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Number 6 never actually got out of the Village.

Sorry to spoil the end of a nearly 60-year-old television show for you, but it’s true.

“The Prisoner,” a cult British series that originally aired from 1967-68, spends 17 delightful, mod-inflected hours weighing theories of individuality, duty and conformity before showing us that there’s ultimately no way out of our larger prisons. As a nameless secret agent known only as “Number 6,” Patrick McGoohan protests against his imprisonment in a charming model village in Wales via a series of wry barbs, defiant acts and occasional judo flips. At the end of the series’ one and only season, McGoohan finds that the mastermind behind his captivity is himself, before making one last futile escape attempt in his sports car. We know he’s going nowhere. It’s still inspiring to watch him run.

As the most-powerful rocket ever launched by NASA makes its historic flight around the moon, the debate about whether we’ll ever get off this old rock has reignited. The revitalization of NASA moon missions signaled by Artemis II has people looking beyond our immediate surroundings and recalling SpaceX head Elon Musk’s promises of a Mars colony before the century closes. Like most Musk initiatives, it’s a load of hokum, supercharged and granted legitimacy via an unfathomable amount of money.

Let’s get real: Mars will never host long-term human settlements. It has no magnetosphere to stop all the harmful radiation from the sun. It’s 50 million miles farther away from the life-giving warmth and light that deadly ball of radiation provides. There is no air on Mars. Current estimates of a one-way trip to the red planet push up against current records for the longest time spent in space. Anyone sent to a hypothetical, air-filled structure on Mars would be living inside a sealed coffin, surrounded by the void, months removed from anything resembling food or life. It’s a punishment that would make the eternally suffering Omelas child think “Eh, could be worse.”

The obvious infeasibility of human settlement on a dead, airless planet, infinitely less hospitable to life than the deepest depths of the Arctic Ocean, has proven too much for even Musk’s pie-in-the-sky press releases. He’s walked back his Mars plans by an order of 100, sheepishly saying that he’s now eyeing the moon for incredibly expensive and implausible space settlement. If that ever comes to pass, at least it won’t be so hard to recover the bodies of the would-be colonists.

That doesn’t mean there’s no value in shooting humans farther into space than ever before. Artemis II and similar projects can expand the scope of human knowledge and teach us new ways to deal with adverse living conditions, something that will come in useful as the only planet we’ve ever known — and the only one we know for sure can host complex life — keeps heating up. Previous work by NASA has added immense value to the average Earthling. Astounding advancements in water filtration, personal computing, cameras and medical tech all got their start as part of various metaphorical and literal moonshots. Beyond that, there’s the whole “indefatigable human spirit” thing.

We’ve been looking up at the stars for millennia and taking every opportunity we could to map our own stories onto them. We looked out there and saw ourselves. The urge to put ourselves up there, to travel as far as we possibly can, even if it’s ultimately fruitless, will not be quelled by the cold, hard facts of a colder, harder universe.

Like McGoohan’s unnamed eternal fugitive, we’ll never actually escape. We can’t let that stop us from trying.

What do you think? Should we continue to focus on space exploration? Am I completely off-base about the futility of living in the most hostile environment imaginable? Sound off in the comments.

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