This week's Mars Landing is generating much press and excitement. Humanity's ability to land a rocket on another planet, and remotely control it from Earth is an impressive technological feat. But should we be spending U.S. government funds on Mars exploration when life on earth is threatened?

The cover story of The Atlantic Monthly takes on this exact question: where should we spend U.S. government money in order to protect the biosphere? The author, Greg Easterbrook, found a "one-in-10 chance per century of a dangerous space-object strike." These dangerous strikes, according to Easterbrook, "ought to command attention because of their scope. A tornado is far more likely than an asteroid strike, but humanity is sure to survive the former." Easterbrook suggests that an asteroid strike might cause a mass extinction of life on earth, an extinction that could threaten humanity.

To give historical precedent for such dramatic events, Easterbrook turns to past "mass extinctions—the dinosaurs died about 65 million years ago, and something killed off some 96 percent of the world's marine species about 250 million years ago." Easterbrook then describes "the most recent mass extinction....about 12,000 years ago, many large animals of North America started disappearing—woolly mammoths, saber-toothed cats, mastodons, and others." While the article makes much of some claims that this extinction was caused by asteroid impacts, it ignores the possibility (supported in 2001 Science Magazine and by Jared Diamond in his book Guns Germs and Steel) that the late Pleistocene extinction, about 12,000 years ago, was caused by humans.

While there is academic debate over the cause of the last great extinction, the article conveniently ignores the current great extinction. Scientists agree that we are in the midst of a massive species extinction on the same scale as the extinction that wiped out the dinosaurs. Humans are wiping out the fish we eat, the bees that pollinate our food, and birds whose presence we simply enjoy. This current great extinction, caused by climate change and habitat destruction, could be slowed by finding alternative sources of energy, and decreasing demand for energy and land. Finding non-polluting alternatives and ways to decrease demand for energy fits in the job description of the U.S. Department of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy.

The Atlantic Monthly article bemoans the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration's (NASA) budget, and claims that the one in ten possibility of an asteroid strike justifies a $1 billion "sophisticated search of the proximate heavens for asteroids and comets." However the current mass extinction, deserves equal research funding as astrophysical risks. Unfortunately, the sad facts of U.S. federal research in environmental science bear out a strange set of priorities.

While NASA has a $16 billion budget, including $5.2 billion for space science research, the US Department of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE) has a total research budget of $1.1 billion. This includes only $81 million for solar energy, and $38 million for wind energy. When you add other federal funding for environmental science research (pdf), the sum is about $4.7 billion.

The U.S. spends far less money studying this planet than we do researching outer space. While I agree whole-heartedly with The Atlantic Monthly that the U.S. ought to spend research money on projects that will protect life on earth, it seems the magazine's focus on asteroids is based on an unrealistic sense of the threats to our planet. The current mass extinction of species caused by human activity, which threatens our existence, is certainly cause for some serious investigation.

After all, what good is searching for life on other planets when we can't even sustain life on this one?