talk751

Landing A Man on Mars and Safely Bring Him Back

by Pat Wong

As a Father’s Day gift, Michael urged me to attend the Planetary Science Town Hall Meeting at Cubberly Community Center in his stead. A lot of memories came back as I had taken a few programming classes at the same venue more than a decade ago. All memories seem to be in unit of decades nowadays.

I always thought that landing a man on Mars was just George Bush’s misguided vision trying to emulate JFK’s landing a person on the moon. But he is no JFK, and the Cold War had long ended and we had already won. Landing a person on Mar now will simply squeeze NASA’s resources for other more realistic endeavors such as maintaining the Hobble Telescope and studying the atmosphere of Jupiter. Even if we can land people on Mars, that still would not help us to explore other terrestrial bodies. In other words, it is a dead end. For human to travel in space beyond Mars requires other break through in theoretical physics beyond that of Einstein’s.

However, I feel saddened that there is a lot of advocacy within the ranks of Planetary Society for landing a person on Mars. All three panelists Chris McKay, Sandra Bodley, and Kevin Stube argued for it with Bill Nye less so, being the moderator. They cited international prestige, global leadership, the modern-day Columbus style of exploration and other abstract reasons. Kevin Stube even said that if a human was on the surface, putting dirt in the oven would be a trivial task and we didn’t have to worry about the Phoenix robot got stuck for a long time before the problem was eventually solved.

I was not the only one who thought a lot more of science can be done without worrying about the survival and safety of the astronauts. One wise man in the audience cited the fact that the robot did recover and performed the task successfully. If the robot should fail, he further argued that we could surely afford to set more Phoenix Mars Landers with the resource saved form manned missions. He was asked how long should human landing on Mars be pushed back? In stead of the 50 years target advocated by the panelists, he said should probably be a hundred years or more. My argument would be much longer, in the order of millions of years, until the micros change the atmosphere to an oxygen rich one! By then if we are still around as a species, the technology will be so advanced and the artificial intelligence so sophisticated, perhaps a human venture would become superfluous.