New Mars

Richard L. Poss provides an excellent analysis of the various arguments used for and against the exploration and colonization of Mars, drawing comparisons with our current situation and similar historical events in the past.

There comes a time for anyone who is an enthusiast - for any subject - when he or she must answer the question, Why? The question is simple enough to ask, but can be devilishly hard to answer, especially when the answer is intended for an audience, be it of one or one hundred. While we may know in our hearts the answer to the question, that answer may be too personal, too nebulous, or simply too complicated for our head to give clear voice to. What follows, therefore, is a bit of a gazetteer to seven classic arguments favoring space exploration in general and what happens when they are applied to Mars exploration and settlement in particular. No landscape is complete, of course, without a few sinks and bits of quicksand, and we’ll explore a few of the most enduring counter arguments to space exploration. Hopefully, you’ll pick up a few useful tools along the way.

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The Advancement of Science and Technology

The argument that the larger good of society –not just American — is served by all forms of basic research has been made persuasively to the American public already, and, one might say, the evidence for its success is everywhere.

This is the oldest and purest of the arguments for space exploration and one of the strongest. Indeed it is so strong that we frequently forget how much is left out.

While not all space exploration is science, there are some forms of scientific investigation which can only be performed through space exploration. On the simplest level, if we send a probe to one of Saturn’s moons, we will acquire information about that moon, which will enlarge our knowledge of the solar system. This knowledge will be interpreted in the light of experimental results here on Earth, so that theories of planetary formation, etc., will have a larger data base from which to draw.

All this is difficult to refute, if “science” in the limited sense of data collection is our main goal. The two main objections to this are 1) “So what?,” and 2) “This can best be performed by unmanned, robotic probes, and therefore human space exploration is unnecessary.” The first of these is a serious concern. Funding priorities always involve judgments as to the importance of many different kinds of activities. This “pure” knowledge, if it comes, will come at the expense of flood relief, weapons research, worthy social programs such as Project Head Start, support for the arts and humanities, and unemployment and welfare payments to Americans in genuine need of assistance. The question, “What good is this pure knowledge about Saturn’s moons, that we should fund it at the expense of these other needed activities?” is neither small-minded nor short-sighted.

Examples from the history of science support the answer to the question, which must take the form of a demonstration that over the long term, basic research in the pursuit of seemingly useless knowledge has shown itself time and again to have life-saving relevance. The lines, however, cannot be drawn clearly at the time the research is conducted, and therefore one must appeal to our historic experience. The argument that the larger good of society — not just American — is served by all forms of basic research has been made persuasively to the American public already, and, one might say, the evidence for its success is everywhere.

The second question, of robotic probes, is also crucial, and goes to the heart of why we want to explore. Much, perhaps most, pure data collection can be performed by machines. The results of historic spacecraft like the Viking, the Galileo, and the current Cassini mission show the spectacular advances generated by unmanned probes. Without in any way diminishing the accomplishments of those great robotic explorers, we must remember their limitations. Quite simply, they do not report what they have missed. Recent NASA experiments with telepresence in a robotic rover in Arizona show alarming limitations in recognizing quite important features.

Our position should be to try to heal the wounds of the decades of forced competition for funding between the manned and unmanned mission communities. As humans explore the solar system, robotic probes will multiply in number, quality, and importance. Human exploration is unthinkable without a fleet of probes of every conceivable type, doing basic science, targeted experiments, telecommunications and information processing using artificial intelligence, and other marvels we cannot even currently imagine. So the response to the objection that probes can perform exploration must be both “Yes” and “No,” for while they can do a great deal, probes cannot replace humans.

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The Advancement of Industry and Business

Like parenting, space exploration is at its core about love and a commitment to the continuity of life beyond our own time.

It may seem to us that there is a smooth continuum running from pure science to technology, then to industry and to business. In a capitalist system, when it works, basic science often generates technology which is used by industry to manufacture products which are marketed to consumers. But it need not be that way. A socialist or communist (or any) state could conceivably engage in a major space exploration program and utilize the resulting technologies with no regard for business applications or the enhancing of consumer markets.

It is awkward to argue that we should explore space because of technological spin-offs and in the next moment urge missions to Mars which can be executed “with current technology.” It is expected that technological advances are inevitable as exploration proceeds, and they can be expected to have a major impact on industrial processes and materials engineering. Discoveries and applications will extend to medicine, the environment, psychology, agriculture, and human health. The list is endless, but the concrete results in any given area are neither immediate nor assured.

