We’ve Got to Get Out of This Place

In "From the Earth to the Moon,” the ground-breaking 1865 novel by Jules Verne, we read the story of a Frenchman and two well-to-do members of a post-American Civil War gun club who build an enormous sky-facing cannon and launch themselves in a projectile/spaceship from it to a Moon landing.

Ever since that novel was published, man’s dream of travelling to the planets and then to the stars has grown ever stronger. Science fiction novels and movies continue to spark the imagination of would-be astronauts, both the “real” variety and those who explore space from the comfort of their armchairs.

Such romantic visions of space exploration and conquest are slowly, quietly being supplanted by a more ominous motivation -- survival. Man’s chances of surviving as a species on this planet go down almost daily. Any elementary school student can give you the laundry list of reasons why this is so. (Read my thoughts on the subject here.)

Yes, Earth is home. It is where we were born, have lived and died for thousands of years. But given those reasons alluded to above, it’s likely the cycle will not continue too very much further into the future.

And now, the important part: if we’re going to establish a permanent human presence on another world, we must take action SOON. It may even be too late already.

Simply “exploring space” is not the same as colonizing other worlds – not by a long shot. Researching, planning, designing, funding, building and populating a viable colonization mission (preferably several simultaneous missions) could take many hundreds of years and thousands of trillions of today’s dollars. And for such a mind-bogglingly large undertaking, man’s resources may well be forever insufficient.

So why don’t we just forget about it and work harder on improving our chances of survival here on our home planet? Good question. Many people believe that’s the proper course of action, and those people have a good argument in their favor.

My argument is simple. What if those people are wrong?

(For a general discussion of this topic, start here with the Wikipedia article, "Space Colonization.")