11.12.2014
Mission Mars and the final frontier
The successful Orion flight has revived dreams of returning to the moon or even going straight to Mars. Yet, no matter how marvellous the technology, Jack Conrad warns that the left would be ill-advised to cheer on the project
Neil Armstrong’s “giant leap for mankind” did not end the space race. While the US remains the space hegemon - surely proven by Nasa’s $17 billion annual budget - Russia, China, the European Union, India and Japan are all trying to compete.
Russia, of course, remains a major player - regular manned flights, rocket launchers, space tourists, etc - albeit only spending around $3 billion annually. At least when it comes to ambition, China is determined to catch up. In October 2003 the Shenzhou 5 spacecraft orbited the Earth 21 times. Yang Liwei became the country’s first astronaut. Since then it has established a space laboratory, Tiangong 1, and plans for a large, permanent space station are well advanced. China has an eye on the big time. Officials talk of a moon base in the 2020s - the stepping stone for a manned landing on Mars. However, showing that this owes rather more to science vagary than science fact, China’s Mars time frame lies somewhere between 2040 and 2060.
Private capital is, meanwhile, almost frantically, establishing a space market. Virgin Galactica, Golden Spike, Boeing, Blue Origin, Excalibur Almaz, Space Adventures, etc, are developing launchers, low space orbiters and trying to make a profit. Space tickets are being sold to the super-rich. The cost of a proposed circumlunar flight, using a Russian Soyuz spacecraft, is $100 million.1 Surely the obscene pinnacle of ‘how to spend it’ conspicuous consumption. Note: though there is austerity in the core capitalist countries, and the global economy is extraordinarily fragile, “in absolute terms”, the mega-rich have got ever richer.2 There is, as a result, a huge pool of surplus capital.
Before the inevitable bust happens, however, there is an ever-expanding range of ever more fantastical private venture projects - moon bases, mining asteroids and even colonising Mars. Eg, the Dutch-based company, Mars One, proposes to begin one-way trips to the red planet, commencing in 2025. Many thousands - the official website gives a figure of 200,000 - have applied ... and there is an associated list of (cynical) sponsors. The idea is that the first Mars colonists will finance their precarious existence by constituting themselves as the human fodder for a reality TV show to be broadcast back on Earth.3
Of course, at least in terms of the next two or three decades, it is the US alone which must be taken seriously, when it comes to moon bases and Mars missions. Delivering a keynote policy speech at the John F Kennedy Space Center, on April 15 2010, Barack Obama committed his administration to Mars: “By the mid-2030s,” he boldly declared, “I believe we can send humans to orbit Mars and return them safely to Earth. And a landing on Mars will follow. And I expect to be around to see it.”4
With the successful test flight of Orion, on December 5, launched by a Delta IV rocket, America now has in place the most important element needed to fulfil his daring plan. Orion superficially looks like Apollo. But it is designed for long-duration, deep-space missions. A habitat module will be attached, along with a laboratory, water storage units, etc, for the 16-month round trip to Mars.5 Much of the add-on hardware is derived from the International Space Station. There will, therefore, be ample room for living, eating, washing, sleeping and exercising.
Before any Mars journey, there are to be a series of intermediary goals and stages. In 2018 the next Orion test flight is scheduled. Instead of being launched by a Delta IV, there is to be the Space Launch System. The successor to Saturn V, SLS will be the most powerful rocket ever built. Even its basic version is designed to lift 70 metric tons into orbit.6 Then, in 2021, comes the first manned Orion mission: a figure-eight loop around the moon, an asteroid flypast, etc.
After that Nasa faces a strategic choice: ‘Back to the moon first’ or ‘Straight to Mars’. Within the US space ‘community’ two rival lobbies manoeuvre. Eg, Buzz Aldrin, the second man on the moon, says, “Get your ass to Mars”.7 A pointed echo of Arnold Schwarzenegger and Total recall (1990). Others see the moon as the obvious initial destination. Here, only three days away from planet Earth, a permanent base could be established. With this intermediate outpost up and running, the still to be developed engineering, endurance and survival techniques and equipment needed for Mars can be tested and perfected with relative confidence.