My suggestion is that while these are valuable and important benefits, they do not constitute in themselves a valid reason for space exploration, especially when we consider the enormous dangers this enterprise will entail. Young men and women will die, for if anything is certain it is that deaths will occur in the exploration of space. We should therefore approach the mission with some sense of the solemn character of the enterprise. Humans do not cease to be human when they go into space, and we can expect over the long term to encounter accidents, sabotage, terrorism, crime, even war. Not to acknowledge this is to be naive about the realities of human nature. Too much emphasis on better airplanes or lighter shoes can be misleading with respect to the seriousness of the risks involved.

Of course, space exploration will generate all manner of business and commerce, and it will be of tremendous benefit to the world. Eventually it will involve people building and selling to each other in space, not on Earth. But the whole notion of linear benefits that come back and appear in tangible form on Earth is a limited perspective which in the long run we must grow beyond. Parents do not work, love, sacrifice, and persist for two decades so that their child can write them a check or bring them better shoes. Fundamentally, material pay-off is not what this is about. Like parenting, space exploration is at its core about love and a commitment to the continuity of life beyond our own time.

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The Argument from Military History — The “High Ground”

This argument assumes and perpetuates competition and lack of trust among groups which have made much progress in cooperation and collaboration. Thus the very strength of this argument is also its greatest weakness.

While this is the strongest and most immediate argument for the United States and other industrial nations to go into space, as it deals with national security, it relies upon assumptions that are not shared by a significant portion of the community. The “high ground” argument is distasteful because it accepts the necessity for one group of humans to get the advantage over another group, in anticipation of violent conflict.

The “high ground” argument begins with a review of military conflicts and levels of technology. It proposes that if two countries go to war, the side with the superior technology usually wins. That superior technology can be visualized as the vertical third dimension in a two-dimensional horizontal landscape. If two opposing groups have swords but one group also has the bow and arrow, then in general, the group with the technological “high ground” will eventually overcome its less developed neighbor. The argument does not purport to explain the history of warfare, and there are important exceptions to it (Vietnam not the least of those), but as a general principle it can be said to have a limited sphere of applicability.

Thus the “high ground” argues for a nation to go into space because it will lose the next war if it doesn’t. However, if there are no more wars, then this argument is null and void. It is the background for much of the history of rocketry, from the V-2 to Sputnik through the Apollo program. This argument assumes and perpetuates competition and lack of trust among groups which have made much progress in cooperation and collaboration. Thus the very strength of this argument is also its greatest weakness.

If the “high ground” argument is valid and recognized as valid, then it implies that when your neighbors go into space, they may be doing so to prepare for hostilities. This was much in the minds of representatives of the member states of the United Nations, who have considered over the years several space treaties limiting exploration, development, and militarization of space. These are legitimate and valid concerns for less-developed nations, which may be placed even further behind in terms of prestige, authority, and wealth. Put another way, any nation which declines to explore space can be expected to fall behind technologically and suffer the resulting losses in the area of national security.

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The Argument from National Pride

Though the reasons for Apollo were not primarily scientific, they were nonetheless compelling. There are seven arguments for going into space, and science is half of one of them.

It is possible to see space exploration as sport, and to follow it on TV the way one follows a balloonist or a basketball team. This follows quite naturally from the “high ground” argument, in which the activity of space exploration is evidence of cultural, technological, and military preeminence. Competition in the military arena flows into competition for prestige. The U.S. and Soviet race for space during the Cold War occupies this category, getting to the moon first for the “bragging rights.” The Apollo program has been derided for this reason, and it did perform rather little real science. But though the reasons for Apollo were not primarily scientific, they were nonetheless compelling. There are seven arguments for going into space, and science is half of one of them.

The “national pride” element is irrational, insidious, and suspect, but it is a very strong motivator. We see it’s presence in current negotiations over participation in the space station, and in the dynamics of cooperation in planning future Mars missions. International collaborations for purely scientific research still have major contributors, and the very presence of scientific research indicates political and military prominence.

It has been claimed that during the anti-war tumult of the summer of 1969, when the first human set foot on the Moon, every person in America felt “proud to be American.” If it is true, it shows the emotional reach of the national pride phenomenon.

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The Argument for Planetary Insurance

What we do here matters, and our actions have consequences beyond our own lifetimes. We are at the beginning of human history, not at its end…

This argument does not excite the emotions, and is admittedly weak in the short term, but is very strong over the long term. If space exploration occurs on a serious scale, then human civilization will consist of communities living on Earth, on the Moon, on Mars, and on space stations in orbit about the Earth and Mars, and soon out to the asteroid belt and beyond. When this has happened, we will have planetary insurance, which may be thought of as similar to “continental insurance” today. As an example, suppose a major catastrophe occurs and Europe is completely destroyed. What becomes of European civilization? While the human and cultural loss would be great, the truth is we would pick up and keep going in a very short time. What if both Europe and North America were destroyed? The same result. Civilization has spread across the globe and the loss of any country or continent would not halt the living reality of our culture.

