Can we be saved from ourselves?

NO less an intellect than Stephen Hawking has advised us to migrate to Mars so as to save the human race.

NASA, the European Space Agency and the visionary engineer Elon Musk have schemes in hand to tame and modify the Red Planet to accommodate humanity.

Ingenious, expensive techniques are being developed to counter the dangers and rigours presented by that inhospitable world.

Challenges include lethal rays, a tenuous atmosphere, immense temperature changes and a total lack of flora and fauna for the use of mankind.

Yet these challenges have given Musk the urge to send rockets there by the early 2020s.

Why is such an expedition being considered? Because homo sapiens, the most creative yet most destructive animal of them all, are wrecking their planet, making it uninhabitable through industrial pollution and unrestricted population increase.

Our place in the galaxy, the so-called Goldilocks position, has simply been abused.

If these ambitious, futuristic plans are realised and we achieve the settlement of Mars, what are the odds that history will repeat itself and that in due time we will be looking for yet another bolthole?

Can human nature change, or is our species born with a death wish?

JACK FLETCHER, Chopwell