Mars

Maciej Cegłowski is back online, and his first post in a year is brilliant:

A standardly caustic opening:

The goal of this essay is to persuade you that we shouldn’t send human beings to Mars, at least not anytime soon. Landing on Mars with existing technology would be a destructive, wasteful stunt whose only legacy would be to ruin the greatest natural history experiment in the Solar System. It would no more open a new era of spaceflight than a Phoenician sailor crossing the Atlantic in 500 B.C. would have opened up the New World. And it wouldn’t even be that much fun.

A salient fact:

But fifty years of progress in miniaturization and software changed the balance between robots and humans in space. Between 1960 and 2020, space probes improved by something like six orders of magnitude, while the technologies of long-duration spaceflight did not. Boiling the water out of urine still looks the same in 2023 as it did in 1960, or for that matter 1060. Today’s automated spacecraft are not only strictly more capable than human astronauts, but cost about a hundred times less to send (though it’s hard to be exact, since astronauts have not gone anywhere since 1972).

The hard science and what should be humbling:

The fact that failed to notice 99.999% of life on Earth until a few years ago is unsettling and has implications for Mars. The existence of a deep biosphere in particular narrows the habitability gap between our planets to the point where it probably doesn’t exist—there is likely at least one corner of Mars that an Earth organism could call home. It also adds support to the theory that life may have started as an interplanetary infection, a literal Venereal disease that spread across the early solar system by meteorite. If that is the case, and if our distant relatives are still alive in some deep Martian cave, then just about the worst way to go looking for them would be to land in a septic spacecraft.

Humans who land on Mars will not be able to avoid introducing a large ecosystem of microbes to the area around the landing site. If any fugitives from the spacecraft make their way to a survivable niche on Mars, we may never be able to tell whether biotic signatures later found the planet are traces of native life, or were left by escapees from our first Martian outhouse. Like careless investigators who didn’t wear gloves to a crime scene, we would risk permanently destroying the evidence we came to collect.

And the crux of the matter:

When you hold on to a belief so strongly that neither facts nor reason can change it, what you are doing is no longer science, but religion. So I’ve come to believe the best way to look at our Mars program is as a faith-based initiative. There is a small cohort of people who really believe in going to Mars, the way some people believe in ghosts or cryptocurrency, and this group has an outsize effect on our space program.

The same people that today believe in The Science™, are obsessed with colonizing a planet out of some sort of ideological zealotry. We have absolutely no way of knowing what sort of beings, sentient or otherwise, lurk below the surface of Mars and other spots around the Solar System. But we do know that introducing terrestrial microbes would be catastrophic both to those creatures and any future research without any plausible benefit beyond satisfying idle curiosity. But the Science™ must go on.

Life around the universe and forms it could take is something that’s fascinated me for a long time, and I’ve written about it before and more recently. It’s interesting to see the continuity of my own thoughts on this, as I wrote almost four years ago:

We like to think that the brutishness of Europe circa 1492 has passed. The current treatment of indigenous peoples says otherwise.