To extend this unpleasant example, suppose an asteroid, or nuclear warfare, or biological or chemical accident or warfare, were to end all human life on Earth. At the current time, it would be the end of everything. But if we lived not just on Earth but in the solar system, then life would go on. This requires us to do a little “growing up.” Many feel that “if life on Earth were destroyed, I wouldn’t care about it continuing on Mars or the Moon.” This provincial childishness is like the Englishman who figures that if England sinks, the rest of humanity is not worth considering, or the Frenchman who thinks if Paris is destroyed, the rest of humanity is not worth bothering about. We must realize that humanity and civilization are larger than the city-states of ancient Greece, larger than western Europe, larger than the countries which currently rule the Earth, and larger than the small collection of planets and moons we are soon to inhabit. What we do here matters, and our actions have consequences beyond our own lifetimes. We are at the beginning of human history, not at its end, and there is a greater world out there in which we will play a important role.

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The New World Argument

We will go into space, not to bring back things which will make us richer or more comfortable here on Earth. We will go there to live and make it our home.

If space exploration is more than doing science and making better machines for a more convenient life on Earth, then what is its real essence? For the answer we must refer to the first and greatest of explorers, Odysseus, whose voyage through great pains and marvelous wonders, recounted in Homer’s Odyssey, was all in search of his home, the isle of Ithaca. The ultimate goal in his wanderings was to get back home where he belonged, as king of the island, husband to his wife, son to his elderly father, and father to his own son. Later, when Virgil writes the Aeneid under the patronage of the Emperor Augustus, he rewrites Odysseus’ voyage, transforming it into a different kind of journey. Aeneas’ world, Troy, is destroyed, and the gods coerce him into leading his people to a new land. He encounters the same dangers and marvels as Odysseus, but for a different kind of overriding purpose, which is to create a new home and a new civilization. He wages war on the Italian mainland, then marries the Princess Lavinia. “Lavinia” is a woman but is also the name of the land near Rome. His followers intermarry with Italians and settle on Italian soil, which becomes their home. Thus the goal of his adventures is to join with the new land and plant the seeds of what will become the civilization we know as Rome.

This narrative has a long and problematic history. It is the essential myth of colonialism, but it is also the essential trajectory of space exploration. We will go into space, not to bring back things which will make us richer or more comfortable here on Earth. We will go there to live and make it our home. This is the “New World” argument, and just as few Americans today want to return permanently to their country of origin, in two hundred years few residents of Mars or the space stations will want to move back to Earth. This argument raises the hopes for a new start, for a new landscape where new kinds of cities, universities, arts and letters will arise. This kind of exploration is the precursor to migration, and it is backed by a biological imperative which is more basic and more powerful than the languages or ideologies we generate to describe it.

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The “Substitute for War” Argument

Would it be possible for a society to commit itself to so radical a process as mobilization without the threat of war as a motivation?

This is my favorite argument but one we hear only rarely. It has a sociological dimension and is not a strong motivator in the short term. If we recall the personal accounts of the members of any community in serious crisis, but most particularly the personal accounts from England and America during World War II, we repeatedly hear remarks like the following: “It was very hard to get by, but there was a feeling of togetherness, of common humanity and community that was so strong, I have never felt anything quite like it.” From any number of quarters but most classically from London during the “blitz,” one encounters these testimonials. Of course the ones who gave these accounts are the ones who survived, and no one ever recommended going to war as a way to generate feelings of togetherness, but it is a fact that the social phenomenon of mobilization for war had many positive features.

Would it be possible for a society to commit itself to so radical a process as mobilization without the threat of war as a motivation? This argument echoes the famous phrase, “the moral equivalent of war,” and it suggests that instead of several nations mobilizing to attack each other, that they all mobilize to explore, settle, and spread civilization throughout the solar system.

This is a social argument, which prompts the hearer to look around at the “way things are going” in the world. Is society becoming more rational, more humane, more virtuous? Or is it degenerating? This argument makes use of examples like the following: The youth of the inner cities who join gangs do so for many reasons, many of which are in themselves good. The opportunity to be part of a team, to experience trust, to test one’s skill and courage, to encounter real dangers, to depend on one’s companions and have them depend on you for their survival–all of these are healthy motives. There is something in youth and in growing up that needs these challenges, and a society at peace often invents substitutes for combat so that these challenges can still be met. If space exploration were to become a large-scale societal imperative, as military and technological competition was during the Cold War, then the young would know exactly where to turn for the most awesome and dangerous challenges, to the strict meritocracy of an astronaut corps, open to all.

