Faster, Please! · Economics & Policy
TIER 4 Tue, 16 Dec 2025 20:26:45 +0000
Looking for life is first, everything else second ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ | | ---|---|--- | | | Forwarded this email? Subscribe here for more --- # 🚀 After we get to Mars, then what? ### Looking for life is first, everything else second Dec 16 --- --- | | | --- | | --- | | --- | | --- | | READ IN APP --- | | ---|---|--- _🎄 The holiday are fast approaching, which is especially good news for**Faster, Please** free subscribers like yourself._ _Between now and New Year 's,**you can get a 50% discount on a paid subscription**!_ _Just hit the Big Blue Button below for more info. My guess is that 2026 is going to be an amazing year on the pro-progress front, and I can 't want to cover and analyze it for you folks! I appreciate your support!_ Get 50% off for 1 year * * * **My fellow pro-growth/progress/abundance Up Wingers in America and around the world:** For me and probably most other space enthusiasts, the notion of humanity venturing off-planet -- and taking permanent root there (maybe way out there) -- is about a whole lot more than nationalist competition, asteroid mining, and even enabling scientific advances to better life here on Earth.¹ Rather, it's about something harder to quantify: purpose. Three of my favorite recent essays neatly capture that intuition. Writing in The New Atlantis last year, William Boyce argues in "What is space for?" that space has never been merely another domain for resource extraction or geopolitics. Across cultures, the pastor notes, the heavens have functioned as a kind of "thin place" -- a realm that reliably induces awe, humility, and moral recalibration. Leaving Earth is less conquest than pilgrimage: a way for humanity to see itself whole by stepping outside itself. (Many astronauts would agree.) Marko Jukic, a senior analyst at Bismarck Analysis, reaches a sterner conclusion by a different route. In a long essay for Palladium earlier this year, "The Only Reason to Explore Space," he contends that space matters because only by venturing beyond Earth can humanity resolve its deepest anthropological uncertainty: what kind of creature it is, and whether it is alone. Telescopes, robots, and theories will not suffice. Economist and futurist Eli Dourado (a friend of the newsletter) strips out the case of mysticism but not urgency in a 2022 analysis, "Why go to space?" Mars offers an "innovate-or-die" environment that Earth no longer does -- one harsh enough to renew our institutions, discipline our ambition, and restore our seriousness of purpose.² Still, spiritual and civilizational meaning alone does not offer a Mars mission plan.³ #### Putting science in charge That's where a new National Academies report on human exploration of Mars earns its keep. The study lays out a focused blueprint for NASA built around four illustrative "campaigns" of three missions linked to specific science objectives. "The first steps humans take on Mars," the report explains, "will dramatically expand scientific knowledge of the red planet and offer a glimpse of what it is to be human in the universe." The symbolism of human boot-prints on another planet is acknowledged, sure, but science is prioritized. At the top of the NA's proposed agenda sits one overriding goal: the search for life. Finding credible evidence that Mars once hosted biology (or may still do so beneath its surface) and returning the right samples to settle the question back on Earth outranks everything else. Understanding, for instance, how Mars lost its water and warmth or reconstructing its geological history both matter -- but chiefly because they enable the search for life. So, too, does the pragmatic science of Martian survival such as mapping ice, characterizing dust and radiation, and learning how organisms cope with the Martian environment. When missions run short of payload capacity, time, or money -- as they inevitably will-- the report is explicit about trade-offs. Life detection comes first.⁴ #### Four routes to discovery The four Mars campaigns embody different ways of pursuing that wager: * The first concentrates effort on a single exploration zone: a short human landing, an uncrewed cargo delivery, and then a long stay approaching a Martian year. By committing to one carefully chosen site, it can address nearly all of the highest-priority science objectives in a coherent setting. The big risk: A generation of exploration hinges on getting the first site right. * The second retains the same three-mission architecture but narrows its ambition. Rather than seeking comprehensive coverage, it prioritizes a smaller set of high-leverage measurements that cut across disciplines and can be carried out at a wider range of sites, trading encyclopedic scope for flexibility and responsiveness. * The third is unapologetically astrobiological. It steers resources toward environments beneath the Martian cryosphere. That's where liquid water and long-term habitability may be most likely, with deep drilling used to probe the planet's subsurface history. Much of the planet's surface diversity is left for later exploration. * The fourth disperses risk by spreading effort across three short missions to widely separated sites. It maximizes comparison, but cannot support the long-duration biological and environmental studies possible in a single extended stay. Depth versus breadth, certainty versus surprise: to explore is to choose. Yet on Mars these decisions acquire unusual weight. Each NASA choice isn't only technical, it reflects what we ultimately want from the Red Planet -- answers, renewal, or a Solar System foothold -- and how we order those desires. Get 50% off for 1 year 1 Elon Musk argues that establishing a self-sustaining human settlement on Mars would function as a "life insurance policy" for civilization -- reducing the risk that a single planetary catastrophe (natural or self-inflicted) could wipe out humanity and thus the only known "light of consciousness" in the universe. 2 Civilizational renewal aside, Dourado argues that space is already a foundational layer of modern life, economic productivity, scientific knowledge, and democratic security. 3 If you're looking for a timeline, the Metaculus forecasting platform gives an aggregate estimate of December 2044 for "When will the first humans land successfully on Mars?" 4 If NASA wants humans on Mars primarily to pursue the highest-priority science--especially the search for life -- the NA report makes clear that existing planetary-protection rules, designed to prevent Earth microbes from contaminating Mars and compromising life-detection efforts, would likely prohibit many of the required activities. * * * **On sale everywhere** _**The Conservative Futurist: How To Create the Sci-Fi World We Were Promised**_ | | ---|---|--- #### Invite your friends and earn rewards If you enjoy Faster, Please!, share it with your friends and earn rewards when they subscribe. 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