Earth in its greatness with green trees, blue, water, white snow, sweltering deserts, frozen tundras, and oceans of possibilities: space has its massive rocks that may have some ice, the distant slim possibility of life, and the infinite expanses of nothing. People have looked up at the stars in wonder for years hoping to travel that far someday. In the past, there were races; to orbit, then a race to the moon, now they look to mars which is a dusty desert with solid ice at the poles. Interplanetary travel (travel between planets) comes next with the so called race for Mars. With the notion of interplanetary travel comes the argument of for or against. Scientific priority should be refocused from interplanetary travel as long as parts of the Earth remain unexplored, the dangers outweigh the rewards, and the nations no longer lead research.
The vast Earth with it’s deep caves, pointed mountains, and oceans. The oceans are seemingly infinite when one looks out over it; the real infinity is what’s beneath the surface. Up to this date the approximated percentage of the ocean area that is discovered is only 5% (NOAA 1). The sheer percentage of the unexplored is a simple deterrent from space exploration, without the full understanding of what exists terrestrially the understanding of anything extraterrestrial should be of no priority until the Earth is understood. The rock beneath the Earth is another unknown as shown by the fact that the deepest borehole is only 8 miles deep