I just returned from 4 days in Boulder, Colorado, attending the inaugural Mars Society conference. This conference was attended by many people from academia, industry, NASA, as well as a number of interested amateurs. It was exciting, thought-provoking - and sobering.

History will regard this conference either as the watershed groundbreaking of Humanity's next giant leap, or as yet another fringe meeting of sci-fi buffs and space enthusiasts, sound and fury, signifying nothing. And, although I fervently hope for the former, I fear the latter.

On a national level, we have lost some of our exploratory curiosity in this country. The willingness to accept risks, to explore, to break new ground - these are the abilities that America was founded on, and they are a significant part of what makes this country great. But in the last couple of decades, we have grown cautious and soft, perhaps lacking the technological enemy that spurred us to the Moon in the 60s, perhaps watching our willingness to accept risk go up in the same smoke that consumed Challenger in 1984, perhaps lacking a president that defines the goal in such visionary terms that it immediately commands the attention of the public.

There are some technological issues that surround a manned mission to Mars, but not large ones. The primary barriers to a Mars mission are political. Mars can be done safely, relatively cheaply, and with today's technology,

There will always be people who will say we shouldn't go - it's too dangerous, the level of risk is too high. It is fortunate that this same level of risk avoidance was not in place throughout history. Discovery of truly new places has always involved at least two types of risk: We have never gone there before, so the journey is at least partially unknown. And, we can't be sure what we'll find or experience once we're there. Going to Mars with the technology of the new millenium will be far less risky than going to the Moon was in the 60s. Mars is definitely not risk free, the point is that the risk is well within the boundaries of human acceptence. It is a risk that hundreds of qualified men and women would love to have the chance to take, and hundreds of millions of people who have seriously pondered our unique chance to open a new world would love to have the chance to give.

Other objections are more difficult to deflect. I have often heard the sentiment that we should not go to Mars as long as there is human suffering in this country or in the world. I agree with this entirely: If it can be shown that going to Mars is the only thing preventing the dawn of an era in which suffering is obsolete, the rational approach would be to scrap the mission at once. Unfortunately, the primary obstacles to eliminating human suffering are socio-political in nature, not economic. I would argue that the level of human suffering in the world would sadly remain unchanged, whether we go to Mars or not.

Finally, some people object to the cost of the mission, perhaps pointing to NASA's first unfortunate estimate of $500,000,000,000 as justification. This figure would put the mission squarly into the realm of the impossible. But, this initial estimate was both erroneous and inflated. A far saner mission architecture puts the final price tag at well under a tenth of that, or under 2% of the annual federal budget. At the peak of the Apollo program, the NASA allocation was slightly over 4% of the total, making Mars (a far bigger prize than the Moon ever was) more than twice as cheap in relative terms. And, this is the lump-sum figure - that is, we're not going to pay the entire cost of a Mars program in a single year, we'll spread it out over 15 years. . If NASA could commit 20% of its current budget for about 15 years, we'd be able to send multiple manned missions to Mars. The interested reader is encouraged to look at Dr. Robert Zubrin's outstanding book The Case For Mars for additional information. For those with web access, the site http://www.nw.net/mars/ would be of interest as well.

The reasons to accept the Martian challenge are many. We will be continuing a proud tradition that defines our race. Humans have always explored, and have often reaped great benefits from doing so. The existence of a physical frontier is important to our racial psyche, and Mars will provide a frontier for the world. The treasure trove of scientific information returned will answer many questions, create many more new ones, and fire our collective imaginations.

Mars gives us the chance to probe one of the most profound biological, philosophical, and theological questions of our time: Is it possible that life exists outside our Earth? There are good reasons to believe that Mars may have developed single-cell life, and there is a small chance that it went beyond this. There is a smaller chance that life survives there to this day. Finding direct evidence of this life would be the most significant scientific discovery of recorded history. Finding that is does *not* exist would be equally profound.

Finally, Mars has tremendous value to the human race as an occupied, settled planet. It is the only other place in the solar system on which settlement is relatively easy. The Martian day is only 30 minutes longer than ours, the Sun provides adequate energy to grow food, the gravity is reasonable, and the temperature is not (quite) too cold. No other place is as conducive to a continuous human presence: Mercury and Venus are far too hot, the Gas Giants are, well, gas, the asteroids are too cold and have insufficient gravity. The Moon is probably the second best place for future exploration and settlement, but the Moon has two problems that will be very difficult to overcome: First, the lunar day is about 2 Earth weeks long. This is OK for humans, but plants would not be able to survive. Second, the Moon lacks an atmosphere, which is almost a necessity for shielding the surface from the intense radiation. So it is really only Mars that holds such possibilities. Mars will be inhabited sometime in the next century - what a unique gift for us to give today's children.

The rewards of exploring Mars are fantastic, the technology and cost are within our grasp today. An international effort led by the United States is more than equal to the task and there is no reason not to sieze the opportunity.