Obviously Barack Obama - like JF Kennedy before him - has an eye on his place in history. It almost comes off the pages of Niccolò Machiavelli: “Nothing brings a prince more prestige than great campaigns and striking demonstrations”.8 Alan Shepard, Telstar, Gemini, the 1969 Apollo moon landing, Space Shuttle, Orion and mission Mars - all resonate with American national mythology. When captain James T Kirk of the USS Enterprise spoke of space being the “final frontier”, he not only looked expectantly towards the future, but referred approvingly to America’s past.
Frontiers
After 1783 and the Peace of Paris, Americans “shifted” from being a seaward-orientated people, with European preoccupations and a reliance on Atlantic supplies. Instead of being a European outpost, they increasingly looked west and to taking hold of the interior - “that vast, tempting, unexplored wilderness”.9 From then on the US welcomed successive generations of poor and downtrodden Europeans to its shores ... and ever-expanding frontier lands.
While many migrants settled in the great cities of the east and north-east as proletarians, others headed west: “To the west, to the west, to the land of the free” (from a 19th century English folk song). The native population was either exterminated or driven from the best lands by wave after wave of these incomers - trappers, traders, adventurers, prospectors, loggers ... but above all small farmers. Alike Jeffersonian populism, Abraham Lincoln’s Yankeedom and Hollywood epics turned this class into a national icon: hence Daniel Boone, Davie Crockett, Bill Cody and the films of John Huston and Clint Eastwood. Dominant American ideology still lauds individualism, movement, expansion and internal colonisation ... and the search for the final frontier has now projected itself into the vastness of space.
Announcing his Mars mission, Obama invoked JF Kennedy and his famous May 25 1961 speech: “I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before the decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to earth.”10 Kennedy spoke during the cold war. And in that feverish atmosphere of superpower stand-off every success for the Mercury, Gemini and finally the Apollo programme (annual cost: around 1% of US GDP) generated rapturous popular enthusiasm. Of course, Kennedy was not around when Eagle touched down on the Sea of Tranquillity. He died in Dallas, Texas, on November 22 1963 - shot down by an assassin’s bullet. So it was Richard Nixon, the 37th president, who, on July 20 1969, made “the most historic telephone call ever made from the White House”. He addressed Armstrong and Aldrin ... and an estimated 600 million TV viewers.11
Of course, getting to Mars is undoubtedly going to prove hugely expensive. Mainstream estimates vary from $100 billion to $250 billion over the timespan of the whole project (though I have come across figures as high as $1 trillion12 and as low as $50 billion - the latter coming from the free-marketeer, Robert Zubrin, co-founder of the Mars Society13).
Despite the inevitable criticisms of the costs of Orion and mission Mars, Nasa, for its part, is banking on the undiminished popularity of all things space. Generations of science fiction writers, from HG Wells to Kim Stanley Robinson, and long-running TV and film series, from Star Trek to Star Wars, have created a ready audience for America’s version of bread and circuses. No wonder the proposed Orion mission to Mars has proved to be hugely popular. Millions watched the launch.
Not least due to sci-fi, space is still commonly thought of as ripe for human colonisation. It is the new America. Supposedly space is humanity’s destiny, but one for which the US claims a special responsibility. It is, after all, the quintessential frontier nation. Moreover, without moving into space there is the supposed risk that problems here on Earth will continue to multiply. According to Rick Tumlinson, co-founder of the US-based Space Frontier Foundation, unless we humans make the leap into space colonisation, we will “begin to slide into a new dark age”.14
Germs and labour
In my opinion all this is bunk. The suggestion that space is the modern equivalent of crossing the Atlantic and ‘discovering’ the New World in 1492 is altogether unconvincing. The Americas, perhaps even before the end of the last ice age, supported abundant human life. Estimates of first habitation vary widely - “from 11,500 to 50,000 years ago”.15 Nevertheless, whenever people first arrived, they flourished and settled everywhere from Alaska in the far north to Tierra del Fuego in the far south. They also produced their own high civilisations: eg, the Aztec and Inca empires.
