Earth isn’t all that bad
The shortlist for the journey to Mars closed Saturday, with well over 100,000 signing up for around `7,000 each, without even a plan to bring back the four pioneers who will go to the red planet nine years from now if a Dutch company can raise `40,000 crore to make the journey possible. Beyond that, there is the wearisome seven-month space travel and a “diet” of 3D printed pizza, purified sweat and urine to consider. Finally, the radiation in the new home could, well, be killing.
We know life isn’t all that great on our beloved Earth early in the 21st century, though philosophers keep telling us life isn’t so bad and our scientists and technologists are making it more comfortable now. But then, the world is getting more crowded — while it took humans nearly 200,000 years to grow to one billion by 1800, and there were only three billion of us in 1960, now there are seven billion on this planet; a figure that will grow to nine billion by 2050 and 10 billion by the century’s end. This population explosion represents a planetary emergency as our resources dwindle.
Even so, Mars — come on — there must be nicer places to hide on Earth itself! After all, Earth is in the Goldilocks zone of the solar system, neither too hot nor too cold to make so much life possible. And there are millions of ways to find some happiness with `7,000 — at least for a while.
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