“When a place gets crowded enough
to require ID’s and assorted licenses, social collapse is not far away, and
it’s time to go elsewhere.
Unfortunately we’re running out of elsewhere’s here on Earth. The nice thing about star travel once we get
it developed is that it will make it possible to find “elsewhere”.”
There are, at best estimate, about
200 billion or so stars in our Milky Way galaxy. Making a very conservative guess, let’s assume that only one star
in 100 has a planet capable of being a human habitable world (1%, or two
billion planets). And let’s say
that none of these planets harbor any sort of life, intelligent or otherwise
(which I cannot bring myself to believe).
Assuming further, we’ll assume that only star systems with such planets
are ever occupied by our species and adapted to our sort of life. Thus, with star travel available to them,
over the next million or so years our descendents could spread among the stars
at an average rate of 2000 new stars per year, in an explosion of life than we
can only imagine, thoroughly remaking the galaxy as surely as life has remolded
a once barren Earth.
Logic tells me that life does exist
elsewhere in our universe, so… as seen from the bridge of your approaching
starship, imagine gazing down on a totally new living world and wondering how
its people had shaped that world, and the world it’s people. Imagine the variety of worlds and of the
living species flourishing upon them! Water worlds, desert planets, jungle
planets, mountains that reach above the sky and canyons vast enough to swallow
a small moon. Every habitat and every species
ever imagined in science fiction will become real, and many more yet to spring
from the imagination of explorers born half a million years from now. Imagine the knowledge to be gained from each
and every one of those planets.
And as long as we’re letting our
imaginations run free, consider what happens once we’ve explored our home
galaxy… Look out into the vast
distances of the cosmos, home to millions… billions… of other galaxies, each a
swarm of new stars, new planets, and life unimaginable. We have an entire fascinating universe to explore. There’s an endless line of new places to go,
new things to see, new people to meet, new adventures, and new knowledge to be
gained.
It can be argued that we have no human presence on the
moon today because there has been a lack of public support, vague
understanding, and little willingness to invest our hard earned dollars in
space development. Fairly or not, I lay
this lack of public support squarely at the feet of NASA’s administration. To all indications, NASA has lost the sense
of adventure, the drive, and the challenge we associated with spaceflight in
the 1960’s. That very human drive to
explore the unknown has been replaced in our government by nothing more than a
culture of bureaucratic empire building.
Certainly competing economic interests play a role, but given the amount
of money necessary to achieve those dreams of space development, the cost is
actually nominal, even incidental.
Rightly so we have made hero’s of our astronauts for
their pioneering of manned spaceflight.
In much the same manner we looked upon the space scientists and
engineers whose labors made those flights possible. To the American public in the 1960’s and 70’s NASA was the “fair
haired boy” of the mirade of US government agencies. We considered space flight to be the bright shining future of
humanity. Over the following years,
this positive attitude began to change.
Rather than demonstrating to the public the potential of
space development, what humanity as a whole could do in space, NASA insisted on
resting on their laurels while a shortsighted congress cut the funding, thus
making spaceflight the realm of only a very few select individuals. This perceived “exclusivity of space” made
the public feel left out, that there was no place for the common man in space
exploration, that there would be no benefit for them or their children, and
would in fact, would leave them at an economic disadvantage. After all, why
should my hard earned tax dollars be spent on creating a bright and shining
future for a very few space going “supermen”, leaving me behind in the dust and
squalor of overcrowded planet? Instead
of pressing science and industry to open spaceflight to everyone, the public
settled for any number of space operas of dubious scientific accuracy that did little
more than pump millions of dollars into the Hollywood economy. People never lost their fascination with
spaceflight; they were just left out of the game by a mindless bureaucracy.
In the Star Trek universe, the Federation is all about
ensuring that all people benefit and have a role in the forward evolution of
that wondrous future. This is a concept
that we here on our pale blue marble should seriously consider for the long
term good of ourselves and of our descendants.
After all, we’re running out of accessible natural resources. For
the most part we’re now mining low-grade materials to feed our industrial
demands, and even those materials are getting scarce. We’re running out of
energy sources as well. What’s going to happen when the oil finally runs
out? The environmentalist’s object to
our burning coal and oil, they won’t let us develop nuclear fission, and their
alternate “green energy” programs have been a total flop so far. Yet the sun
each second puts out about forty million times as much energy as we need on
Earth, which leaves the possibility of building efficient space based solar
power systems to solve our energy problems… until the sun burns out in a few
billion years. It would be nice if we
could develop a new supply of natural resources as well… before we’re reduced
to living in an updated version of the Stone Age! The moon, and the near Earth
asteroids, contains a plentiful supply of just about everything we need here on
Earth, and will need to live and work in space itself. Professor John S. Lewis, a planetary
scientist at the University of Arizona states that an asteroid only two
kilometers in diameter, and assuming typical meteorite composition, would be
worth (at today’s prices) around 300,000 trillion dollars! That’s about the gross
GLOBAL product for a very long time into the future!
The recently initiated engineering
study “100YSS” (the 100
Year Starship), a NASA/DARPA program to study and develop the means of reaching
the stars, believes, as do I, that pursuing an extraordinary tomorrow will
create a better world today, if we, and our Congress critters, don’t allow it
to wither on the vine. The social, cultural, political, scientific and
technical communities, along with the electorate, must see human travel to the
stars as not just the dream of a few wild eyed space enthusiasts, but a
necessity for the very survival of the human race that we must begin work on
now, while we still have the means to do so, so that all human life here on
Earth… and our children’s children into the far future… might “live long and prosper”.
