The healthcare proposal Obama didn’t have the nerve to make
The recent New York Times op ed was brilliant: Because the cost of sending scientists to Mars would be, well, astronomical ($300 to $600 billion), superstar physicist Lawrence M. Krauss proposes we save a ton of money by flying those researchers out but not back. That’s right—a one-way ticket to Mars.Krauss knows his interplanetary stuff. Besides getting a PhD in physics at MIT and winning all kinds of awards, he also published a bestselling book called The Physics of Star Trek, which explained that “dematerializing” a human being for teleportation might be feasible, except for requiring about as much energy as is released by a 100-megaton hydrogen bomb. So he doubtless got the facts right when he explained that Mars travelers would likely be killed by solar radiation unless the ship was “so heavy that the amount of fuel needed becomes prohibitive.” From there it took him just a few rational hops to decide that the cost problem would be solved if the astronauts never came back. Even better, he continued, would be to recruit scientists over 65, “whose longevity is limited in any case.” We’d send up medical personnel and equipment, of course, but that “would still probably be cheaper than designing a return mission.”
Interesting, no? And maybe a little...crazy? But then it turns out that Dr. Krauss isn't serious. President Obama has just been handed a report on the interplanetary-travel options, and Krauss is being deliberately outrageous in order to make a point: that in his view there's no reason to go to ridiculous lengths and risk human life for the sake of space research; we have robots that we can send to do the job.
But while Krauss was being satirical, he may be on to something here. So let's take his one-way ticket idea and run with it. For example, instead of recruiting elderly scientists to do research on Mars (which might be tough, given that they all know Madame Curie died of radiation poisoning), we could fall back on that genteel British tradition of transporting prisoners. Of course, the convicts sent to Australia in the 18th and 19th centuries didn’t have to be smart enough to do research once they got there…but under the provisions of the No Criminals Left Behind Act, which could be quickly passed, we could test the armies of inmates nationwide and surely find the necessary handful of sociopath-scholars (Hannibal Lecter, anyone?) for the task. Or even better: We could solve two problems at once by testing among the two populations that are much more despised these days than criminals, namely, the elderly and the overweight, whom everyone says are making decent healthcare unaffordable for the rest of us. Krauss did suggest recruiting scientists over 65, but that won’t help enough, since most of them are male. Statistically, American women outlive men, so logically it’s those XX-chromosome healthcare guzzlers we should boot off-planet. And when it comes to the obese, well, that’s a no-brainer. According to a 2007 Rand Corporation study, “obese individuals incur higher health care costs than current smokers or problem drinkers,” and you know it’s all because they just won’t change their ways. To paraphrase Ralph Kramden, “Pow, Tubby, right to Mars.”
Dr. Krauss, of course, will remind us that he was ridiculing the idea of marooning people in space, not proposing it. But what may be crazy when applied to the space program may seem perfectly sensible when suggested in the healthcare debate, which in the last few months has achieved such a feverish level of insanity that this idea could contribute meaningfully to the dialogue. (Glenn Beck, are you listening? Or how about you, Rep. Joe Wilson? As the only congressperson ever to heckle a sitting president, you just may have the guts for this kind of deal.) So we'll send all those fatties and old wobblies to space, but what happens when they get there? Yes, there’ll be doctors and X-ray machines and all that…just not very many of them. (As Krauss points out, the heavier the spaceship, the more expensive the trip. And a mammogram machine weighs a heck of a lot more than a treadmill named for Stephen Colbert.) So maybe those death panels that the Obama plan never actually called for might work just fine up there. Because in space, no insurance company can hear you scream.