The Star Trek: The Final Frontier

The highly public sojourn into what the Star Trek franchise refers to as “the Final Frontier” has been debated for decades amongst scholars and scientists. Mankind has been in awe of the stars and planets surrounded by the vast expanse of space for thousands of years, and now we have the technology and motivation of enough people to debark from our home planet. We have successfully put men on the moon, and the next step is the colonization of the dusty red planet named after the God of War. I am adamant that the Mars expeditions are necessary to prevent the overpopulation of the earth, save humanity from the depletion of resources that sustain life, and further the knowledge and prosperity of the citizens on current and future planets. It

The world is a finite resource and will eventually wither and die. In order to prevent the world environment being salvaged past the point of no return we must look elsewhere. To find the resources we need, we must look off-planet, starting with Mars. A prime example of a valuable non-renewable resource is phosphate rock, a necessary ingredient in phosphorous. Phosphorous is one of three ingredients necessary for crop growth. Without crops, we have no way to feed the ever-increasing population. While there is not necessarily a cause for alarm in this particular element right now, a report provided by the International Fertilizer Development Center states: “There is no substitute for phosphorus in agriculture, or indeed in life. Phosphate rock is a finite resource—at some point in time the earth’s supply may be exhausted.” (“IFDC Report Indicates Adequate Phosphorus Resources Available to Meet Global Food Demands.” IFDC. N.p., 03 Mar. 2015. Web. 25 Apr. 2017.) There are many resources that once depleted, cannot be created and must be obtained from other sources. Without phosphate, life will cease to exist. Luckily, phosphates can be found in abundance on Mars, and beyond. Three published students “predict phosphate release rates during water–rock interactions on Mars that are as much as 45 times higher than on Earth and phosphate concentrations of early wet martian environments more than twice those of Earth.” (Adcock, C. T., E. M. Hausrath, and P. M. Forster. "Readily available phosphate from minerals in early aqueous environments on Mars." Nature Geoscience 6.10 (2013): 824-27. Web. 26 Apr. 2017.) Something that is so precious to life does not only exist on earth, and we do not need to cause harm to our planet to find it and can focus on the expansion of human