Mars : Exploration vs Exploitation

February 4, 2023

The BBC [1] have an article [2] today where Bill Gates, discussing that he would prefer to pay for vaccines than fund trips to Mars. My comment is not about this directly but the latter part of this article looking at going to Mars.

Fellow entrepreneur Elon Musk has said he wants to colonise Mars, while Jeff Bezos has also joined the "space race".

SpaceX, the rocket company co-founded by Mr Musk in 2002, has made it an ultimate goal to send crewed flights to Mars and eventually colonise the Red Planet.

This raises a few questions, what do we mean by colonise?. If we look at history, white Europeans, have colonised North / South America, much of Africa and Australia as well as other countries. This was based on the assumption at the time that they were in some way superior. So history is being repeated here.

Do we, as humans have the right to decide that we are going to simply colonise Mars? If so, how? It is as if it is ours to colonise.

In terms of ethics, we need if we look at both Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, we can conclude they are very successful. However look at Twitter, after Elon Musk bought it, he has made changes, sacked a huge number of workers, and seems to be banning journalists, banning people mentioning alternatives (e.g Mastodon) and allowing right wing extremists back on. Yes the buck stops with the CEO.

If we now take Jeff Bezos (Amazon CEO), we have had Amazon workers on strike, over conditions, timed toilet breaks [3]. We should examine if those at the top are ethical, in the way they got to where they have done. What are their actual intentions.

From a Science / exploration viewpoint going to Moon / Mars is part of human nature and desire to explore. We can go there to explore, learn and develop our curiosity and understanding further. As the paper [4] says, in terms of mining, we need to take in to account there are cultures on Earth that consider the moon Sacred, so if we deface the moons surface, we affect those cultures, we would not burn a copy of the Quran or Bible in public, if we did we would be arrested. Would changing the moons surface, sufficiently enough to be visible from Earth any different to damaging sacred sites. We already have open mines that are huge. National geographic have an article discussing the destruction of Palmera by ISIS [5]. This caused international anger.

There are papers discussing this issue, one is ethical exploration [4]. There is a difference between having a colony on the Moon, Mars or elsewhere and simply a presence on those celestial bodies. We need to avoid the mistakes or assumptions of the past that everywhere is for humans to just exploit or rather specifically mostly White Europeans and probably more recently White Americans, wiping out indigenous people, so I guess we should include Canadians and Australians, and South Africans in that. But those countries are borne out of European explorers and colonisers.

I have added a link below to science forums, but we can also discuss on the fediverse.

We need to find a way to explore the cosmos peacefully.

References

Links

Science Forums