Shortly after George W. Bush proposed that NASA "prepare for new journeys to worlds beyond our own," EPPC invited Robert Park of the American Physical Society and Robert Zubrin of the Mars Society to assess his plan at a February 5 seminar, "Worlds Beyond Our Own: A Discussion of President Bush’s New Vision of Space Exploration." The speakers, longtime foes who had never before debated face to face, agreed on the importance of space exploration but strongly disagreed about who, or what, should be doing the exploring.

Calling Bush’s vision "heroic but hopelessly romantic," Park argued that manned missions squander limited resources. The use of telerobots, by contrast, is efficient and cost effective—as their current success on Mars attests—and will allow us to probe far deeper into space. In space travel, human beings are "merely very expensive passengers" whose role is both "dangerous and menial." They do not function or see as well as robots, and have no compensatory advantages. It is the unmanned programs that have produced all significant progress in space exploration, he declared, and will continue to do so in the future because "robots change every day but human beings haven’t changed in 300,000 years."

Zubrin viewed Bush’s proposals much more enthusiastically and defended the "scientific superiority of humans in space." Robots are useful, he said, but only human beings are able to perform certain critical tasks that require flexibility, such as hunting for fossils. The goal of putting men and women on Mars is necessary, furthermore, both to spur NASA on to specific achievement and to inspire young people. Technological ingenuity has allowed human beings to inhabit the whole earth, "to leave the known and master the unknown." Zubrin asserted that a new branch of civilization on Mars not only was possible but would someday make positive "contributions to the human story."

Adam Keiper, managing editor of the The New Atlantis, EPPC’s journal of technology and society, moderated the lively discussion that followed. Edited versions of Park’s and Zubrin’s comments appear in the Winter issue of The New Atlantis and are available online at www.TheNewAtlantis.com.