Recently, there has been a lot of talk about how modern technology is advancing at a rate that could soon allow us to leave our home planet Earth and inhabit Mars. “A Dutch nonprofit venture called Mars One aspires to send four people to Mars by 2026 as the beginning of a permanent human settlement,” according to the New York Times. Lots of people are fond of this idea, considering the fact that a large sum of our Earth is trashed at this point, and is slowly dying. Temperatures are rising, landfills are growing, animals are dying, forests are shrinking, pollution is increasing. Why wouldn’t we want a fresh start?
Wrong. To abandon Earth would be to abandon our mother after she has given us life and a home, for a newer, shinier version. Of course it’s possible for us to migrate to Mars, or it will be in the near future, however that doesn’t mean it’s the right move to make in terms of ethics. Just because we can, doesn’t mean we should.
It is wrong for members of today’s society to assume that the universe is there for our taking. We belong to the Earth, not the other way around. We were given this planet as our home, which leaves us with the responsibility to care for it. You don’t get to trash one planet and just move on to the next.
Moving to Mars is the large-scale form of staying home from school so that you can miss a test that you haven’t studied for and avoiding your responsibilities. We all do it, we all ignore our problems and pretend like that will make them go away, but it’s time we wake up and realize that our problems as the human race are still here, and getting worse.
According to an article published recently by Business Insider, there are multiple reasons why the human race should migrate to Mars once the time comes that it is possible, one of them being that it will ensure the survival of our species.
“History shows that surviving as a species on this tiny blue dot in the vacuum of space is tough and by no means guaranteed,” Jessica Orwig writes on the Business Insider website, using the extinction of the dinosaurs as an example.
However, there is also no way to guarantee that our species will survive permanently on Mars, either. And the tedious and expensive task of getting there and finding a way to sustain ourselves out there isn’t even close to being worth it. If our Earth is killing us, it’s partly because we provoked it to.
An article published in the New York Times explains how monotonous and unnatural life on Mars would really be. “There will be persistent mechanical noise and vibration, sleep disturbances, unbearable tedium, trance states, depression, monotonous repetition of meals, clothing, routines, conversations and so on,” Ed Regis details. “Every source of interpersonal conflict, and emotional and psychological stress that we experience in ordinary, day-to-day life on Earth will be magnified exponentially by restriction to a tiny, hermetically sealed, pressure-cooker capsule hurtling through deep space.”
A few more reasons why we shouldn’t move to Mars include the facts that it’s too cold for us to survive without an abundance of extremely reliable technology, the atmosphere is so thin it counts as a laboratory vacuum on Earth, there are rough and global dust storms and much more, according to Scientist Robert Walker.
As a part of nature, it is our duty to stay on Earth and attempt to repair the damage we’ve made. If we are so reckless and ignorant that we destroy our planet to the point of it dying, we are obligated to heal it or to die with it.
There are some ways to undo the damage we have done to the Earth in order to avoid the dull and abnormal way of life that awaits us on Mars. this includes not increasing the population at such alarming rates, lowering our tendency to burn fossil fuels, no longer cutting down such a large and unnecessary amount of trees, dumping less waste into the ocean and much more. Do your part to save our home, rather than trashing it and moving on to the next planet, only to trash that one too with time.