Christopher Columbus, and the conquistadors who followed him over the next 30 years, claimed vast swathes of territory and within next to no time allowed the Spanish monarchy to amass unprecedented riches. The native people were enslaved en masse and gold and silver flooded into the bulging coffers of Madrid. America, confirms the distinguished French historian, Fernand Braudel, represented the “treasure of treasures”.16
But there was, however, a fundamental problem: labour. Everything comes back to labour, Marx stressed in Capital. Because of Eurasia’s much greater population densities the Spanish had developed a certain immunity to a wide range of diseases: measles, typhus, tuberculosis, smallpox, flu, etc. Not the native Americans. European conquistadors came with their writing, flintlocks, horses, steel swords and armour ... and germs.
Hernán Cortés beat the fiercely militaristic Aztec empire not only because his forces possessed immense technological advantages. In 1520 half the Aztec population - including the emperor, Cuitlahuac - died from a raging infection, which miraculously spared the Spanish. “By 1618,” writes Jared Diamond, “Mexico’s initial population of about 20 million had plummeted to about 1.6 million.”17 The same thing happened when Francisco Pizarro and his raggle-taggle army of 168 men took on the millions of the Inca empire in Peru. Smallpox arrived just ahead of them and decimated the native population, killing both the emperor, Huayna Capac, and his designated successor. Throughout the Americas it is estimated that around 95% of the native population died from European diseases.
Germs facilitated European conquest, but destroyed virtually the entire potential workforce. And without labour the Americas were as good as useless (what remained of the native slaves would annoyingly take flight into what was for them the familiar surrounding hills and forests). Labour therefore had to be recruited from the outside if the Americas were to be transformed from an ever-diminishing object of plunder into a self-expanding source of profit. After indentured European labour was tried and failed, the richest classes amongst the colonialists - and their Old World investors and state backers - turned to systematically buying black slaves. They were typically purchased from the most advanced areas in west Africa (peasants made the best slaves, hunter-gatherers tended to go native and become Maroons). And, though you would not have thought it, given BBC nonsense about the “very influential” role played by William Wilberforce, a saintly Christian, in the abolition of the slave trade, it should never be forgotten that slaves resisted, escaped, fought back, and, with Toussaint Louverture’s revolution, they established their own free state in St Dominique/Haiti. Only after that seismic event - a Caribbean October 1917 - did the UK parliament vote for abolition of the slave trade (not slavery). Till then, of course, highly respectable British merchants often played the lead role in the trade.18
Some 12 million Africans were transported across the Atlantic (one and a half million perished during the ‘middle passage’ and an unknown, but surely even greater, number died prior to embarkation). These poor wretches partially substituted for the ghosts of the native Americans. African slaves were central to the hugely profitable plantation system - sugar, tobacco, coffee, etc - which made numerous aristocratic fortunes. Overwork, pitiless exploitation and malnutrition took a terrible toll. Up to a fifth of the slaves died within the first year. No problem: the labour force “could be replenished by further slave purchases”.19
Only after two or three centuries of superhuman efforts - half driven by base greed, half by desperate yearnings for freedom - were the Americas reinvented and transformed into Europe’s outer skin. Europe and the Americas fused into a single system. But one whose centre of gravity inexorably shifted from east to west. By the dawn of the 20th century the precocious US ‘child’ had already surpassed its aged ‘parent’. The defeat of the Germany-Italy-Japan axis in 1945 certainly saw the transfer of world domination away from the exhausted British empire and the beginning of the so-called ‘American century’. The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 left the US as the sole global power.
Ecosystem
Neither the moon nor Mars are in any way modern equivalents of the Americas. Leave aside the lack of atmosphere and the absence of flora, fauna and running water. There is no native labour. Nor is there a realistic chance of substantial population transfers. Zubrin writes of taking people on a one-way trip to Mars at a rate similar to visits to the International Space Station. Permanently manned since November 2000, the facility has been visited by 216 individuals to date. That would mean around 14 new Mars colonists arriving per annum.
