And one benefit to this mission would be to determine if there was evidence of life on the red planet. Or, as some believe, the basis of life on Earth.
A theory
called panspermia, which dates back to the 5th century BC, posits that
certain life forms can hop between planets, and even star systems, to
fertilize them with life.
Following this theory, science theorists
suspect that the first life on Earth never formed on our planet at all,
but instead, hitched a ride inside planetary fragments from Mars that
were flung into space after a powerful impact and eventually fell to
Earth.
This travel between different planets has a parallel in the lost time-travel/sideways universe arcs.
There is still no clear cut conclusion between the island world and the sideways world, which mirrored the lives of the characters on Earth. Various theories believed the sideways universe was connected to the island by some portal or electromagnetic time-space machine.
If you take this old science theory and apply it to the fiction of LOST, could the sideways world be actually another planet - - - a second Earth that was being colonized by removing human beings from Earth and teleporting them to a distant, similar world?
Why would anyone do this? In some sci-fi series, like Star Trek, there are advanced races of aliens with vast technologies who use it to help to reverse the decline in their own humanoid species. By taking humans from Earth and re-creating an Earth like setting (as was done in The Cage), with a group of people who are close knit friends, the alien planet could have its new gene pool.
So the sideways world was not purgatory but a New Earth, replicated for the benefit of the LOST survivors who were deemed dead by their families but kidnapped by the aliens to bond together on an island adventure in order to accept their new home in a distant galaxy.