Pros And Cons Of Space Colonization

Rough Draft
Robert A. Heinlein once said that “Earth is just too small and fragile a basket for mankind to keep all its eggs in.” Space Colonization is our next goal after landing a man on the moon; however, the idea of space colonization is like reaching for the stars, you can see your destination but getting there is the problem. That problem is the health risks, resources, and practicability of traveling through space to reach our destination. Space colonization is impractical because it takes lots of resources and we don’t have the technology needed for safe travel through space;on the contrary, the belief that overpopulation and environmental effects could lead to extinction is merely a prediction since there is no way to tell what happens
The NSF(National Science Foundation) budget for education in math, science, and engineering was close to $700 million for students across the world, this is small compared to NASA’s budget of $18.4 billion and consists of 35% of all scientific research spending by the US (Space). NASA has an enormous budget and it still isn’t enough to develop a logical plan for space exploration because space is huge and we don’t have the money needed for the amount of resources a group of people would need. The money that NASA uses can be put to more important things on earth such as education, climate change, poverty, and the economy. Using the collective knowledge of multiple scientists in the field, Dr. Chung Kwak found that “Building colonies in space would require a combination of many factors, including access to space, food, construction materials, energy, transportation, communications, life support, simulated gravity, and radiation protection” (Kwak). Colonies in space require many resources to stay functional and not everything can be found or made on the planet. The only way to get resources to the colonies is to constantly send spacecraft costing more money the farther away the planet is, there are many factors that can go wrong with sending resources and if a shipment is late it can cause some problems in the colony. If we plan on
Even though we don't have the technology needed yet for space travel, some argue that “we need to get a colony up and running within 46 years”(Tierney) and that “the human race is likely to survive at least 5,100 more years but not longer than 7.8 million”(Tierney). Having a colony up and running within 46 years can be possible but there really isn't a good reason other than “because we can” to go through with this since there are lots of risks involved and it would require lots of resources. Like stated previously, space is filled with the unknown and we have no idea of what physical problems could occur. Another argument that is brought up is what will we do in the event of a global disaster and that “by the time we’re in trouble and wish we had [a] colony on Mars, it may be too late”(Tierney). We have many precautions in order to prevent any global disasters from happening in the first place; even if a disaster were to take place, it would be unlikely that we could move everyone to Mars because there isn’t enough fuel and resources in the world to move everyone safely. Even if we do manage to colonize another planet, there wouldn’t be enough food, housing, and resources for everyone to use. There are many more arguments on the other side such as overpopulation; however, space colonization isn’t the answer for these problems since we can’t develop technology