Humans on Mars...for a better Earth?

In Asimov's novel, "End of Eternity", the key message of the novel is the following:

(DO NOT READ the following three paragraphs if you intend to read the book!)

being an interplanetary species inevitably clashes with the objective of obtaining, at every point in time, the greatest good for humanity on Earth, where the future of each human being is calculated, optimised, and decided upon by Eternals, an elite of men operating outside space time.

Humans escaping Eternals' (and eternal) control on Earth, and thriving on space instead, would necessarily comes with struggles, losses, sometimes disasters, the story goes (and common sense tells), but, in turn, it places them in a condition that gives a firing, everlasting sense of purpose.

Purpose is what ultimately determines happiness, and happiness for the conquest of an infinite space ("Infinity" instead of "Eternity") beats greatest good on what, it had then become, an hyper-controlled, uninspiring Earth. This is what the protagonist Andrew Harlan realises at the end of the story through the persuasive words of No?s, who, to me, is the real main character of the novel.

The novel "End of Eternity" was published in 1955, six years before the US President John F. Kennedy stood before Congress, announcing that the US "should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth".

50 years ago, Apollo 11. 

Now, the vision of humans on Mars.

In this opinion piece, (Mars and our path to being an interplanetary species) issued by the Australian Financial Review on July 18 2019, the author Adrian Turner explains how "technologies designed for Mars have already had a positive impact back on Earth". Turner is the chief executive of CSIRO's Data61, an Australian multidisciplinary research group whose purpose is shaping a "positive data-driven future".

In the article, Turner provides compelling examples of the "Mars --> Earth" technology transfer from different research fields: from bioengineering (organisms to clean up toxic compounds, which could be used for waste treatment on Earth) to social sciences (understanding how to improve the life of whom lives in isolation, with direct implication on elderly care on Earth).

It is exciting to see these developments unfolding.

However, some thoughts start to pop up. The message from "End of Eternity" is, to me, as topical as it could possibly be.

Trying to heal a damaged Earth by a technically dull, yet remarkably functional, systematic minimisation of suffering, or...rising to the stars?

Are these two extremes unreasonable to conceive as we imagine them puzzling us in our current reality?

And even in the case where these extremes do appear in our current reality in a milder version of them, would they put us in a position of making a mutually exclusive choice between them, in the light of the urgency to solve the climate crisis and prevent all its satellite spin-off crises? (with scarcity of resources on top of this?).

...Purpose, I mentioned before.

Imagine a viable path that guarantees ingenuity and excitement for "what's next", a path which (clearly) does not feed a scarcity mindset, and, at the same time, does not buy into a reportedly unbounded resourcefulness of humans that get them to bounce back and reinvent themselves in hardship (excuse the lack of optimism if I do not believe that these cycles of crises and re-invention led us to the best of the possible worlds, given our significant portion of agency in the process of shaping them).

So, how shall we design the future path(s)? With which ambitions? With which risks? With which exit strategies?

(with respect to the last question, have you ever heard of the concept of Deep Adaptation?)

The design of the above path becomes more poignant when its territory trespasses the planetary boundaries.

"It doesn't have to be zero-sum game", some claim, when discussing the question within interplanetary system boundaries. However, it could turn out to be a zero-sum game played within the home planetary boundaries if the conversion from space exploration applications (or, more traditionally, military applications) to applications dedicated to solve socio-ecological problems on Earth does not happen fast enough.

The problem is that money spent on research is suffering from diminishing return. It does not mean that investing on science is not worthwhile of course. The phenomenon of diminishing return simply tells us that "great discoveries are simply getting harder to make" (from the article in link).

This, again, brings us back to the dilemma that I paraphrase through these two statements: "focus on where and when to place our limited resources", or, "investments on research, innovation and technological development will unveil what are, now, unknown unknowns that will then pay us back with the encouragingly steep returns".

Concluding with a comforting wrap-up thought that would make the questions I asked in this post lighter and easier to handle is impossible. So, I have no choice but to conclude with more questions.

In which circumstances and conditions do you see space exploration as an opportunity for human civilisations at this point in our history? When does it become a threat to them?