But who would seriously volunteer to spend the rest of their lives in a precarious “tuna can” habitat, with the prospect of endless toil ahead of them? Zubrin’s colony is expected to obtain its water from the underground permafrost, practice CO2 agriculture in flimsy greenhouses and produce all their basic industrial needs. However, the Biosphere 2 experiment in Arizona, built between 1987 and 1991, which covers 3.14 acres of varied biomass, all under huge glass roofs, was able to produce neither enough food nor enough oxygen.20 Moreover, MIT researchers have recently warned that Mars colonists would soon be dying: from suffocation, starvation, dehydration or incineration. In short, the colonisation of Mars will make for some seriously morbid reality TV. The analysis also concludes that 15 heavy rocket launches - costing around $4.5 billion - would be needed to support just the first four Mars colonists.21
Hence the fancy projections of fabulous economic returns are quite frankly risible. There is no chance of plunder, let alone profit. The chatter about mining “gold, silver, uranium, platinum, palladium and other precious metals” is just that - chatter.22 Talk of Martian towns acting as humanity’s technological driver, etc, owes everything to technological quackery and nothing to rational investment of labour time. The relative unit costs of doing virtually anything on Mars would be a thousand, a million, times greater than on Earth. Ferrying anything back to Earth is technologically feasible, of course, but would be prohibitively expensive. Getting a Mars colony to produce anything on a scale for export to Earth makes no commercial sense whatsoever - except for utopian dreamers.
What about science? Nasa’s manned missions do not stand in the noble tradition of Galileo Galilei, Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein - a grotesque suggestion made by Dr James Williams of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.23 All that the astronauts did on the moon was plant the Stars and Stripes, leave footprints and carry away a few bags of rocks. Apollo was about neither economic returns nor scientific advance. It was an engineering triumph over the Soviet Union - a second-rate superpower. America’s mission Mars is essentially no different. It would shore up the US position as global - and space - hegemon. Nothing more.
Let me cite three trusted members of the US space establishment. First, Doug Osheroff - a Nobel prize-winning physicist who sat on the committee investigating the 2003 Columbia accident. He is perfectly frank: “Right now there is no economic value in going to Mars.”24 Second, Ed Weiler - assistant advisor of Nasa’s office of space science. He is equally candid: “These missions will not be driven by science.”25 Then, finally, Neil de Grasse Tyson - astrophysicist and member of George W Bush’s Mars commission. He admits that, if “pure science” was the purpose, “it’s obvious that you would send robots”.26 Compared with astronauts, robots are 50 or 100 times less expensive.
Mars is the most Earth-like of all of the other planets and moons in the solar system. But that is not saying much. Barren, pitted with craters, prone to gigantic dust storms, Mars is virtually airless - the mainly (95%) carbon dioxide atmosphere is 100 times less dense than ours. Therefore no ozone layer to shield the planet’s surface from the sun’s deadly ultraviolet radiation. To make matters worse, Mars is hellishly cold. On average the temperate zone is 60 degrees Celsius below zero. True, there is plenty of iron and a little magnesium, titanium and aluminium.27 But, as far as we know, nothing exists there that cannot be made or obtained infinitely more cheaply on Earth.
No-one with a modicum of scientific knowledge ever doubted the existence of water ice in the Martian poles. We do not need astronauts to tell us that. There is also abundant frozen water beneath the planet’s rocky surface. But why travel in a tiny metal capsule - six months there and six months back - across 60 million miles of deep space for that?
Yes, scientists speculate about the possibility of terraforming. The Martian atmosphere could conceivably be artificially oxygenated, the density dramatically upped and thereby significantly warmed. Water might then flow once again along its wide valleys and into new seas and oceans. However, creating a self-sustaining ecosystem, one capable of supporting plant and animal life, would take quite a few years - roughly a 100,000.
There are more modest schemes. If 100 nuclear-powered terraforming factories were established on Mars - a scheme discussed in a joint paper by Margarita Marinova and Chris McKay - specifically to pump out perfluorocarbons (a super greenhouse gas), the time span is much less awesome.28 They estimate that it would take 100 years to raise the Martian temperature by six to eight degrees. To get to the point where some water melts would need another 700 years. A greatly thickened carbon dioxide atmosphere would then retain heat. But Mars would remain cold, alien and thoroughly inhospitable to life as we know it on Earth - except perhaps for microbes.
Worshippers of science doggedly insist that going into space is the one sure way of overcoming all the mounting problems and contradictions found here on Earth: eg, hunger, poverty, global warming, lack of housing. For them technology holds the solution for everything. By the same measure the huge exertions required for space colonisation would encourage humanity to leave behind parochial concerns.
