Welcome to the Colette Podcast. My name is Claire Lehman and I am editor and chief of Colette.

Colette is where Free Thought lives. We are an independent grassroots platform for heterodox ideas and fearless commentary.

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associate editor Toby Young and Canadian editor Jonathan Kay. You can support our podcast by

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Welcome to the Colette Podcast, as we start off 2020 with a brief Martian interlude.

As readers of our website will know, we've recently been running a series of articles

under the banner Our Martian Moment in which authors describe what a future

human colony on Mars might look like. But one of the most intriguing entries we've published is by

Florida-based forensic psychologist Ermondo Simon, who warns that we shouldn't go to

Mars at all. Even putting aside the dangerous eight-month trip, our astronauts

would encounter a deadly and desolate landscape, and then possibly come back to Earth contaminated

by exotic microbes that, if they do exist might infect earth with

diseases we can't even imagine or describe.

I spoke to Mr. Simon this week as he was visiting San Antonio, Texas. Here are excerpts from our interview.

One of the first things you tell us in the piece you road is that getting to Mars would be difficult.

Let's just look at the space station right now. getting to Mars would be difficult.

Let's just look at the space station right now.

If we were able to assemble a craft of that size,

it will be a spectacularly expensive.

Once the astronauts land in Mars,

...