Wired has an article on scientists in the US complaining about the attention Mars gets when so much research and work needs to be accomplished on Earth. To quote one of them:

Real oceans need scientific attention more than the dried-up remnants on Mars, Earle contends.

I have been thinking the exact same thing. While I understand the fascination and future importance of space exploration, we might never get enough time to really start exploring our universe if we can’t take care of our own planet well enough to sustain us while we do so.

To criticize even further: what is the point of space exploration? Knowledge? Anything that increases knowledge is good. However, when resources are limited, you need to prioritize what you want to study first and one would think that our planet is most important. Finding new inhabitable/terraformable planets? What for? So that we can go there and pollute another environment? If we had the means to re-create an habitable environment on another planet, wouldn’t it be more worth it to try and fix what’s wrong with ours (assuming we understand it well enough to not make things worse)? And how about the 3/4 of the population who couldn’t care less about Mars when the next lunch/dinner seems so far away?

Another approach on the same problem (resources, especially financial ones, are scarce and we need to prioritize their use): the (controversial) Copenhagen Consensus (currently down) project initiated by Bjorn Lomberg, author of “The Skeptical Environmentalist”. The idea makes sense but is there really a way to assess cost/benefits when so much is a stake (in particular, millions of people lives) and so much more is to be understood about our environment’s complexity?

Black Letter Days from the album Black Letter Days by Frank Black & The Catholics

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