New Mars Forums

What Reason you ask: well, an argument that often surfaces nowadays with regards to terraforming is the cosmic collision argument. From this point of view Mars, in itself, is a resource that must be exploited through terraformation, as it is valuable planetary real estate that might promise to save human civilization from destruction by an inevitable asteroidal or cometary encounter. BUT!!!!!It might be thought of as rather peculiar how, in the wake of the demise of the Cold War, all sorts of enemies are dreamt up by some space industrialists to encourage a space attitude within the general public. The cosmic collision is one such enemy and it has been suggested that if we colonize and terraform Mars we will have an insurance policy for humanity against such a collision. No doubt it could also be thought that the actual odds of a collision are enhanced to convey a sense of immenence and urgency and that cosmic collisionists can be exposed as peddling thinly-disguised self-interest since they themselves are the ones set to gain research dollars if their idea become accepted by political authorities. Governments, to be sure, are hardly going to fund asteroid searches if the asteroid-searchers, themselves, say that cosmic collisions are exceedingly improbable.

There are a couple of other points one could make to debunk the cosmic collision argument for terraforming. Firstly, we won't have time to evacuate any great number of people to a terraformed Mars . This is no problem if a terrafromed Mars is home to a representative appendix of the whole of humanity, but it will hardly be that. We might also state that if a worst case Earth-Asteroid collision eventuates, civilization as we know it will be destroyed and humanity will consist of isolated groups of humans huddling to protective conclaves in a desparate struggle for existence. If we settle on a terraformed Mars, the transplanted civilization will not be of type any that we know on Earth, and a Martian-based humanity will - at least for the first hundred thousand years - consist of isolated groups of humans huddling together in protective conclaves in a desparete struggle for existence. There is, then, no qualitative difference between the two. With regards to the cosmic collision argument, we may as well not terraform mars. Terraforming will not be a saviour for civilization but merely an exercise in the production of equivalent circumstances.

Anyways, it would seem terribly bad luck (or impossibly bad luck) that at the very moment in history that Earth creatures have managed to build instruments to detect impending collisionary objects we are also hit by such an object. It's like the universe is punishing us for looking out at it. The other impending global catastrophes that are cited above, being historically-contingent on late-twentieth century activities, are just as bound to effect a colonised Mars as they are a sorry, disease-ridden or eco-disasterous Earth (indeed, most historians would point out that they would affect both, since a colony is never able to immune itself against what goes on within the original coloniser).

What do you think? Am I an extremist? A radicial? Or is it you who is radical and extreme by trying to solve the Earth's problems by going to another planet?