New Mars Forums

A therapist on Mars will be essential since the montonous landscape and confining environments the colonists will live in would drive anyone crazy.  Someone will need to check the sanity of the therapist herself from time to time.  A therapist willing to go to Mars in the first place should be highly suspect.

I think the fuel generation experiment would be a good idea.  Since the Mars Society seems more concerned about the actual colonization of Mars rather than pure science, such a mission could help advance its goals at least a little.  I think building a deep drilling machine to look for liquid, subsurface water would also be interesting.  Maybe have a lab on the drilling machine that would examine any samples of water for life.

I don't believe Jung is over-reacting at all.  History, psychology, sociology, everything pertaining to the study of humans has shown how easy it is for the masses to be whipped up into "totalitarian madness" by their over-reliance and trust of authority figures.  Some philosophers have postulated that one of the reasons modern humans are so eager for highly destructive wars is because the war gives people a "proper" outlet to express a kind of unconscious rage at being suppressed and disempowered by much of modern civilization (it's interesting that a lot of terrorists and pro-war people also tend to be very religious, and religion often attempts to ruthelessly oppress a lot of our instincts toward sex,etc.)  It's not good to champion the colonization of space because it'll only continue the cycle of war and competition for resources.  It's foolish to assume space colonists will always be benevolent toward Earth and they'd have the ultimate high ground from which to launch attacks.