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'Can I get two tickets to Mars?' This might sound ridiculous right now, but it might be our reality in the near future. Whether humans should or should not colonize Mars is a big debate, and we should care about it because we all live on this Earth, and colonizing Mars would be a big step for all of mankind, and will change the lives of many people on Earth. However, I believe that we should not colonize Mars becauses we are the problem, we are being too optimistic, and it's a waste of money.
One of the reasons that may push us to colonize Mars is to run away from the many problems we are facing in our own planet. However, the whole reason we are having these problems in the first place is us. Replying to a quote from Elon Musk, Lori Marino (2009) writes in her article “Humanity is not Prepared to Colonize Mars,” 'Musk’s reason for wanting to colonize Mars is to save ourselves from ourselves and it is self-evident that this alone recommends we should not be going anywhere'(p.3). This means that wherever we go, we'll be there, and we'll bring our problems with us. Overpopulation, for example, is one of the problems we are facing on Earth. The number of creatures is not the only cause of overpopulation, but also the efficiency of using our environment and resources. There are many other problems on Earth, such as: climate change, pollution, species extinction, and many more. Instead of wasting our resources and time trying to fulfill this fantasy of going to Mars, humans should focus on fixing these problem from their roots by fixing themselves first, after doing that, then we should rethink colonizing Mars.
The second reason why we should not colonize Mars is that we are being too optimistic. In the article “Humanity is not prepared to colonize Mars” Marino (2019) described our species is 'fatally hubristic', which means too self-confident (p. 11). Being excessively optimistic and self confident is not necessarily good, because of these two factors people are building unsupported assumptions. Some of the Mars colonizing
supporters are assuming that we learned our lesson on Earth, and the people going to Mars will know better, and we can just leave the Earth and have a fresh start. Why these assumptions are most likely false is: humans don't change. Unless we can prove that we can change and fix the problems we are already facing, we should not colonize Mars.
Another reason we should not go to Mars is because it is too expensive. As Christopher Mari (2011) mentioned in his book U.S. National Debate Topic 2011-2012: American Space Exploration and Development , NASA estimated that a program for sending people to Mars would cost about 600 billion dollars, which is a colossal amount of money. All of this money could be invested in better ways, solving world hunger or developing renewable energy sources for example, which are problems we are facing in our mother planet. Personally, I believe that saving our own planet should be prioritized over going to a new planet which we know relatively little about.
Some might say that Earth won't last forever, and we need to colonize Mars as a backup planet, just in case something happens to Earth. Ian Stoner (2017) replied in his article 'Humans Should Not Colonize Mars' with a good reason why that is not true. The first scenario, what is threatening Earth is a large scale threat, such as a nearby supernova. In that case Mars would also be affected, and both planets will face their ends. Second case, the threat we are facing will only affect Earth on a large scale, an asteroid for example. If such event occurred, living on Earth after being hit by an asteroid is going to be easier than building a colony on a planet with barely any oxygen in its atmosphere.
At the end, we should not colonize Mars because if we went without fixing our mistakes on Earth, we will simply go through the same cycle we went through on Earth, but this time on a different planet. Also, we should have solid proof that we can fix our problems on Earth instead of being too optimistic and assuming that we just need a fresh start. Furthermore, 600 billion dollars is too much money, and it could be invested in many other ways. Earth is our responsibility, and we should all work on saving this one planet instead of destroying two different planets.
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