By Ian Mayes

In recent years I have been becoming increasingly interested in and excited about the prospect of people exploring and colonizing the planet Mars. A friend asked me recently about what I find so compelling about this idea, and I thought that I’d elaborate some on it here.

First off, I view the possibility of humans going to and living on Mars on a permanent basis as being an enormously important milestone for humanity overall. This move will signify humanity as being a species that resides not just on one planet but on multiple planets. Humanity would then be a multi-planetary species. This would be a huge development, comparable to when humanity left Africa 1.8 million years ago to become a multi-continental, multi-regional species. To think that we can witness such a thing, and potentially be a part of such a thing, is just mindblowing.

And as far as the survival of the human species goes, I do think that it is best to not have “all of our eggs in one basket”, so to speak. There is any number of different things that could kill off humanity on Earth, be it human-based such as ecological devastation and nuclear war, or naturally-occurring phenomena like asteroid impacts and supervolcano eruptions. I think that the more that humanity can spread around throughout our solar system, the greater the likelihood that humanity can continue to survive on into the future.

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