Isaac Asimov (1920-1992) touchingly hoped that “cooperation in something large enough to fire the hearts and mind” - like a Mars mission - would make people “forget the petty quarrels that have engaged them for thousands of years in wars over insignificant scraps of earthly territory”.29
The morphed Revolutionary Communist Party - a 1980s ultra-leftist flash in the pan and nowadays a rightwing libertarian coven - echoes this scientism. Writing on the Spiked website, Stuart Atkinson impatiently urged the US on to Mars in the name of an ahistorical human nature: “We are a curious species.” Scraping the bottom of the barrel, he pleads on behalf of the dead crew of space shuttle Columbia. They “would not have wanted” space exploration stopped. A “big idea” like Mars would inspire and show what could be done here on Earth.30 In the same breathless spirit James Woudhuysen says: “Let’s go back to the moon - and beyond.”31 Ray Bradbury (1920-2012) was not less embarrassing: “The moment we land on Mars all the people of the world will weep with joy.”32 Then there is China Miéville: “We socialist sci-fi fans can’t bring ourselves to oppose space programmes … I think it says something exciting about humans that we want to explore space. I think there’s something wonderful about rocket ships.”33
Nothing could be more misplaced or naive. Ever since Adam Smith, ideologues, apologists and turncoats have insisted that the system’s contradictions and the attendant curses of war, unemployment, ecological destruction, gross inequality and poverty could be overcome through accelerating capitalist progress. History should have taught a lesson or two. Obviously some will never learn.
Marxism does not question the existence of human nature. But attributes such as curiosity and an eagerness to explore must be examined historically and contextualised socially; not treated in a manner which universalises Nasa-man and the modern American ideology of constant technological innovation, individual enrichment and restless expansionism.
Scattered around the Indian Ocean coast, in India and Pakistan, the Philippines, and Malaysia - marking the southern route out of Africa and the “beachcombing” trail to Australia - there are genetically distinct “remnants” of the original homo sapiens.34 Having arrived between 80,000 and 75,000 years ago, they often liked what they found very much. With the subsequent expansion in population numbers and pressure on natural resources, some immediate descendants would trek off to the next suitable location along the coast. But enough were perfectly happy to stay firmly put.
It should not be forgotten that till recent times many groups of hunter-gatherers contentedly enjoyed what some would describe as a primitive existence. Others might be tempted to call it idyllic. Such was their mastery of the local environment - yes, through curiosity and exploration - that necessary labour could be reduced to a couple of hours. The rest of their day was spent eating, story-telling, playing with the children, dancing, etc. Why move under such benign circumstances?
Nor should technological progress be viewed as linear. After 1450 China scuppered its ocean-going fleet of big treasure ships and dismantled its shipyards (mechanical clocks and water-driven spinning machines were also abandoned). Between 1600 and 1853 Japan virtually eliminated what had up till then been a lucrative line in the production of guns. In the 1880s legislation put a stop to the introduction of public electric street lighting in London. Jared Diamond provides other examples of technological “reversals” which occurred during prehistory. Aboriginal Tasmanians abandoned bone tools and fishing, aboriginal Australians may have abandoned the bow and arrow, Torres Islanders stopped making canoes, Polynesians discarded pottery and Polar Eskimos lost the bow and arrow, while Dorset Eskimos abandoned the bow and arrow, bow drills and dogs.35
There are materialist explanations for all such seemingly aberrant behaviour; but clearly teleological notions of an inevitable progression from flint axes to landing humans on Mars are quite erroneous.
Of course, Marxists have always had a positive attitude towards science and technology. But we do not privilege science and technology or take an uncritical view. Motivation, application and consequences must be thoroughly interrogated. Neither science nor technology is neutral. So it is wrong to conflate scientific and technological progress with social progress (a mistake which joins Eduard Bernstein, ‘official communism’ and the former RCP).
The main locomotive of history is class struggle and the constant striving for human freedom: eg, the Athenian citizen-peasant revolution of 508-507 BC, the 73-71 BC Spartacus uprising, the 1381 peasant revolt, the Hussites of 14th century Bohemia, the 1789 French Revolution, Chartism, the First International, the 1871 Paris Commune, the 19th century democratic breakthrough in Europe, the 1917 Russian Revolution.
