Mars? We have enough problems here
Re The case for Mars, Editorial Oct. 16 Nobody can convince me it’s worth hundreds of billions of dollars to go to Mars when the world has been technically broke since 2008. What kind of society are we that we would spend this kind of money to send a few elite people to Mars when billions are starving on earth?
As for the technology we gain from these space endeavours, is it not possible to invent them without the cost of going into space?
About 75 per cent of the Earth is covered in oceans yet we have barely discovered 10 per cent of what is under the seas. Why? Is it not much easier to go underwater than to spend this fortune on space travel?
I seriously doubt many people care about Mars, they are more concerned with paying for heat, hydro and mortgages. Gary Brigden, Toronto With all due respect, renowned British astrophysicist Stephen Hawking must have skipped his classes on evolution.
All life forms on Earth, including humans, are exquisitely evolved to live on this planet only, with this atmosphere, gravity, bacteria and so on. We can live nowhere else for any extended period of time.
Space travel to other planets is the perfect job for robots. It makes everything easier, cheaper and let’s not forget safer.
As for all the great spinoff technology? It seems to me we have all the technology we need to live well on this planet. We just need to live up to our “sapiens” name. Kurt Crist, Consecon, Ont. Surely a better use for the billions required to colonize Mars would be to live in greater harmony with the Earth. Establishing a zero-population growth pattern would have a significant impact on global warming, as well as reduce humanity’s hunger for land.
The United Nations’ worst-case scenario estimates that the world’s population will reach 20 billion by 2200 and 37 billion by 2300. Given the expected population shift brought on by global warming, how do we feed these people? And where do they live?
A quick visit to breathingearth.net — a trip much closer than Mars — would surprise many at the rapidity of our growth.
Just as the space race gave rise to technological innovation, so too would the population growth challenge direct money and research toward providing food and shelter for the expected billions. And if memory serves me, it was during the 1960s space race that another innovation — the birth control pill — saw the light of day. Simon Jensen, Cobourg, Ont.