This animal, man, keeps living like animals have for eons. Our intelligence isn’t well adapted for understanding the “grand scheme of things.” Oh, we get a piece here and there with great labor – think how much work is required to extend new knowledge. A third of a lifetime training, often years for an important discovery, and then it must be communicated to the few other humans who want to know. Extending knowledge backwards in history is similar.

What we are good at is drawing up into groups and grabbing what we can. Sometimes it is spectacular, like the early Europeans in the New World. Sometimes it is petty theft. Sometimes it is using control of government – which is the only institution which today can legitimately use force – to get your group what is needed by others, too.

Hardly anyone balances the waste and cost of war and preparation for war against what can be done constructively with the same resources.

Hardly anyone understands the difference between the organic life of the past and industrial life of the present.

Many do not consider empathy with others a building block of society.

Many do not see future generations as needing consideration.

We are a crude beast, indeed!

Tom Bond, Lewis County, WV

Yes, humanity faces many serious perils, all of them of our own making. But the notion that we could solve any of these problems by leaving a planet perfectly suited to human life–except for the damage we’ve done–and go to a planet with the wrong temperatures, wrong atmosphere, and above all, no life…even if we could terraform Mars in a few decades (extremely doubtful) we would also have to import entire complex ecosystems from Earth, as we depend on them.

Would this REALLY be easier than ceasing to trash our homeworld?

And even if by several miracles we pulled it off, as you say, why wouldn’t we promptly begin to wreck the ecological and social atmosphere of Mars?

Mary Wildfire, Roane County, WV