I had blogged previously about The Martian, the movie where Matt Damon is stranded on Mars. But there are people in the reckoning to make real-life trips to Mars, and at least one of them’s Indian: Taranjeet Singh Bhatia. Caravan has just profiled him: what’s really fascinating is that he’s not insisting his Mars ticket be a two-way one, he’s not averse to making a life there. “If we’re already there, already making a living there, why should I come back?” he says with disarming simplicity.
Bhatia had made the journey that many young Indians make, one from which they seldom come back (though Aamir Khan recently ran into a saffron fusillade for suggesting something similar – one he may have anticipated when he wanted to turn into an alien like PK) — to the US to earn a PhD in computer science. But after graduating he didn’t send his CV to Google or Facebook but instead took a far bigger exploratory leap – he joined the Mars One programme in the Netherlands, set up to send humans to Mars.
As long as you see space missions as a way to expand the frontiers of knowledge, unmanned ones will always be paisa vasool and manned ones expensive and risky. So why send manned missions at all? With Mars One it seems an existential quest. It says in its publicity materials: “Humans have always moved from a place to another without the intention of returning.”
In this view humans are restless nomads, who will not stay confined to one place for long. As there is no place on Earth left unexplored, human civilization must spread to other planets. You could also see this as an insurance policy, meant to ensure the survival of the human race. As my next post will argue, the prospect of catastrophic nuclear war on Earth cannot be ruled out.