You’ve seen the heart-wrenching polar bears. The sad pandas. You’ve heard the talk about the melting ice caps. I bet you’ve also heard talk about inhabiting Mars. But we have bigger problems here on Earth that running away to another planet can’t fix.

Tell me why’d you want to go and live on Mars. Why do you want to run to another planet when our planet is in terrible shape? The carbon dioxide levels are rising which means so are our global temperatures. The misallocation of climate research is a huge problem.

“Most people probably think that because climate change is so severe, research on this would be hugely prioritized. But the opposite is true. And, oddly, the smallest part of the funding goes into solving the most pressing issues,” -Benjamin K. Sovacool, Director of the Institute for Sustainable Energy at BU. While the budget for climate change research is huge, only 5% of it is actually being used to mitigate that. Meanwhile, $744 million is spent on Mars spacecraft development and launch.

The reason for space exploration also may not be as innocent as you may think. Over time space exploration has become more about the money and less about genuinely wanting to explore space. Big space industries like SpaceX profit off of society’s obsession with the unknown above us. Lastly, space travel contributes to global warming. While exploring outside our planet is interesting and fun, it leaves behind black carbon emissions which contribute to 6% of global warming(insideclimatenews.org).

 Universe.wiki states 5 reasons to live on Mars. One of which is “to avoid human extinction.” That could already be avoided if we put the same energy we put into inhabiting Mars into helping our own planet. So halt on space exploration and pay heed to our current planet.