The world is tormented by war and poverty, terrorism, injustice, hunger and misery. Surely space exploration, especially sending humans into orbit and beyond, is an immoral waste of money? -- couldn't the billions be far better spent on Earth?
To that question I reply that space exploration is essential for three reasons:
The expansion of human activities into outer space is therefore an integral part of the growth of modern Western civilisation. It is an assertion of our values of tolerance, liberty, progress, reason and democracy. Anybody whose main concern is to suppress or destroy this civilisation will quite naturally find nothing of interest in space.
Our civilisation is founded upon the principle of economic growth, allied to progress in science, technology, culture and institutions. For all people's fashionable cynicism, it is still deeply ingrained into us. But is growth sustainable, and do we have any idea where it is taking us?
We have come a long way since in 1972 the Club of Rome published The Limits to Growth, predicting a collapse of apocalyptic proportions during the 21st century. A quarter-century later, it is common knowledge that the Earth's resources are being depleted more slowly than was expected (for example, proved reserves of oil and gas have actually risen over the past 30 years). Meanwhile the trends towards increasing industrial efficiency and energy conservation hint at a future moulded by nanotechnology, in which modern standards of living are maintained on tiny resource budgets.
Our industrial civilisation might therefore experience a soft-landing into the resource-limited future. Gradual adaptation through recycling and energy efficiency could allow sustained growth for many centuries to come, with no apocalypses -- other than those caused through human conflict. Will that be good enough?
There is one slight problem: nobody can predict the future. Could we responsibly take the chance of getting that prediction wrong if it could be shown that there were vast reserves of natural resources waiting for us beyond the Earth?
Those reserves do in fact exist! The quantity of rocky and icy rubble drifting around the Solar System is enormous: the asteroids, for example, contain a mass of material somewhere between 0.1% and 10% of the mass of the Earth -- vastly more than we could ever imagine mining from the Earth herself. This material is scattered around in mountain-sized pieces, and those pieces which fly close to the Earth's orbit occasionally pose the threat of mass extinction dramatised in the recent Hollywood films Deep Impact and Armageddon. Yet this same material could potentially be used by a technological species like us to create valuable living-space: habitable domed cities on the Moon and Mars, rotating wheel-shaped or cylindrical cities flying free in the vast ocean of space.
In terms of energy, the story is similar: our Sun radiates vast quantities of light and heat, and almost all of it disperses away into interstellar space (see our Energy Page for further details). So only a minute proportion of the matter and energy in the Solar System is tied into living matter, but a far larger proportion could be, given the creative use of technology.
Does needlessly confining our energy resources to one two-billionth of the Sun's output really give our children the best purchase on the future? Does needlessly confining ourselves to one small world among the dozens in our Solar System and the billions that must exist in our Galaxy really give us the best opportunities for sustained growth? Hardly!
We catch a glimpse, therefore, of a future of stupendous economic growth as these resources are tamed and put to work in the service of life.
Where there is economic growth, there is also moral growth; this is the lesson of history (note 1). If this pattern continues, we may reasonably anticipate that a new age of industrial growth in space would nourish not just increased material prosperity, but also an enhanced sensitivity of personal opinion and governing parliaments to the social environment. And this benevolent overview of human affairs is precisely what astronauts and cosmonauts report (note 2).
It is hard to dismiss the impression that the appearance of the human species marks the onset of a new phase of creative natural evolution, building on past ones to turn life from a planetary phenomenon to a cosmic one.
The billions spent on the Moon-landings, the Mir space station, the Space Shuttle and now the International Space Station are therefore a wise investment towards answering the burning questions -- Is a future millennium of stupendous economic and social growth possible? Can mankind grow from being one species among many on a single small planet to becoming the creator of ecologically independent worlds elsewhere in space? And what will be the perspectives of Space-Age man on the perennial questions of war and peace, of new technologies, of old religions?
The question of security has consumed vastly greater sums, in the form of wars, hot and cold, preparations for wars, and the ensuing havoc, than any space programme ever conceived.
The threat of world war has thankfully receded, though human nature is still much the same as it was fifty years ago, and the political situation is one of constant change. But we now know of threats far more dire than any posed by quarrels between mere governments. Catastrophic climate change is one such danger -- whether induced by our own industrial activities or occurring as part of the natural sequence of ice ages in which (people sometimes forget) we are still living.
