By ET, I mean us.

By that I mean, why the hell are we talking about sending humans to Mars?

Sure, President Bush is pushing for something like this, but that’s just election-year posturing for the most part. But I heard some guy on NPR yesterday – in town (Chicago) for some type of “Let’s get man to Mars” convention (I dunno what it was).

The guy was kind of a wing nut, but – still – there is an interest in putting people on Mars.

I just don’t get it.

Now, I’m probably more science oriented than the average person, and I strongly support the space program and all that. I fully understand that the benefits of a space program cannot really be seen in advance; you just have to do it because you’re curious and benefits sometimes appear.

For example, putting man on the moon was really an exercise in nationalism, kind of a key battle in the Cold War. Yet out of this came the integrated circuit, advances in computing, aerospace materials (composites, for example) and so on. But we didn’t go for that; the benefits were gravy.

All space exploration is like that. Will the current Saturn probe or the recently launched Mercury probe bring any benefits beyond more info about these far-flung bodies? Who knows? Who cares? The point is to understand more about these planets.

Again, everything else is gravy.

OK, what does this have to do with men on Mars, fer Christ’s sake?

Well, I look at it this way: Putting a man on Mars would cost (time and dollars) incredibly more than a unmanned mission. This can’t be disputed. I just don’t see the benefit – what we’ll gain – from sending one manned mission (for example) to Mars instead of numerous unmanned missions there.

Just getting a person there is a huge task; and – once there – that one mission will examine one area. Period. And roving is very limited due to the human factor. Need a certain amount of oxygen, protection against extreme cold, extreme warmth, cosmic rays and so on. And humans get tired, need sleep, need to dispose of waste and so on.

Unmanned probes are far less fussy. We could scatter roving probes all over the planet for far less than a single manned mission.

Sure, a human has better processing ability and can easily change the mission (not that rock, this rock is more interesting…), but the sheer volume of data points that can be gained by multiple missions – probably at a lower cost – make the whole manned mission to Mars talk silly to me.

To be fair, my argument is undercut by my own statement that one really can’t tell what benefits will accrue before it all happens. Yes, it’s possible the effort of putting a man on Mars – or what he finds there – will be so great that it will make all the cost/effort worth it.

Yet the same could be said about the unmanned missions. And – with more unmanned missions possible for same time/effort/cost – the odds of something good coming out of the unmanned missions seems higher.