A Reason To Hope For A Human Future In Space
I think there's a very good chance of our succeeding in spreading beyond the Earth. It's easy to get discouraged by the cancellation of this or that program, or by those who argue that the environments of other worlds are so hostile that we shall never be able to thrive there, but you have to put all this in a historical context.
We've only been venturing off our own planet for half a century (this year we will celebrate the 50th aniversary of the first "Sputnik"). In that time there has been tremendous progress, and not all of it in that first 12-year rush to the Moon. We have far better computers, better materials, and a much better idea of the problems and opportunities than we did in 1957 or even 1969.
There is also the beginning of a systemic change that will make a very big difference. In the 1960's there were just two Powers on Earth with a spaceflight capability. Today there is America, Russia, Europe, China, India, Israel, and Japan -- and there are numerous private entrants into the field, at least one of them a multi-billion dollar corporation. There is, in other words, real competition.
This is important because, historically, if there is only one or two Powers capable of progress in a field, the withdrawal of one of them can end this progress. If there are multiple participants, the withdrawal of one simply means that the one which withdrew falls behind. Eventually, that one may re-enter to try to make up lost ground.
We have also absorbed the emotional shock, from the 1960's, of finding out that the other planets of our Solar System were not shirtsleeves-habitable. We tend to underestimate this shock today because we have all grown up with it, but it was a serious disappointment to people who had dreamed of Mars as being something like the Gobi Desert with canals, and had had similar hopes for other worlds.
Accepting that the only world that we can live on (mostly) unprotected is Earth, we have now begun to understand and appreciate the other worlds of our System on their own terms rather than expecting them to be Earth clones. And we have come to realize that there are ways to set up self-sustaining colonies upon them: we just have to do it a bit differently than we would if we were colonizing (say) Antarctica.
In the last decade or two we have found evidence that the rest of the Solar System is less inhospitable than we feared in the 1970's. In particular, we have found accessible water almost everywhere save Venus: ice in the shadows on Luna and perhaps Mercury; under the sands of Mars; subsurface oceans on Europa and lakes on Callisto and Ganymede; and an Outer System of planetoids that seem to be mostly ice. And where there is ice, there is accessible hydrogen, which means fusion power.
So I don't think that the situation is at all gloomy; in fact we are getting very close to actually achieving some of the specific dreams of 1950's science fiction, such as Lunar colonies (projected now for 2024) and atomic rockets (in the form of nuclear ion engines for interplanetary work).
The future is bright.
We've only been venturing off our own planet for half a century (this year we will celebrate the 50th aniversary of the first "Sputnik"). In that time there has been tremendous progress, and not all of it in that first 12-year rush to the Moon. We have far better computers, better materials, and a much better idea of the problems and opportunities than we did in 1957 or even 1969.
There is also the beginning of a systemic change that will make a very big difference. In the 1960's there were just two Powers on Earth with a spaceflight capability. Today there is America, Russia, Europe, China, India, Israel, and Japan -- and there are numerous private entrants into the field, at least one of them a multi-billion dollar corporation. There is, in other words, real competition.
This is important because, historically, if there is only one or two Powers capable of progress in a field, the withdrawal of one of them can end this progress. If there are multiple participants, the withdrawal of one simply means that the one which withdrew falls behind. Eventually, that one may re-enter to try to make up lost ground.
We have also absorbed the emotional shock, from the 1960's, of finding out that the other planets of our Solar System were not shirtsleeves-habitable. We tend to underestimate this shock today because we have all grown up with it, but it was a serious disappointment to people who had dreamed of Mars as being something like the Gobi Desert with canals, and had had similar hopes for other worlds.
Accepting that the only world that we can live on (mostly) unprotected is Earth, we have now begun to understand and appreciate the other worlds of our System on their own terms rather than expecting them to be Earth clones. And we have come to realize that there are ways to set up self-sustaining colonies upon them: we just have to do it a bit differently than we would if we were colonizing (say) Antarctica.
In the last decade or two we have found evidence that the rest of the Solar System is less inhospitable than we feared in the 1970's. In particular, we have found accessible water almost everywhere save Venus: ice in the shadows on Luna and perhaps Mercury; under the sands of Mars; subsurface oceans on Europa and lakes on Callisto and Ganymede; and an Outer System of planetoids that seem to be mostly ice. And where there is ice, there is accessible hydrogen, which means fusion power.
So I don't think that the situation is at all gloomy; in fact we are getting very close to actually achieving some of the specific dreams of 1950's science fiction, such as Lunar colonies (projected now for 2024) and atomic rockets (in the form of nuclear ion engines for interplanetary work).
The future is bright.