This is the third of four installments. The first was “Are We Alone in the Universe,” where the conclusion was, it seems so. The second installment was about the space explorers of 50 years ago and the irony of looking outward towards space caused them invariably to focus back on the tiny blue marble that held everything important. The focus shifted from looking outward to looking back to home, planet Earth. Which brings us to…
The Lunacy of Space Exploration
I use the term Lunacy knowing the irony. After all, lunacy has the same root word as Lunar. Originally, lunacy was madness brought on by the Moon.
We seem to have a new lunacy brought on by the Moon and space exploration in general. If seems many billionaires have founded companies devoted to space exploration. Four come to mind:
Stratolaunch– owned by the late Paul Allen.
Blue Origin—started by Seattle’s latest richest man in the world, Jeff Bezos.
SpaceX—the brainchild of everybody’s favorite egomaniac, Elon Musk.
Virgin Galactic–from Sir Richard Branson
I’m in the same generation as most of these guys, excepting Musk. I’m certainly not in the same income stratum and I’m not as smart as any of them. I can understand the excitement they remember from space exploration in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. They now are trying to privatize space exploration.
Take a look at the website for Bezos’s Blue Origin where they describe their Vision:
Blue Origin believes in a future where millions of people are living and working in space. Why? Because we believe that in order to preserve Earth, our home, for our grandchildren’s grandchildren, we must go to space to tap its unlimited resources and energy. If we can lower the cost of access to space with reusable launch vehicles, we can enable this dynamic future for humanity. It’s a hopeful vision.
I’ll say. Spending billions to just escape the Earth’s gravity to pursue a business model based on resource exploitation? I don’t think so.
I see the value of global satellites for communication and navigation. And I think space tourism would be cool, albeit expensive. I’d love to go. And there is certain benefit from the development of new technologies.
But traveling to the Moon showed us that there is nothing there for humans. Colonizing Mars—preposterous! The distance, cost, energy and the toll on human bodies will never be practical, in my humble opinion. And if it was possible, what is there on Mars of use to us? Good science yes, but at what cost? I know NASA is working on a mission to Mars but I’m skeptical it can be done.
Space exploration is useful when it is related to Earth orbit or Earth-focused. But everything else in our solar system is nothing but barren rocks with nothing to recommend it. It is all cold, dark and foreboding. Scientifically interesting but there is no future for mankind on the Moon or Mars.
The idea of finding another planet to escape to after we trash this one? Everything is so distant that we would need to find a way to turn ourselves into pure energy and then figure out how to travel faster than the speed of light. It ain’t gonna happen.
Plus, the Earth’s biosphere has evolved over billions of years and we have coevolved with that biosystem for a small fraction of that history. We are part of the living Earth and would not fit into another environment.
We have only one home.
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