The only good reason for the existence of the European Space Agency is the possibility it might bring back a Martian. And the first question our little green visitor will probably ask the ESA is: why did you bother finding me? Why is Europe, or anyone else for that matter, putting humans in outer space at vast expense, when there are so many more pressing problems back on earth?
You're probably unaware that the ESA is planning to put a man on Mars some time around 2030. Well it is. I say "man" because there is absolutely no evidence there is a single woman in the world stupid enough to want to go there. But even if there were, I'm simply not going to write "putting a person on Mars" nor "spaceperson". So there, Equality Agency, you can shove that up your personal Aurora.
The Aurora programme, by the way, is the name of the larger ESA project which will lead to putting a man on Mars. Once there, he can chip rocks and bring them home again, and it'll all cost billions. A tip to ESA: you can get bits of rock somewhat more cheaply in Glending quarry. Moreover, the Americans have already proved that you don't really get much back from putting people on other planetary bodies, except a few pictures of some nice-looking footprints that'll stay there for all time.
Doing our bit
Ireland has 21 scientists working with the agency, so we are doing our bit for this monumental folly. But why? Is there nothing here on earth for us all to spend this money on, especially since so many of the various space programmes in the world are duplicating one another's work? Because, it's not just us and the US who are at this nonsense; so are the Indians, the Russians, the Chinese and the Japanese, and for all I know Chad is as well: a little chap in a loincloth with a big catapult, trying to propel a coconut into earth orbit.
It's the chap from Chad I worry about. It hasn't rained there in about 200 years. The average annual income per head of population is three farthings. And that's affluence compared with the Horn of Africa, where every farthing a peasant earns is confiscated by some warlord or other, and where children have developed alimentary canals that can extract nourishment from sand, and even rock: no doubt the sturdier class of Somalian infant will one day live off silicon Mars bars, brought to them courtesy of the ESA.
That would be one method of feeding them; another would be to give them water. We can do this two ways. We can send them Ballygowan, which would be pricy, but at least would make nice Geoff Reid very rich; or we can find water locally, either by digging, or by creating massive desalination projects.
No argument
So why aren't we doing this? Why are so many tens of thousands of scientists working so hard to loft rockets to Mars and to galaxies beyond, at uncountable cost, but not working on ways of supplying water to the hundreds of millions of people who need it? Morally, there's no argument. It's one thing to put satellites in orbit, because these are extraordinarily beneficial for the human race; but quite another to hurl these all non-returnable toys into outer space. We all know that for the money being spent on projects to get someone to leave their footprints - oh, all right, girls, just to keep you happy - or their stiletto-heel indents on Mars, we could irrigate the deserts of Africa and India.
Millions of children would be rescued from a misery which is quite beyond belief and description if the world did this. Yet the world doesn't do this because it clearly doesn't feel it should. And that's about it. There's no further moral or logical explanation for this. What man does, wherever he can, is hurl expensive hardware into space, where he now knows he will never live. What he doesn't do is undertake irrigation projects to save vast tracts of Africa from certain death by desertification. We know this.
Deserts are spreading
We know something else too: the deserts are spreading, north and south. So it's in our interests to undertake major anti-desertification programmes. But we don't, even though we could, for the management of water is one of the ways which we differ radically from the other residents of this planet.
The road to space began with water: the gardens of the Mesopotamia, with their irrigation channels to cultivate crops, were the first step towards organised settled societies. Crops required knowledge of the seasons, and so man invented meteorology and astronomy. Crops created riches, which had to be counted; hence numbers and writing. Mix them up together over a few thousand years, and the result is a procession of Golcondas being squandered on placing a couple of human hoof-marks on some sandy real estate in outer space, while not far from Mesopotamia, children are dying of drought.
We can try to justify this morally, but we can't; and because we know we won't even convince ourselves, we don't even discuss it. So why aren't we examining ways of watering Africa - and I don't mean whatever exists now, a couple of boffins with test-tubes and a bunsen burner and a part-time secretary called Shirl who works Tuesdays and Thursdays, but a star-wars type project, costing billions? It's a good question. To get the answer, we'll probably have to wait for the ESA to bring back a pet Martian.