Opinion Secton by Neel V. Patel Opinion Staff Editor

In the last decade, scientists have found evidence of liquid water pooling up seasonally on the surface of Mars in scant amounts. They’ve also seen indications that there are huge reservoirs of water deep underground. This week, researchers published more evidence to suggest there’s a vast ocean of water seven to 13 miles below the planet’s surface.

Where there’s water, there’s the potential to find signs of life, but scientists won’t know if there’s life in that water unless they get a chance to study Mars’s water up close. Based on NASA’s current priorities, the opportunities for them to do so seem very, very distant.

NASA does many things, but its crown jewel programs are focused on human exploration of outer space. In recent years, the agency’s Artemis program, intended to return American astronauts to the moon, has been given a greater priority than Mars exploration. Since its inception in 2017, Artemis has been mired in delays and its centerpiece technologies have come under enormous scrutiny for billions in overrun costs. The first Artemis flight with a crew is supposed to take place in September 2025, followed by a human landing on the moon in 2026 and, eventually, a sustainable, permanent moon base.

But it’s unlikely that this timeline will hold, given frequent hardware snags and testing delays. To make matters worse, NASA recently canceled VIPER, a lunar rover mission meant to look for ice at the moon’s south pole, a prerequisite for a lunar base. The agency already spent $450 million on the mission; the rover, already built, is now destined to collect dust.

It’s not as if all this sunk cost came at the behest of the American public. A 2023 Pew survey found that only 12 percent of Americans believe sending astronauts back to the moon should be a top priority for the agency. Just 11 percent say the same about sending humans to Mars.

But the possibility of life on Mars grows stronger and stronger with every finding. The Curiosity and Perseverance rovers have found tremendous evidence of complex organics on the planet. Combined with water, there is so much rich potential that life on Mars once existed. Maybe it still does. But scientists won’t know unless space agencies start building and launching scientific missions with the express purpose of finding out.

Sending humans to extraterrestrial worlds is not a worthless goal. But this achievement pales in comparison to answering the question of whether we are alone — an answer that would change how humanity thinks about its place in this universe. Attaining that knowledge would be a worthwhile mission for an agency renowned for achieving what was once unimaginable.

Naw, let’s just look for “the conditions to support life” for the 10th fucking time.