Why Mars Could Be Humanities Last Stop In Space Exploration By Dobschuetz Summary

In the essay titled, “Why Mars could be humanities last stop in space exploration,” Konrad Dobschuetz theorizes that once humanity reaches Mars, and establish a base of operations, that all drive and motivation for space exploration would evaporate. He stated that, our drain of motivation would stem from three focal points; Time is money, lack of alien contact and, a mass extinction event on planet earth. For the first point, Time is money, he reasoned that once we were to establish a foot hold on Mars that our pioneers would focus too much on survial rather than space exploration or science. He also stated that, “A human can only be a scientist and explorer if there are resources to support and time as well as space to think, study, reflect and imagine.” (Paragraph 4), and that support from the earth would slowly fall off if the project failed to provide any astonishing scientific break throughs or any monetary value to gain from Martian resources.

For example, he brought up the Fermi Paradox, which states the oddity that we haven’t come across any intellectual life even though we contain a vast number of stars that even if for everyone million stars that one has a planet that could support life there still would be millions of stars that have the potential for life. He brings up the point that this would leave us feeling alone and uninspired to explore the sea of stars. The author constantly leaves a tone of doubt and despair for the future of our space exploration and in relation, humanity’s