Biography
Biography: Donald C Barker
Abstract
Humanity, within only the past 40 years, has traversed a unique technological threshold of self-enabled survival, a first in the history of life on Earth. Given current knowledge regarding potential locations in our solar system, Mars is the only neighboring world replete with the needed resources, primarily water, which can rapidly and permanently sustain human settlement. Given our imperfect understanding and tenuous control over changes to Earth’s environments and ecosystems, as well as our own population and behaviors, an ever-growing likelihood exists that an event or series of events could rapidly induce social collapse or possible extinction of our species. Prior to our recently gained technological capabilities, life on earth subsisted at the mercy of natural events, known or unknown. These same technological advances, over the past 75 years, have empowered humanity to suffer self-induced catastrophes. Such knowledge necessitates the immediate self-initiated diversification off Earth. Despite increasing financial constraints and decreased population attention-spans, the sedulous pursuit of settling humans on Mars should be our species highest imperative. It is the technological threshold of enabling interplanetary travel and habitation of other worlds that has the potential to reset humanities survival clock. Meanwhile in hindsight, as the clock ticks away, we entertain a thought experiment highlighting what might have occurred had NASA’s budget been radically different over the past fifty years. In addition to survival, concrete home world benefits in education and inspiration also exist, and the initial act of settling Mars will uniquely serve as humanities greatest globally inspiring self-initiated achievement.