The development of the productive forces and the rational application of science create the objective basis for generalised human freedom and the rounded development of each individual. But capitalism does not do that. Capitalism skews progress - performs technological miracles, while simultaneously leaving millions in abject squalor. Capitalism perverts science - not only by bending it to the lopsided, narrow and demeaning diktats of profit, but by turning it against humanity to the extent of threatening our very survival. The insights, ingenuity and resources of science have been channelled into ways of killing and destroying on an almost unimaginable scale: carpet-bombing, gas chambers, nuclear warheads, chemical and biological weapons. Walter Benjamin damningly remarked somewhere that our rulers perfect not so much the means of production: rather the means of destruction.
Military
And the fact of the matter is that Nasa and the whole US space business is a branch, or extension, of the military-industrial complex. What is true for the US is true for Russia, China, the EU, Japan and India too. Satellites, launch rockets, tracking stations, etc owe far more to military requirements for spying, pinpoint targeting, the delivery of WMDs, real-time command and battle communications than so-called pure science. Loring Wirbel, a peace activist and expert in space technology, shows that even back in the 1950s the US “civilian satellite programme served as a cover for a wide-ranging spy satellite programme”.36
Today GPS - a space-based satellite navigation system - allows motorists, seafarers, airline crews and even hill walkers to locate themselves to within a few feet. But, however welcome, this is merely a by-product. It should never be forgotten that GPS began with overriding military functions. When a car suspected of carrying Hamas members is blasted to pieces by an Israeli missile in Gaza, that was GPS at work. When ‘precision’ bombs slammed into Baghdad in 2003, once again that was GPS at work. Indeed the US military boasts that during the invasion of Iraq 60% of all aerial bombardment was accounted for by GPS-guided bombs. The US deployed not so much airpower as spacepower. As former US airforce secretary James Roche triumphantly announced, concluding an April 2003 speech, “The war in space has already begun.”37
Behind mission Mars and the highfalutin language of discovery, human adventure and manifest destiny, lurks a sinister agenda for ensuring total US domination of space. The US military-industrial complex has tested unmanned space-planes, most notably the Boeing X-57, which, having made a sudden dive into the atmosphere, could conceivably be used to deliver nuclear bombs on Moscow.38
So, as I have argued before, there is another aspect to mission Mars which cannot be ignored.39 The Orion project, like the rest of the military-industrial complex, constitutes a so-called third department of production (the other two being the production of the means of production and the production of the means of consumption). Department three allows capitalism to guarantee “maximum” self-expansion from the firm basis of the “minimum” consumption of the relatively impoverished masses.40 Their limited ability to purchase the means of consumption no longer constitutes a barrier.
Turning the production of the means of destruction into a system of profit and self-expansion through state purchase effectively obliterates the distinction between consumption and destruction. This is feasible precisely because for capital the purpose of production, the end aim, is not human consumption of use-values according to need: rather it is self-expansion for its own sake. Problems of real use, and therefore real consumption, are overcome (though not eliminated) through the unlimited ability of the state to generate artificial demand and purchase waste - ie, the means of destruction - through credit and taxation. This innovative response to capitalist overproduction - initially tried before World War I and then after the 1929-33 world economic crisis - was made into a model of normality after 1945. The annual peacetime US arms budget in nowadays $640 billion (well over twice as much as China and Russia combined).41
The state legitimises this perverse and obscene squandering of human and material resources through patriotism. A real or imagined enemy is singled out and thoroughly demonised: eg, kaiser Germany, Bolshevism, European fascism, post-World War II USSR, Gamal Abdel Nasser, Saddam Hussein, Osama bin Laden, Islamic State. Voting in favour of the endless production of waste therefore becomes a national duty and imposes a welcome internal discipline on the working class. Spending on Nasa and the space programme is essentially no different. Except that, besides patriotism, it is able to harness another misplaced idealism - the Quixotic belief that space represents humanity’s manifest destiny and promises solutions to every problem.
Social problems
Meanwhile, here, back on planet Earth, the United Nations estimates that over a billion people have no access to clean drinking water, some 840 million have to survive on significantly less than the recommended daily intake of calories and around 30 million are infected with HIV/Aids. There is nothing inevitable or natural about any of this.
