Thinking specifically about the book and movie The Martian, I definitely think that both have given humans hope that Mars is an option for future habitability, especially if we manage to completely ruin Earth. At the same time, if you go off of the sheer number of shows, movies, and books regarding what Earth looks like after we wreck it, a vast majority of people also assume that it’s not if we ruin our planet, it’s when.
The best example I could think of regarding the overwhelming response to The Martian, is a tweet I saw from Andy Weir talking about how he’d been invited to talk with some people at NASA. Not only did people find the book interesting, but people are also latching onto the hard science he used as a framework for the story.
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You start to wonder if we really could colonize Mars, and if it would be worth it. You think about the risks involved, the mechanics and the sacrifice behind trading our home planet for another. Red Planet focused quite a bit on the interpersonal relations between people stuck on a ship for half a year to get to Mars, the idea of colonizing the planet with the one female that came on the trip, and how the science of the trip was important, but the other real value was human life.
Greg Bear’s book, Moving Mars, also gives the reader hope that Mars is a real possibility, but it puts a lot of focus on colonization issues, such as who’s in charge of what, and to what extent the colony has to depend on/bend to the will of their home planet. Those are things we would need to think about if we wanted to eventually move to Mars and colonize it.
You could be positive and say that we’re being inspired, or you could be negative and say we’e being deluded. I guess which is true really depends on whether we actually ever make it to Mars with a manned mission, and whether we ever actually colonize the planet. For me, I can appreciate the entertainment value and the deep thinking required of me without deciding for sure whether any of it will actually happen or