Live long and prosper

“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”.