Meanwhile, our eyes were opened in dramatic fashion to the dangers in our own cosmic neighbourhood when comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 collided with Jupiter in 1994, and by the evidence which has accumulated to show that the extinction of the dinosaurs and a large proportion of other species 65 million years ago coincided with the impact on Earth of a ten-kilometre asteroid or comet nucleus. Rare as these catastrophes are, Victor Clube of Oxford University and Bill Napier of Edinburgh University have related social upheaval and collapse in historical times to the effects of heavy showers of cometary debris.
The threat from dust particles released by new comets entering the inner Solar System for the first time could be even greater. While the hard nucleus may only be tens of kilometres across, the dust tail stretches for tens of millions of kilometres across the sky. If it intercepts the Earth's orbit the Earth will pass through a lane of debris every year, sweeping up dust on each occasion and suffering global cooling as a result.
In such cases, the very survival of our civilisation would depend on its first having diversified off the surface of the Earth. Vigorous space exploration is necessary to detect and track dangerous asteroids and comets, and to nudge them off a collision course. In the worst case of a unavoidable disastrous crash, mature space and planetary colonies would be in a position to assist their mother world with a cosmic Marshall Plan, while even those perishing on Earth would know that cultural archives on the Moon and Mars would ensure that nothing of enduring value need ever be lost.
Human self-perception is undergoing a painful change of historical significance. The traditional religious views of life are slowly giving way as a new philosophy appears on the stage: an understanding of our place in the universe based partly on science and partly on the poetry of the stars, which I call Astronism (short for Astronautical Evolutionism).
So long as we remain confined to the Earth -- a speck of dust in the immensities of the Galaxy -- our status is that of creatures. But the moment we leave Earth for new cosmic shores, starting with the Moon and Mars, our significance undergoes a momentous change. Formerly just one participant among many in terrestrial ecology, we become the carriers of life out into the vastness, junior participants in creation itself, an essential link in the chain of life from bacteria to living planets, collaborators with an infinite evolving Nature in which our science, our technology and our spirit of adventure become the keys to unlock the vast potential ecological niches which wait patiently in space and on other worlds.
The value of this new self-image may be appreciated by contrasting it with its competitors: the paradigm of selfish consumerism; the madness of defining people with different customs, religious opinions or skin colour as mortal enemies; or the pious ideal of rejecting the wealth and achievements bought with so much blood and sweat over the past 500 years, and returning to tradition and authoritarianism in a society which rejects change and ignores both the dangers and the opportunities which surround it.
Our society is dominated by change, so we can hardly organise our affairs taking every day as it comes, as members of a traditional society might. On the contrary, we need a unifying overall vision of where change is taking us if we are to make sense of our lives.
The view which has prevailed until recently has been the socialistic vision of government-led progress towards a perfectly just society, globalised under the auspices of the United Nations. But this has now reached the stage where further government action obeys a law of diminishing returns. The alternative ideologies of aggressive nationalisms and religionisms have been enjoying a comeback, as represented for example by Le Pen in France, Zhirinovsky in Russia, and the numerous civil war factions and terrorist organisations that bomb and murder their way around the globe.
It may well be that the only world-philosophy adequate to our need for a moral and political compass in coming centuries is one based on the space perspective. Astronism requires us to improve social conditions -- yet not to elevate that to our highest goal or to despair when our efforts turn counterproductive. It justifies our consumerist, liberal society -- yet also shows that it has a greater purpose in the scheme of things. It allows us to feel pride in our national achievements -- yet not thereby to denigrate other nations, for the space perspective emphasises the unity not just of mankind but indeed of all life, in stark contrast with the dead worlds and empty spaces whose shores we tread. And it bases our view of the world on rational science -- yet in such a way as to preserve the mystic element which is so important to our humanity.
Is our greatest aspiration to be for enough food and mindless leisure to while away the pointless hours between birth and death? Is it to be for the power to force the world to stop and fossilise in its present state, through fear of change? Is it to be for a war of annihilation against the folks next door on some pretext of ideology or intolerance? Or is it to be for the dangerous, sacred project of completing an unfinished Creation on a galactic scale? Which of these is the more inspiring thought? Which seems to reach deeper into the human condition? Which will be the better basis for social and political philosophy in the coming millennium?
By Stephen Ashworth FBIS, August 1998.
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Last revised 25 May 2003 / 34th Apollo Anniversary Year