For roughly 4.5 billion years, the Moon has kept Earth company. In the much shorter span of time that humans have been around, we’ve admired the great silver beacon in the night sky.
The Moon may soon also serve as our launchpad to celestial bodies farther afield in the Solar System. Major space players including the United States, Russia and China all have plans to establish bases on the Moon’s dusty surface within the next ten years. And one of the goals of NASA’s Artemis Moon mission is to enable humans to one day travel to Mars.
Tech billionaire and SpaceX head Elon Musk is even more bullish. “SpaceX will colonise Mars”, he said last year. Musk believes this could happen by 2055 – and would be just the beginning of humans becoming a multi-planetary species in order to save ourselves from future annihilation.
Not everyone agrees this is possible. But it raises a more fundamental question: should humans colonise space?
We asked five experts – four of whom said no. It’s not just a question of whether humans try to live in space, but also about how we do it. Here are their detailed answers.
Disclosure statements
Alice Gorman receives funding from the Australian Research Council. She is also co-vice chair of the Global Expert Group on Sustainable Lunar Activities and a fellow of the Outer Space Institute.
Kirsten Banks, Art Cotterell, Ben Bramble and Sara Webb have nothing to disclose.