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Message: Mars Landings: Do They Make Us Greener? NASA employees celebrate the Phoenix Explorer landing Sunday. Yesterday’s NASA Phoenix Project Mars landing was a scientific and technological spectacle in the great tradition of the moon program. There are many reasons to engage in this kind of research and I won’t go into them here. I will say though that if I had a choice of spending $500 million dollars to possibly find life on other planets and further our understanding of the universe, or fund three more days occupying Iraq, the Phoenix Program gets my vote. The Futurist Buckminster Fuller argued from the perspective of the Sixties that the space program allowed us to do more with less—an essential tactic in a world where resources are becoming scarce. I’d like to adopt his argument. Programs like this one and other space related, non-military research allow us to amplify our knowledge in so many ways. We would not know, for example, the full impact of global warming and threats from pollution without satellite-based information gathering systems. Still, we do know that the endless striving for better technologies is not an end in itself. We have to use the tools and knowledge this research supplies to make positive environmental change happen. Without that as an end game we will only be left with one reason to continue these space missions: to escape an Earth that can no longer sustain us. Forget that! People and nations are on the verge of a green renaissance. Wind power, solar cells, electric cars are an integral part of that rebirth of a more human centred economy. All these technologies owe their start to the space program. www.corporateknightsforum.com