Foreword: This is a long post--seems like I can't write as succinctly as I'd like to about this. My apologies. If you have an urgent appointment somewhere, perhaps you should just skim the headlines and get going.

Don't say you weren't warned

So here's the thing. I am very, very torn right now. It's all about space.

Space is a commodity, like most things, and like most commodities it's bought sold and traded. And like some commodities it is (on this planet anyway) in increasing demand, but slowly decreasing supply.

Estimates on the number of babies born in the last twenty-four hours vary enormously, but if we accept the informed opinion of the US Census Bureau, probably the most thoroughly researched and current major census available, then this many babies were born last night.

Dr. Malthus posited that the Earth could support about 2 billion human beings. Of course, this was in the eighteenth century, and Dr. Malthus had no foreknowledge of the tremendous improvements in efficiency that would happen throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. We became able to grow more food, for longer, in a greater range of climes.

So here we are in the year of Our Lord, or 2004 AD, or ACE or whatever. The population of the Earth is 6,375,882,069 or so. We're probably good until around 2029 or so, when we'll finally hit eight billion (barring war, rapture or something else stupid).

At the moment, things seem, by and large, to be improving. The bottom 10% of the world’s population is worse off than it’s ever been, and the top 10% is wallowing in wealth. But the vast span of “not-too-bad” in between has never been wider. People in the middle are getting along okay, and there are more of them.

The point of all this geopolitical economics is that at some point, population may outpace our ingenuity. Then what? Well, if we’ve been wise, the human race will have prepared for that, by investing in space.

If we are lucky enough to have a few powerful leaders with vision and forethought, the human race will have been busy preparing, seeding itself on new worlds—Mars is only the beginning. But we seem to be lacking in vision and forethought—why else does George Bush Jr. appear to be the sole high-profile proponent for a Mars colony?

This worries me. On one hand we should be heading for Mars, and kudos to Bush for seeing that. But there are other nations as capable. Is the lack of competition due to lack of funds? No--per capita, space travel starts comparitively cheap and gets cheaper as the benefits over time become clear. I think it's about vision, and lack thereof.

The lack of vision in modern Western societies has partially been accompanied by the decline of religious affiliation—not that the two are necessarily connected. They may both be effects, stemming from some sort of general cynicism, rather than one being a cause and the other the effect. But religion has this going for it: its true practice demands that one consider the future, not for next week, not for a lifetime, but beyond the span of our own lives. To be a true religionist, one must actively believe in something larger than oneself.

Why is that of any concern? Well, look at the sort of cretinous leadership we’re getting: People whose vision is limited to how best to fool voters into electing them for the next five years. The voters are little better, voting themselves consistently bigger slices of pie, pandered to by desperate and power-hungry men, knowing the cost to the future, and apparently not caring.

Most administrations in democracies limit their planning to five or ten years. This is more than ludicrous: “Men who think in lifetimes are of no use to statesmanship”-- H.G. Wells. I for one would vote for a person who promised to raise taxes 5%, but have a base on Mars by 2010.

But we don’t need to raise taxes. We just need the will. President Kennedy declared in 1961 that the US would send a man to the moon within a decade. It was done in eight years—why? Because the people of the United States believed in the mission—they believed in something bigger than themselves. Not a lot bigger—this was “the national dream” for the Cold War. But they believed that they as a society were greater than the sum of individuals.

Remember, this was back in the days of I-dunno-let’s-build-one-and-test-it engineering. There was little computer simulation, and almost nothing was known about the hazards or rewards of space travel. But they did it.

Then came the eighties. The Me generation took the helm, and started hiring people whose only promise was to lower taxes, regardless of the cost that would impose on future generations. Ronald Reagan became the first president to introduce a trillion-dollar deficit, and has been surpassed only by. . .well you can look it up.

By the way, why did they name an airport after someone who made air travel noticeably dicier by firing the air traffic controllers? Sort of like having a GWB Peace Prize, no?

Due to the limited vision of even the most demogogue-ish of these people, the US got the space shuttle; a boring and timid shadow that, while utterly necessary, should have been developed as an adjunct to the moon base or the space habitat. In part thanks to the financial and visionary constraints on that program, the people have lost the sense of drive and purpose—why pay for something that effectively is going nowhere?

So it’s a refreshing relief to see this ambition flare again in the hearts of Americans. But did it have to be this particular president? Yeah, it did. Sigh.

But why only him? China is mumbling about putting a person on the moon (although this begs the question of why they’re collecting a ton of aid money from other nations). India is toying with the idea of manned flights, and Europe is trying to establish common vision. Marc Garneau has said Canada can go to Mars—as a technological payload passenger on a US probe only—for the cost of a small pizza per Canadian (What could they do for the price of a large? I have a coupon, if that’ll help . . . Can I get that delivered within thirty minutes?).

Why do we circumscribe ourselves like this?

If George Bush, or those like him, establish the first exo-atmospheric stations of humanity, they won’t be for the sake of human expansion, but for geopolitical advantage—and there’s nothing wrong with that. It’s up to the people who do the dirty work to decide what something should be used for (not legalese, just a fact).

If, on the other hand, you believe that space should be the territory of humans, not just citizens of country X, if you believe that space should be reserved for peaceful purposes as much as possible, and if, most of all, you believe that humanity has a destiny beyond this horizon and this ball of rock, sea, and sand, then press your political representatives to recognize your vision.

Let's aspire to something bigger than a four-bedroom house with a two-car garage. The universe is just above your head.

"A man's reach should exceed his grasp, or what's a heaven for?"--Robert Browning

As for me, I’ve got a small suitcase packed and ready for the day they open up Mars for colonization.

The Mars Society
Mars Institute
NASA and Mars


If you insist on staying within Earth orbit, just remember: "It's a lifetime commitment, recovering the satellites."