The pictures from Mars take my breath away. I am lost for words
to describe the bravado and brilliance of the engineers and
scientists who placed this robotic laboratory so gently onto the
surface of Mars. NASA should be very proud. Americans should be
proud too: they paid for it -around $10 per head. And we should
all reflect on just what human beings can achieve when we put
our minds to something. The brilliantly-conceived mission has
revived talk about a possible manned mission to Mars. And I have
even heard people talk again about the possibility of colonising
the Moon or Mars. While such extrapolations are understandable I
think it is important to understand that human beings cannot
live anywhere except planet Earth. This is not fundamentally
true. It is conceivable that we could create ‘bubbles’ of
survivability far distant from the Earth. Overlooking the many
challenges (e.g. the increased radiation doses; the atrophy of
muscles in reduced gravity; and the creation of a stable
microbial population etc.