atmosphere that is 95 percent carbon dioxide and 2.6 percent nitrogen, has plenty of both. Mars not only possesses all the elements needed for industry but has had a complex geological history including both vulcanism and water action that has allowed many rocks to be concentrated into useful mineral ore. In contrast, the waterless Moon lacks many essential industrial elements and those that it has are all mixed together in trash rock. As thin as it is, averaged across the dome of the sky, Mars’s atmosphere provides the equivalent of about two feet (65 cm) of water’s worth of radiation shielding to its surface. That is well above the thickness required for a solar flare storm shelter, and thus fully adequate to protect both astronaut explorers and thin-walled greenhouses taking advantage of Mars’s 24-hour day to grow crops using natural sunlight. In contrast, the Moon has a month-long cycle of day and night and no atmosphere at all, making greenhouse agriculture on its surface a non-starter. Instead, plants would have to grow underground using electrically generated artificial light to support photosynthesis. The power requirement to do this at scale would be enormous. (For radiation concerns, see Endnote 1.)

For the coming age of space settlement, Mars compares to the Moon as North America compared to Greenland during the age of European maritime exploration. Greenland was closer to Europe, so Europeans reached it first. But it was too impoverished an environment to host more than a few outposts. In contrast, America was a place that could be not only settled but become the home for a huge vibrant new branch of Western civilization.

For our generation and those that will follow us in this century, Mars is the New World.

I would add two more.

4.   Mars will be a powerful technological forcing function  

Technological need drives technological advances, and these benefit not just the industry where they were developed, but spread out from there to benefit the whole economy.  Space has already led to or encouraged many technological leaps, such as these, and these, and of course, solar panels.  From before the first rocket leaves for Mars, and on Mars itself, we will need to develop technologies which are cheap and energy-efficient, such as:-

• Air purification systems
• Water purification
• Machines to extract CO2 from the atmosphere
• Vat meat, fish and milk.  There are no great grasslands on Mars, no seas to fish.
• Materials to build domes and habitats
• Genetically modified fast-growing plants to provide fresh food
• Medical advances to treat the illnesses caused by radiation on Mars
• Safe and workable nuclear reactors, fusion or fission.
• Rocket propulsion systems.

Each of these technological breakthroughs will be immensely useful on Earth too.

5.     Mars will change the way we think about ourselves and our place in the universe

Just as the first picture of the Earth, taken on the first Moon landing, and showing Earthrise over the horizon on the Moon, changed our perspective of what we are, so will the televised images of our first trio to Mars and our first colony there widen our horizons. We will never be the same again.