Mars is a fascinating planet. It is the most habitable planet in the solar system after Earth. While exploring Mars may help us understand more about the origins of life on Earth, there are a lot of problems that the world needs to focus on first.

Earth remains by far the most habitable place in our solar system. The most inhospitable places on Earth, such as Antarctica, even in the depths of winter, are far more habitable than anywhere else in our solar system.

Continued exploration of the solar system and the habitation of Mars sounds interesting to anyone. However, it has created a wrong impression that an alternative to earth exists while there are problems in Earth right now like global warming, rising oceans, extreme weather events, mass extinction of species and a growing risk of nuclear wars.

Talking about the technology needed to go to Mars, NASA is developing a new spacecraft for deep space exploration. But, the technology required to get the supplies into space is not fully developed.

Communication and heavy lifting technologies still need to be developed to be able to get the required supplies to space and communicate with them properly. The cost of doing this would be more than $20 billion, which could instead be used to fight rising national debt, infrastructure, education and more immediately useful projects.

Besides, the health condition of deep space crew members will be affected during travel. Outside of the Earth’s magnetic field, crew and electronics are exposed to high energy particles, including infrequent but potentially deadly solar particles and a constant exposure to galactic cosmic rays.

Just reaching out to see if Mars is habitable costs a huge amount of money. Imagine the cost that would be needed to actually go to Mars. Only the richest people could try that and colonizing an unknown environment, as much as an adventure that would be, might be too hard for humans.

The idea of colonizing Mars and exploring a vast planet of unknown potential is really appealing, but does the glory of travelling to Mars really deserve to continue in spite of issues here on Earth?