What Should the Next 50 Years Bring?
As you should already know, today marks the 50th anniversary of the first manned space flight. As such, for some it may be a time to remember the past, but for most it should be a time to think of the future. After all, though currently we are the Earth’s and our own only realistic enemies, so many things can happen in a more or less distant future that’ll require us to go to the stars in order to have any future at all even if and when we will finally manage to get our own destructive nature under control.
For example, we know the Sun will start noticeably increasing its output in about one billion years, first turning Earth into an inhospitable wasteland and then, perhaps some three billion years from now, into a completely dead world, possibly even engulfing it entirely when it’ll turn into a red giant. Around that same time, Andromeda may collide with the Milky Way, which may or may not have any direct adverse effects on any specific solar system that a sentient race, including our own, may inhabit at the time. But the greater threats are those that may come far sooner than that and are far less predictable, such as anomalies that may cause the Sun to significantly change its output on short notice, runaway stars, planets or even black holes that may be heading our way, our own solar system ending up in a “bad neighborhood” of the galaxy, the Earth becoming geologically inactive and/or losing its magnetic field, as well as many others that we perhaps can’t even currently imagine.
Still, let’s not go quite so far into the future. What we should be thinking about now is what direction should space exploration take over the coming few decades and what part, if any, should human space travel play in it. That is because, while the first manned space flight and, only a little more than eight years later but more than three centuries after the first plans, the first Moon landing were momentous achievements for the entire human race, there currently seems to be little point in putting people past Earth orbit and almost none to get one past the Moon.
At least that’s my opinion and I’m sticking to it. Back then we needed to have people out there because we were not yet capable of creating machines to do the same kind of work, yet now our machines can do infinitely more than a human could ever do in any environment other than the nice, cozy and so terribly fragile one found on the surface of Earth. As such, if we also keep in mind that it’s so much more difficult to put a human out there and keep them alive and well than it is to put a machine out there and keep it functioning properly, it simply makes no practical sense to keep pursuing this goal at the present time. And, though this is the focus of most of those who oppose manned space flights, and perhaps space exploration and most other scientific endeavors in general, I’m not even taking the financial aspect into account when I say this, because money are purely a human invention and have absolutely no meaning and no value in realistic terms.
Quite simply, space exploration is extremely important and a huge amount of effort and resources should be put into it, but its purpose should be, in fact needs to be, solely to gain knowledge. It needs to be a scientific endeavor in the purest sense, not concerned with short-term practical applications or any direct relevance to our current life on Earth, and certainly in no way connected to any economic interests. And it’s just that scientific point of view that makes me say that, while there are still valid research goals to be met by putting humans in Earth orbit and likely even by building a permanent manned research facility on the Moon, it’s highly inefficient to use our ingenuity and limited resources to send manned missions to other planets when, with even less effort, we are currently capable of building machines that will gather so much more data with far greater speed, accuracy and efficiency.
In short, my opinion is that we have already reached the level of development currently required for any manned space missions that make scientific sense. In fact, seeing that the first Moon landing was achieved, nearly 42 years ago, with technology that was perhaps at a level found in today’s pocket calculators, I’m absolutely certain that we wouldn’t even need any significant new developments in order to also go back to the Moon and perform any research and experiments that actually require human beings to live in an environment so different from anything naturally found on Earth.
What’s more, focusing in the near future on the development of manned space travel in general and on plans of colonizing other planets in particular can actually be dangerous. I’m saying that because it could easily be seen as a potential easy way out of the grave we keep digging for ourselves here on Earth at least ever since the advent of civilization, and such an option must never become available! We need to be able to travel great distances through space and colonize other worlds in the future due to the reasons I mentioned in the first part of this post, which are completely out of our control, but we must not be allowed to get away with destroying a world and so many of the other species we currently share it with only to move on to another and, most likely, repeat the cycle all over again. If we as a species won’t decide to start living in harmony with the environment that currently shelters and nurtures us simply because it’s the right thing to do, that decision must be forced upon us, and what better way to do that than ensuring that our very survival depends solely on caring for this one planet, without any chance of moving elsewhere until we’ll learn to be stewards, guardians and nurturers instead of mere parasites, and dumb ones at that?
Perhaps, within the next 50 years, we will learn what we need to learn and start behaving as we should have behaved all along. And perhaps we’ll also learn our place and what we are. If that happens, we will be able to look towards other worlds for the right reasons and we will also be in a much better position to reach them, as we will have far fewer concerns here at home. Yet, until and unless that does happen, we should stick to sending machines out there, certainly putting far more effort and resources into it than we currently do, but not worry about following them ourselves. It simply makes no sense to put humans on another planet purely for research purposes and, even if we’d develop the technology to permit this, we’re far, far from being worthy of colonizing another world, not to mention making use of its resources in any way.
