From Harlem to Mars

I had a lunch at a restaurant on the Columbia campus last week with a group of friends who are all smart scientifically, creative and successful. My plan for the lunch  was for me to share an idea for a new spacesuit that I am working on designing. I wanted to get feed back from successful intellects who are also friends. We had a productive conversation about the product idea, and then relaxed to normal small talk and food. Someone in our group brought up something that was relevant to the topic at hand. He posed a two part question; should we be trying to go to Mars, and will it happen soon? This has come up a lot in recent months, as commercial space companies are being formed to take up the slack left from a withering NASA. In this group of mostly libertarians, I would have thought  that the general move towards privatization would have been applauded. The goals however are the controversial point. The man asking felt that money is wasted on manned missions to Mars, at least at this point, when true science can be better achieved by using robots and satellites. He is not wrong, and as a scientist looking for answers this should be my response as well. Still it is not. It is with issues like these where my scientific curiosity and my human desires collide. When that collision happens it is not detrimental to either me or the science, but rather informative of my passion to exist. If a robot gets the extraordinary experience of a visit to Mars, I want to have that visit as well. This sounds like I am being a spoiled brat, but we can all at least acknowledge that it is a caprice of human existence in many areas. We are often not jealous of other animals, and hardly ever of machines, such as Mars rovers, but our modern times put us in direct conversation with these devices, and emotional feelings become inevitable.

So I want to go to space to join the robots, and to learn some things that only humans can currently learn. I find this a worthy goal. Perhaps the best way to spend money is to go to far away places for no better reasons than the childish ones I mention here. After all, it is less dangerous and expensive than a war, the tax cuts for the wealthy, or the bandwidth and electricity spent everyday covering an imbecilic former Governor from Alaska. It may be impossible to get our priorities right, but we can at least get them better, by launching towards that beautiful red planet near us in the solar system.