Mars to Stay will take a special kind of person. Instead of the traditional pilot/scientist/engineer, Martian homesteaders will be selected more for their personalities—flexible, inventive and determined in the face of unpredictability. In short, survivors. The Mars Artists Community has adopted Mars to Stay as their primary policy initiative. During a 2009 public hearing of the U.S. Human Space Flight Plans Committee at which Dr. Robert Zubrin presented a summary of the arguments in his book "The Case for Mars", dozens of placards reading "Mars Direct Cowards Return to the Moon" were placed throughout the Carnegie Institute. The passionate uproar among space exploration
A Beautiful Planet as "The Great Dying"). Like the force fields which protect fictional spaceships from damage, Spaceship Earth has a very real magnetic field which prevents cosmic rays and the stream of charged particles emitted by the Sun from harming living beings on Earth. In the narrative words of "A Beautiful Planet", the glowing, curtain-like auroras that the astronauts admire in the film "show that shield in action. Because we have this magical magnetic field protecting us, we have our forests, and oceans, animals, and people. It's why ours is a planet of life." Our neighboring planet Mars, on the other hand,