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WHY MARS?

"Mars, the place where new branches of civilization can develop. That is the place where the science is, where the challenge is and where the future is."
Dr. Robert Zubrin, american aerospace ingineer, founder and president of Mars Society and President of Pioneer Astronautics

SCIENCE
Mars was once warm and wet planet, it had liquid water on its surface for more than bilion years, which is about five times as long as it took life to appear on eart after there was liquid water here. So if the theory is correct that life is a natural development from chemistry, or if you have liquid water, various elements and sufficient time, life should have appeared on Mars even if subsequently went extinct and if we can go to Mars and find fossils of past life, we will have proven the development of life is a general phenomenon in the universe. Or, alternatively, if we go to Mars and find plenty of evidence of past bodies of water but noevidence of fossils or development of live, that could say that the development of life from chemistry is not a natural process that occurs with high probability but includes elements of freak chance and, we could be alone in the universe. Furthermore if you can go to Mars and drill - because ther is liquid water underground on Mars - reach the groundwater there could be life there now and if we can get hold of that and look at it and examine its biological structure and biochemistry we could find out if life, as it exists in Mars, is the same as Earth life. Are we what life is? Or are we just one example drawn from the much vaster tapestry of possibilities? This is real science, this is fundamental questions that thinking men and women have wondered about for thousands of years: the role of life in the Universe. This is hypothesis driven critical science.


CHALLENGE
Think societies are like individuals, we grow and we challenge ourselves, and we stagnate when we do not. A humans-to-Mars program would be tremendously bracing challenge for our society. A humans-to-Mars program would say to every kid in school today “Learn your science, and you could be an explorer of new worlds!” We get millions of scientists, engineers, inventors, technological entrepreneurs, doctors, medical researchers out of that. And the intellectual capital from what would enormously benefit us. It would dwarf the cost of the program.


 FUTURE
Mars is the closest planet that has on it all the resources needed to support life and therefore, civilization. 500 years from now there will be branches of human civilization on Mars, and I believe throughout nearby interstellar space. You know, look..if I ask any American what happened in 1492, they will tell me: “Well, Colombus sailed in 1492”, and that is correct, he did but that is not the only thing that happened in 1492! In 1492, England and France signed a peace treaty. In 1492, the Borgias took over the papacy. In 1492, Lorenzo de Medici, the richest man in the world, died. A lot of things happen! If there had been newspapers in 1492, which there weren't, but if there had, thouse would have been the headlines. Not ths Italian takinf bunch of ships and sailing off to nowhere. But Colombus is what we remember. Well 500 years from now, people are not going to remember which faction came out on tio in Iraq, or Syria, or whatever. But they will remember what we do to make their civilization possible. So this is the most importaant thing we could do, the most important thing we could do in this time. And if you have it in your power to do something great and important and wonderful, then you should do it.





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