Prepare for the End of the World
This month marks the 50th anniversary of the dawn of the space age. The Soviets’ launch of the Sputnik satellite started the space race in 1957.
But lately the space race seems to be stalling, with much at stake for our survival. Why?
The world is going to end. Don’t believe it because of some guy on the street corner screaming his Armageddon warnings through a bullhorn. Obviously, the world is going to end someday. We all learned in 8th grade science that at some point, in a number of years with a lot of zeroes at the end, the sun will burn out.
But others believe crisis is more imminent.
In July, New York Times columnist John Tierney wrote about Dr. J. Richard Gott and his conclusion that to ensure our long-term survival, we need to get a colony up and running on Mars within 46 years.
At first I pictured Christopher Lloyd as Dr. Emmett Brown from "Back to the Future." But Gott is a professor of astrophysics at Princeton. He bases predictions about how long something will last based on how long something has lasted already, and also upon the Copernican Principal
In short, Gott points out that if we don’t colonize space soon, we may never do it and we’ll have nowhere to go when extinction looms.
In 2006, a group of scientists, including Stephen Hawking, got together for a TV production and predicted several ways the Earth could end.
* A gamma ray burst or black hole
* Artificial intelligence on the loose
* A super volcano
* An asteroid striking the Earth.
* Nuclear annihilation
* A natural or bioterrorist pandemic
* Global warming
So if not the Earth or Mars, where?
Dennis Hope is selling real estate on the moon; deeds go for $20. Laugh if you will, but Hope claims 4 million people have spent $9 million so far, including George Lucas and President G.W. Bush, according to Discover magazine. Hope exploited a loophole in a UN treaty that prohibits nations from owning the moon but says nothing about individual holders.
However, Discover quotes a professor at the Institute of Air and Space Law at McGill University as saying Hope’s strategy won’t hold up in court. Of course, if these new lunar owners are leaving behind an Earth in ruins, having a deed might be better than not having one.
Perhaps in another corner of the universe, there is another planet colonizing other planets. Or, perhaps we are a colony of a previous planet, and some bumbling Dr. Smith fumbled the sacred history books, which are now ‘lost in space.’
Either way, the game here is "survival of the fittest."
Tragedies in the space program have made us gun-shy. But colonizing space will take bold ideas and risks—and a public with an appetite for failure.
So as we look to the next 50 years of space exploration, let’s steer our children away from iPods and X-boxes and toward understanding the universe.