Go to Mars, but don’t give up on Earth

The loss Wednesday of the European Space Agency’s Mars lander underscores the perils of trying to land machinery — and eventually humans — on the Red Planet. It doesn’t bode well for those who see Mars as a bolt-hole for our species when things go really bad here.

Schiaparelli, the landing craft from the ESA’s ExoMars probe, apparently crashed to the surface when a landing parachute and rocket thrusters failed to deploy properly. The craft hit the surface at 300 kilometres an hour and exploded.

Meanwhile, Elon Musk, the entrepreneur with an array of titles (business magnate, investor, engineer, inventor, futurist) and multiple nationalities (South African, Canadian, U.S.), is proceeding with his dream of setting up a human colony on Mars.

If anyone can do it, Musk can. He’s a dreamer, but one who has the drive, the smarts and the wherewithal to follow his dreams (his net worth is estimated at nearly $13 billion US). At 45, he has already racked up impressive achievements in business and technology.

As wealthy as he is, he doesn’t seem to be motivated solely by money — he has great visions for the future of the world and humanity.

As someone who grew up on science fiction, who devoured stories set on Mars, Venus and more distant worlds, I can’t help but admire this person who seems not to acknowledge the word “impossible.” He personifies the spirit of exploration.

But there’s a dark aspect to his desire to put humans on Mars and elsewhere beyond our planet. We need a plan for when things fall apart here, he says, or the human race will cease to be.

“An asteroid or a super volcano could destroy us,” Musk says, “and we face risks the dinosaurs never saw: an engineered virus, inadvertent creation of a micro black hole, catastrophic global warming or some asyet-unknown technology could spell the end of us. Humankind evolved over millions of years, but in the last 60 years atomic weaponry created the potential to extinguish ourselves. Sooner or later, we must expand life beyond this green-and-blue ball — or go extinct.”

And so he looks to Mars, which he describes as “a fixer-upper of a planet.”

Just getting humans there will be a tremendous challenge — if you find a trans-Atlantic flight exhausting, the 80- to 150-day trip to Mars is not for you.

And then comes the fixing-up involved, which would be formidable. Mars has no atmosphere, to speak of. And we mean that literally, not in the way some unkind people might describe, say, Calgary or Edmonton.

The Martian atmosphere is made up of 95 per cent carbon dioxide and only 0.13 per cent oxygen, and is 100 times thinner than Earth’s. That will make your blood boil (again, a literal term, not a reference to the U.S. election campaign).

Water is apparently present on Mars, but not easily accessible. Making the planet habitable for humans would involve making massive changes to the climate and surface, which is theoretically possible.

But I doubt anything could be done to change gravity there. On Mars, you would weigh 38 per cent of your normal Earth weight, which sounds great from a Weight Watchers perspective, but which would do all sorts of unhealthy things to your bones, muscles and internal organs.

It’s amazing and truly wonderful that people are willing to tackle these challenges. Greatness comes from adversity; growth comes from stretching capabilities.

And to someone who read all the John Carter of Mars books, who lay on the lawn at night watching for the first satellites, who watched breathlessly in July of 1969 when a human first stepped on the moon, it is vindication of sorts. That wasn’t a misspent youth after all.

Still, I cannot help but wonder — if we believe we can inject enough gases into the Martian atmosphere to make it breathable, surely we can do something about the poisonous gases in our own atmosphere. If we believe technology and innovation can produce bodies of water on a distant planet, then surely we can apply equal effort to protecting the oceans, lakes and rivers on our own world.

I’m not saying we should sneer at space exploration or dreams of transforming Mars into a habitable world, but I’m not ready to give up on the world we already have.