In this episode, the topic is Mars! In the near future, we will be sending crewed missions there for the first time. These missions are based on planning and proposals that go all the way back to the earliest days of the Space Age. But what exactly are we hoping to find there? What mysteries stand to be revealed? And will we be able to live there someday? These are questions I will be addressing in greater depth this fall when I teach a course titled The Exploration and Potential Settlement of Mars through the Kepler Space Institute!
Check out the episode here:
Stories by Williams 
I used to really hope we’d find something living on Mars, but then I learned more about the planetary protection issues that would create for our Mars colonies in the future. Now I kind of have mixed feelings about it. I don’t want us to risk endangering a Martian ecosystem, if one exists.
And that’s something we may never find out. If life does exist, it’s likely to be deep underground at this point. If we begin transforming the surface, those changes might eventually reach subsurface ecosystems. So it creates ethical considerations that we will need to figure out long-term.
Yeah. It would be such a shame if life existed there and we destroyed it without ever even knowing.