the unseen challenge of space colonization.
The Earth may not be able to sustain us. We don’t have the collective wisdom to not kill each other. Given those facts, we are steadily approaching a hard predicament. We are probably going to leave Earth, but we may not survive staying there.
It seems our hope for a successful interplanetary future relies solely on 3 rich guys. Feelings about billionaires aside — most of us are waiting with bated breath to see how far they get. Partially out of interest, envy, and awe. Partially because we feel humanity as it stands is doomed.
Impending climate change aside, many cosmic things are guaranteed. One of them is that our sun, our source of life, will explode and take us with it.
Not soon, by any measure. But it’s too close for comfort to think that our relatives 3000+ generations down will be stomped out.
That doesn’t include Earth becoming a rogue planet — a planet ejected from the gravity of a star and sent into space.
Rogue planets end up in voids/super voids — portions of space spanning billions or trillions of light years wide with no other objects. To be sentenced to being a rogue planet is a death sentence for everything but the remaining core of a planet.
If exile for trillions of years isn’t enough — the fact that by-products of industry on Earth is destroying the atmosphere is another thing we’ll deal with.
Not to mention the hundreds of other cosmic threats we face (and have created ourselves) that may wipe our young species in our cradle. We as life have outgrown this planet, and trampled it on our way up.
To be human is loosely defined as experiencing, to explore — to learn, progress, create, and do it over and over again.
Inevitably, it involves trying to explore the rest of the solar system, galaxies, and whatever else lies beyond. It involves making mistakes, and learning how to fix them.
To be human is to grow, to change, and to adapt. That mindset is one that has led humanity to be the most advanced forms of life (that we know of).
From either a need for further exploration, climate change, or some other unforeseen event, there is a solid chance that if we survive the next 100 or so years, we will make it to the interplanetary future we’re rooting for now.
Ideally, we’re leaving our planet at some point far down the line. But the people who will keep us there long-term are not 3 guys in a dick-measuring contest carried out through space exploration companies.
They might build the infrastructure, but the infrastructure isn’t the only challenge. The greater challenge is one that is far harder to achieve with wealth, and one that doesn’t have a scientific formula or solution to it.
We have to make humanity able to stay in space without destroying it, and us.
The Merriam Webster dictionary has three definitions of parasite:
1. a person who exploits the hospitality of the rich and earns welcome by flattery,
2. an organism living in, with, or on another organism in parasitism
3. something that resembles a biological parasite in dependence on something else for existence or support without making a useful or adequate return.
Our greatest fear of alien life is common in sci-fi films. It’s usually an extra-terresterial species who comes to drain Earth of its’ resources for personal gain, only to leave after it becomes barren for everyone else.
We are that alien species to other inhabitants on our planet.
Like the aliens that we see as the worst case scenario, humanity has been extracting resources for wealth and leaving the destruction to be someone else’s issue.
Yes, we are technically and scientifically advanced. But think — would you travel to another planet with the person who cut you off in traffic or yelled at a customer service employee? Probably not.
We are a dumb species. We repeat the follies of previous civilizations and nations over and over again, without fail.
Fighting wars doesn’t make us better at peace. It makes us better at fighting war. Going to other planets to siphon resources will not give us a permanent home. It makes us become the fictional aliens we fear the most.
Humanity’s biggest challenge will not be having the technical or scientific capabilities to get to the stars and stay there. Our biggest challenge will be to not drag along the parasitic characteristics of human nature with us.
We cannot assume moving from planet to planet as we exhaust its’ resources will make us any better at trying to create a stable home for ourselves among the stars. Taking our individualistic traits with us will be our species’ end.
In the early days of evolution, these things served us well. We needed to be selfish, and to fear those who were different to stay alive. These traits kept us from dying in the face of unknown evils in the shadows of night.
But in our current world, we have gotten to a point where we don’t need them — they are sabotaging our species instead of keeping us alive.
PTSD is a prime example of how our most basic human instincts built to keep us alive have come back to sabotage us in the modern age. From an evolutionary standpoint, trauma came out as a result of humans needing to learn how to stay away from bad things. Trauma kept us alive.
It sharpened our senses and awareness so we didn’t die within the context of a world where we didn’t have the convenience of safety by numbers.
Today, most modern dangers are not being eaten by tigers, or being hunted in the woods. Whereas loud noises thousands of years ago signaled an ambush, today they signal day-to-day activities of living near others.
With more noises, people, activity, interaction, and communication than ever — trauma cannot signal danger like it was evolved to. Trauma becomes a side-effect instead of an advantage. PTSD is no longer keeping you safe from a specific event. It keeps you trapped in it.
Like PTSD, other traits like greed, selfishness, discrimination, and violence, evolved from a time when we had to do those things to stay alive.
Those things used to keep us alive, but now they unnecessarily escalate situations and dilute our view of others.
Today in most first world countries, the average person will rarely ever need to use survival skills to avoid death. The stakes have lowered. But our emotional intelligence and wisdom haven’t scaled to match the new requirements set by globalization.
Living with other humans in hubs has increased our safety, accessibility, life quality, and many other things. But with the transition from living in isolated groups to living in cities and being interconnected — we had to learn new skills to be in harmony.
Many of the dangers we faced as cave-men are no longer omnipresent and lurking around the corner.
The newer dangers are the long term ones we ignore and pretend are hidden out of view: use of fossil fuels, stockpiling nuclear weapons, climate change, mass resource hogging, and a focus on profit and scale at any cost over sustainability.
These newer dangers require newer traits to navigate. We are no longer dealing with the survival of the individual that those old traits evolved to protect. We are currently dealing with the survival of the collective.
But those remnants of old individualistic traits still linger in traces everywhere you look. The new traits are coming around, but not fast enough.
We’re getting off this Earth. But at the cost of the powerful having destroyed it and leaving the Earth and the people who can’t afford to leave to die.
We’ve asked the question for so long, — how can humanity get off of this planet?
But we’ve neglected to ask the question we don’t want to know the answer to — Is humanity worth getting off of this planet?
In spite of my obvious pessimism, we are. But not in our current state. We might not change in time to fully mitigate the impacts of climate change, but we can still change on our own before our consequences force us to.
And that’s why our greatest challenge is not to get to the stars, but to change human nature so we can stay there without killing each other.
The soft skills and diplomacy necessary to live in our day to day society will become imperative for everyone to have if we ever plan on a mass migration.
These are things we have to actively work to develop and cultivate, not leave to chance and luck as we prepare to head for the first time.
We cannot afford to repeat the same mistakes we made during globalization if we truly need to leave the Earth we ruined to survive.
We are unique in our ability to adapt and persist in almost extreme circumstances. Humans are the closest thing to shapeshifters we know. Everyone we know is in a constant state of perpetual change, growth, and exploration.
As such — if someone can change, I believe that people can always change for the better. Humanity included.
If we truly want to leave the Earth as a unit, we don’t have any other choice but change. We cannot figure out a scientific equation for how to stomp out intolerance. We will not be suddenly able to avoid war when we go to a new planet.
These are lessons that we have learned time and time again, at great cost of human life. But these are lessons that we never seem to learn from when we face the next obstacle.
Our issue will not be our rockets, but the people who will board them to go to a new world. And the true people who will make humans interplanetary in a way that matters are those who ensure that we don’t repeat our ancestors’ path of destruction.