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Counter-arguments: Arguments Against Space Exploration

The argument from hubris

“We should not presume to conquer other worlds. It is not for us to disturb the pristine state of other planets.” This argument invokes guilt over past genocides, over manifest destiny, over pollution, and ridicules the effort to explore space as a vain attempt to reclaim past imperialist glory. This is essentially a cultural argument, and can only be met on cultural terms. If we rip off the mask of piety, we expose this argument for what it is, fear and cowardice. It accuses space exploration of being a flight from responsibility when in fact it is the opposite. A commitment to space exploration involves nothing less than taking responsibility for the solar system the way we now take responsibility for the Earth. Space exploration is dangerous, expensive, and not for the weak of heart. It will eventually entail “environmental management” not just of one forest or of the entire Earth, but of the entire solar system. As such, it involves a profound turn outward, into territories some feel are “alien” and “inhuman.” It will always be a threat to those who fear the wide vistas revealed by modern science, who prefer to huddle here in endless contemplation of the past, in comfortable ignorance of the reality of other landscapes than our own.

This argument has curious blind-spots. It has no problem with the current state of high technology, for example. It is presumably not “hubristic” to hop around on a commercial jet from New York to Paris to Tokyo, to lecture audiences on the evils of science and technology, but it is only the gravity well of Earth which is a sacred taboo.

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The argument from misplaced perfection

This argument takes a current problem, portrays it in dramatic terms as a pressing need, and then asks the question, “With such urgent responsibilities here at home, shouldn’t we wait until we have solved the problem of (fill in the blank) before we go shooting rockets off to outer space?” So, before we expend resources on space exploration, we should put an end to the problems of world hunger, poverty, war, AIDS, pollution and environmental damage, global warming, education, domestic violence, racism and ethnocentrism, homophobia, and el nino. In short, each and every legitimate social concern can be placed in front of space exploration and shaped into a rhetorically effective attack.

This particular formulation is effective in a number of ways. It makes the partisans of space appear insensitive, elitist, “haves” over the “have-nots.” It pushes the audience toward the comfortable populist left, toward arguments for social welfare, thereby pushing the space partisans toward the right, lining them up (again) with the military, the aeronautics industry, and big-budget science programs. A crucial part of our task is not to allow this demarcation to take place. We must get there first, and clarify the benefits and opportunities of space exploration, and infect every audience with the wonder, the dream, the idealism of this enterprise. We must also resist the political polarization which renders space exploration the prisoner of one side of the ideological landscape. In space we will experience greater diversity than on Earth, not less. So far we have been on the losing end of this debate.

The answer to this counter-argument has two parts. First, some of the social ills are permanent features of human society, so that “solving” them would be comparable to solving the problem of anger. There is appropriate use of anger and inappropriate use of anger, but anger is a part of life and is not going away. Second, both for those social ills which are permanent and for those which can be eliminated, our moral obligation to do all we can about them still stands, with or without space exploration. But why is it that it is always space exploration which is “put on hold” until all these ills can be permanently cured? Why is it that physics, chemistry, engineering, and biology laboratories are not told to close their doors and wait until hunger is “solved” before they can resume their activities? It cannot be that they are useful in the effort to solve hunger and space exploration is not, because that is not true. More likely, space exploration is a victim of its own visual imagery, because it wants to go “out there” and seems far removed from the daily necessities of human life, when nothing could be farther from the truth. It has taken five hundred years for European civilization to expand onto the American continent. Has this resulted in any benefits to Europe in the areas of medicine, physics, technology, or culture? What a ludicrous question! But it is a question for which five hundred years are required to produce a definitive answer.

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The “New Age” argument

This is more a prevalent attitude than a coherent argument, but if it had to be stated plainly it would read like this: “Science and technology are bad, and anything that takes as much science and technology as space exploration does must be bad too.” This is the popular mind-set which relaxes in a fuzzy subjectivism about the possibility of truth or reality, thereby avoiding responsibility for judgment. Instead, it luxuriates in a variety of might-be’s: astrology, crystals, channeling, pyramids, and the diverse popular forms of belief and ritual which go in and out of fashion. To engage in the long-term program of space exploration is to accept enormous risks and to show enormous faith in the future. These are not currently popular, and the debate (more a conflict of mythic images) between these two mind-sets must be joined before real progress will be made in the area of large-scale societal support for exploration.

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Practical Arguments

These are the concrete short-term arguments concerning all the specific aspects of exploration. Frequently these take the form of “too much

Filed under: Articles on August 7th, 2001