Why Mars Is Not the Best Place To Look For Life 298
EccentricAnomaly writes "A story over at Science News quotes Alan Stern (former head of NASA Science missions) as saying: 'The three strongest candidates [for extraterrestrial life] are all in the outer solar system.' He's referring to Europa, Titan, and Enceladus. So why is NASA spending $2.5B on the next Mars Rover and planning to spend over $6B more on a Mars sample return when it can't find the money for much cheaper missions to Europa or Enceladus?"
Mars is closer and easier to send people to (Score:5, Insightful)
Mars is closer and easier to send people to
Re:Mars is closer and easier to send people to (Score:2, Insightful)
This is the correct answer.
Even if we don't find life on mars, it will be important as a second establishment of civilization, this is more important than finding other life (because it will prolong the period we can look for it)
Because it's closer. (Score:5, Insightful)
Mars is closer to us than Europa, Titan, and Enceladus. Not just physically, but culturally. Literature, film, etc, Mars has played a big role in the past 50-75 years. If you hear "little green men", the average person is going to immediately think "Mars". More people are more likely to know the name Mars as opposed to some moons orbiting Saturn ( and yes, I'll admit I had to look in the article to double check that they are in fact moons of Saturn). If you are trying to get funding for something, you go for something people will recognize, because they will be more likely to support it. Ask for something they've never heard of, and they might start wondering if it's really all that necessary. It's sad, but it's true.
Also, people might confuse Europa with a continent, and Enceladus with a Mexican dish. :)
Re:Mars is closer and easier to send people to (Score:0, Insightful)
Why bother? We can't afford it, and have many local problems on our own planet fucking us up right here and now. One day, when technology has improved for space travel, and we have a massively better grasp on energy generation, I can see expanding the human race to other locations. But for the foreseeable future, and that is probably several decade or beyond, we can't even manage our own planet that we're perfectly developed for. Save your teraforming for future generations and cheesy sci-fi tales.
We could probably afford it if we strip the top 1% wealth from their assets.
Re:Mars is closer and easier to send people to (Score:1, Insightful)
This is why we need a "-1 Dumbass".
It would be heavily abused, of course. But it certainly applies to the above AC.
Re:Invaders come from Mars (Score:4, Insightful)
I blame Percival Lowell more than H. G. Wells. Wells just took Lowell's ideas and made a novel out of them. Lowell, being a respected astronomer, caused people to think that it could be true.
Europa (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Mars is closer and easier to send people to (Score:4, Insightful)
Look a bit closer. Even getting into orbit could had the very same reasoning behind. Even today we aren't having our colony vacations in orbit, and probably won't for decades if ever. But how much it changed the world getting there for something else, and developing the associated technologies for getting there and taking advantage of that fact? A lot of the consequences of getting there wasnt even imagined by the time the race started. Not sure if we will ever terraform Mars, or even put self sustainable colonies up there. But all that we should develop to get that goal will give us a lot of benefits down here.
Also, that kind of reasoning will delay that forever, always should be a better use of money in the present instead of betting on having a future. Earth history is full of events that could make all saved pennies worthless, our time here could be running out, no matter if that will be next year, next millenium, or a millon years later, and we can do something about it now, not sure later.
Regarding the "top 1%", if an incoming disaster threaten us in the middle/short term, if its the solution their assets will finance a colony on mars... and they will be the ones that will be saved. We've seen that so many times in movies that will not surprise anyone if it ever happens.
Re:Mars is closer and easier to send people to (Score:4, Insightful)
We can afford it. All the USA needs to do is slow down killing other people and use about 10%o f the military budget for Mars and it is a done deal.
Problems on Earth are mainly not due to technology or money, but poor government. People are not starving because there isn't enough food. They starve because they live in places with incompetent, corrupt, or evil governments. Going to Mars is cheap and easy compared to solving poverty.
We are much better at managing the planet. There has never been such widespread wealth and peace [samharris.org] for such an extended time. Room for improvement, but we are on the right track. Well, maybe not the Tea Party.
Re:Take from the rich and give to the... rich (Score:5, Insightful)
Although you are technically correct (the best kind of correct), that's a rather useless way of viewing money. In the U.S., the top 20% have about 85% of the accumulated wealth, and the top 5% have almost 60%, which makes it a remarkably lopsided distribution, with the vast majority of people living below the mean.
What this means is that if you repeatedly cut the top 1% down to the mean and distribute it among everyone else, it doesn't take long before you have dramatically increased the overall standard of living.
The bigger problem I have with your post is the assumption that the rich have predominantly earned their money. There's earned income, and there's unearned income (capital gains, interest, etc.). The vast majority of working class income falls into the first category. The vast majority of upper class income falls into the latter category. So any tax scheme that does not tax the upper class more than the working class is unfair because it takes away money that the working class have earned to allow the rich to keep more money that they haven't earned.
Re:Take from the rich and give to the... rich (Score:4, Insightful)
There's earned income, and there's unearned income (capital gains, interest, etc.)
I don't want to get caught up in another endless thread about class warfare, but how are capital gains and interest "unearned"? Investing money can be hard work, and that money isn't just sitting there - it becomes available for other purposes, such as funding new companies. I grew up watching my father spend many hours each week looking over the family's investments and planning for the next several decades of our lives - he managed to pay for several college educations this way. But according to you, he didn't "earn" any of the money he made through his investments, so it's okay to confiscate it?
Now, the argument that people who make the majority of their income solely through capital gains should be taxed at the same rate as the rest of us - that I can pretty much agree with. But they earned it just as much as I earn my salary. I also have no problem with the concept that the tax burden should be proportional to income, or that the working poor should get a steep reduction in taxes. I don't really object to taxing the rich at a slightly higher rate either. But I'm really not comfortable telling someone that they don't deserve their wealth and should forfeit it to the government, especially given some of the batshit insane things we spend it on. And yes, colonizing Mars falls into that category.