Final Frontier - A reflection of our place in space
“The nitrogen in our DNA, the calcium in our teeth, the iron in our blood, the carbon in our apple pies were made in the interiors of collapsing stars. We are made of starstuff.”
Carl Sagan, Cosmos
I have always been fascinated by the stars. As a child I would point at the night sky and ask, "What's beyond that star? And then beyond that?" I wasn't the first and won't be the last. Humans have always looked to the heavens with wonder, curiosity, and reverence. Long ago, mankind named the stars after our gods - now we can say we are learning to walk among them.
Earlier this year, the IE community was party to a remarkable event - a talk by Gwynn Shotwell, COO of private aerospace company SpaceX. I sat enraptured, watching footage of reusable rockets landing vertically back on earth, listening to casual discussion about the economic viability of asteroid mining, and sitting struck dumb by the realness of their vision to put mankind on Mars in our lifetime.
And it hit me like a rocket blast. This is really our world in 2018. Many of our parents, mine included, grew up in a world where satellites were new-fangled tech, before people had even been put into orbit. And here we were, students and academics and professionals, for whom news of rotations of astronauts and cosmonauts to the ISS are natural phenomena, where we regularly see Hubble's most beautiful shots of this incredible universe, where we followed the launch of the Falcon rockets on Facebook live, tuned in to astronaut Chris Hadwell's funny videologs from the ISS, and sat discussing the very immediate reality of plans to colonise the Red Planet.
The thrill of discovery is inherent to our human nature. To quote Carl Sagan’s novel Contact, “We all have a thirst for wonder. It's a deeply human quality. Science and religion are both bound up with it.” Our curiosity, rationality, critical thinking, ability to work in groups, and our innovation have driven our species to survive and thrive. We are privileged to witness and be a part of the incredible initiative of science, a manmade methodology to understand who and what we are.
But the reality of man becoming an interplanetary species is contentious. Do we approach Mars to explore or to settle? Do we accept our fate to perish with the earth in a billion years when the sun expands - our current species endangerment due to our own activities accelerating climate change notwithstanding?
When we dream of colonising space, taking an extraordinary new step in the story of our species, we must also ask ourselves the eternal question of what we seek to be as a species. Torches have been used to illuminate the darkness as often as they've been held alongside pitchforks in ignorance. When we embark on our interplanetary course, a collective breath must be taken.
I would like mankind to follow in the footsteps of Star Trek or the Left Hand of Darkness, seeking to discover and learn about the cosmos and our place in it. The Earth is our home, and I do not want us to abandon her. The only cases for a blue planet without humans that I can accept are the sun's death or our species being selected for extinction by Mother Nature's unsympathetic hand. We may become spacefarers, but have we not already seen the ills of forcing colonisation, and can we not caution ourselves against our horrible human habit of repeating history? Mars is a hostile planet. We can treat it like Antarctica, but are we really prepared to blunder our way into a permanent settlement there?
Despite what may seem like fear and criticism, I am not against a human presence on other planets. I just despair of it being done without caution. There is so much we can achieve as a species when this becomes a reality - a unified, human goal to strive, to overcome, to think and work and make a footprint in those cold red sands. Imagine planting a flag - I personally hope something as international as possible, like that of the UN. Imagine a future in which a human being may not introduce himself as an Earthling, but as a Martian. That could be our reality in the coming centuries.
Whether or not there is other life out there - whether other planets are arks like our floating blue haven - we have the very real possibility of sending life further into the universe than our home planet. I would like to close with one final quote by Sagan (whose excellent interpretations of the human relationship with the universe I have already quoted a lot): “The nations that had instituted spaceflight had done so largely for nationalistic reasons; it was a small irony that almost everyone who entered space received a startling glimpse of a transnational perspective, of the Earth as one world.” Let us see what the future shall bring to us who seek to marry the perspectives of both the Earth and the stars.