Neoliberal, IMF and World Bank programmes of market ‘reform’ and subordination to capitalist globalisation over the last 30 years have greatly exacerbated the unevenness characteristic of the system. Today the richest 1% “hold nearly half the global wealth”.42 Leave aside the so-called third world - in Britain some 900,000 people have registered with food banks.43
Yet, with organisation and political will, humanity has within its reach the ability to easily meet all basic needs. The wealth exists in abundance. Simply diverting the US arms budget to real human needs would do away with global poverty - almost at a stroke. But such a turnaround can never happen through the sugary platitudes and diversionary calls of NGOs, religious notables and various leftwing reformers for rich governments to do their moral duty. The modern state palpably exists to defend, serve and promote the self-expansion of capital - the two are inextricably and increasingly interwoven and interdependent.
Social problems demand social solutions. Humanity - which can viably only be led by the revolutionary working class - faces the epochal challenge of putting humanity’s wealth under the control of the associated producers. Capitalism long ago outlived any usefulness it once possessed. Now this most alienated of social relationships threatens our very existence - through economic crisis, social dislocation and ecological destruction.
Once humanity has superseded capitalism and become properly human, who knows what we might choose to do? Mars, along with other planets and moons in the solar system, could be explored by self-replicating robots or terraformed in an attempt to make them habitable. Perhaps one day in the far future our descendants might reach nearby stars. Now, however, the main subject of humanity must be humanity - as we find it on this planet. Our mission is to transform all existing social relationships here on Earth.
Notes
1. http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2005/08/0810_050810_moontrip.html.
2. www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/monkey-cage/wp/2014/07/24/obamas-uphill-struggle-against-economic-inequality.
4. www.nasa.gov/news/media/trans/obama_ksc_trans.html.
5. www.nasaspaceflight.com/2012/04/delving-deeper-dsh-configurations-support-craft.
6. www.thespacereview.com/article/2410/1.
8. N Machiavelli The prince Harmondsworth 1975, p119.
9. H Brogan The Penguin history of the USA London 1999, p220.
10. Quoted in K Gatland Manned spacecraft London 1967, p141.
11. www.nixonlibrary.gov/forkids/speechesforkids/moonlanding/moonlandingcall.pdf.
12. http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2014/04/140422-mars-mission-manned-cost-science-space.
13. www.nss.org/settlement/mars/zubrin-promise.html.
14. http://archive.org/stream/fiscalyear1996na00unit/fiscalyear1996na00unit_djvu.txt.
15. S Oppenheimer Out of Eden: the peopling of the world London 2003, p280.
16. F Braudel Civilisation and capitalism Vol 3, Berkeley 1992, p420.
17. J Diamond Guns, germs and steel London 1998, p210.
18. www.bbc.co.uk/history/historic_figures/wilberforce_william.shtml.
19. R Blackburn The making of New World slavery London 1997, p3.
20. www.science20.com/robert_inventor/trouble_terraforming_mars-126407.
21. www.extremetech.com/extreme/191862-the-first-mars-one-colonists-will-suffocate-starve-and-be-incinerated-according-to-mit.
22. www.nss.org/settlement/mars/zubrin-promise.html.
23. www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?release=2005-039.
24. The Stamford Daily February 10 2004.
25. www.hwupgrade.it/forum/archive/index.php/t-613246.html.
26. http://publicdiplomacymagazine.com/space-chronicles-the-universe-as-public-diplomacy-an-interview-with-astrophysicist-neil-degrasse-tyson.
27. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ore_resources_on_Mars#Direct_evidence_for_useful_materials.
28. www.ifa.hawaii.edu/~meech/a281/handouts/McKay_astrobio01.pdf.
29. I Asimov Exploring the Earth and cosmos Harmondsworth 1983, p153.
30. www.spiked-online.com. March 7 2003.
31. www.spiked-online.com/newsite/article/7096#.VIdx2jGsUe0.
32. Quoted in Financial Times January 15 2004.
33. Socialist Review January 2007.
34. S Oppenheimer Out of Eden London 2003, p201.
35. Cited in J Diamond Guns, germs and steel London 1998, p258.
36. L Wirbel Star wars: US tools of space supremacy London 2004, p19.
37. Quoted in L Wirbel Star wars: US tools of space supremacy London 2004, p146.
38. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Militarisation_of_space#Military_spaceplanes.
39. See Weekly Worker January 14 2004 and July 15 2009.
40. I Mészáros The power of ideology Hemel Hempstead 1989, p226.
41. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_military_expenditures.