Life on Mars is too expensive
21 October 2008
Space exploration is good fun. Those of us with scientific minds love the feel of discovery when someone finds out that life on Jupiter’s moons is possible, or a probe on Mars reveals a hidden ice cap or two.
Even the giant collider with its titillating hints of Big Bangs and Black Holes is fascinating stuff.
I read last week, however, that the European project to send a mission to Mars, to seek out signs of life, was facing a likely two-year delay on account of funding problems. It is now unlikely to land on Mars until 2016. I have to say that while this may be disappointing to some, I cannot see the justification for continuing a project of this kind.
There are two main arguments here. The first concerns the logic or even the ethics of spending large amounts of money (the latest estimate for ‘ExoMars’ was 1.2bn Euro) on a project with no immediate, tangible benefit. Life on Mars, although the Holy Grail of science fiction, is probably not there at all and is certainly not there in any form that is of any use to us – we are still millions, if not billions of evolutionary years away from being able to have a football match that would count as our solar system’s ‘local derby’.
Long term I am sure there are very good reasons and benefits for continuing with a space programme. Understanding the Big Bang, the structure of the universe and exactly what celestial bodies are where in the heavens above is genuinely interesting stuff and it may be the case one day that we need to understand it to safe-guard our species. Unless we continue down this path we will never get to the point where interesting becomes useful, but is right now the right time to be spending this amount of money? Personally I think not.
I am still unsure of how we got to the point of being in a global recession, unless we owe money to the people we haven’t yet found on Mars – logic tells me that on a global basis if we all maintain a certain balance then we can’t all move into a financial recession together (unless there are actual shortages of commodities). But given that everyone seems jittery about what the future holds, the UK government’s commitments to the European Space Agency might in the short term be better directed at propping up its unaccountably flamboyant spending plans.
All for one
The other part of my argument is less about our financial shortcomings and more about our global industry. The electronics industry, as everyone reminds us when they move manufacturing to China, is a global industry. As much of the technical expertise to fuel space projects will come from the electronics industry, why can’t the political harmony cross borders in the same way that the industrial one does? For while the iron curtain has rusted away and the competition to ‘win space’ for America or Russia is no longer with us, there still seems to be an agenda to be the country that flies the flag for humanity.
Maybe this agenda is boosted by national ego, or maybe it is held in place by international mistrust. I don’t know. But since the end of the American ‘STAR Wars’ programme there seems little point in America, Europe, Russia and more recently China investing in space exploration projects individually. Going back to my original point, if the long term benefits of such projects are going to be for the greater good of humanity, I think the days of conquering space for strategic reasons are, or should be, over.
With this in mind, maybe the delay of the European project is a good thing. At a time when even the Americans are a bit short of cash it makes sense to pool resources. Some competition is always good to bring out the creativity and inventiveness in engineers and scientists, but some sharing of knowledge, or piggy-backing of projects could keep the space programme moving.
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