All Terrain Thinking

A Compendium of things I think are Important

Perspectives We Need to Take Seriously

Dr. Doom, On Space Travel

From the beginnings of human history, we have been steadily moving Into previously unoccupied territories, conquering and taming them as we go. In the olden days, the adage was "Go west, young man, go west." This worked until we finally ran out of wilderness when west met east. Western Australia is as far west as you can go now. West- wards from WA is the East. And so, we have encircled and conquered the entirety of planet Earth.

Over 30 years ago, late in 1972, TIME magazine published an article suggesting that a manned space flight to Mars might be possible. I went on record with a letter to the editor, published on January 1st 1973, as follows:

"Sir / Instead of six sex-starved men, let's send up three mated pairs (women astronauts are long overdue), people with a real pioneering spirit, and populate Mars.

One hopes that Martian-born humans will benefit from our lessons on earth and take better care of their planet!

ERIC PIANKA
Austin, Texas"

Science fiction has played a prominent role in our lives and many are convinced that humans will ultimately leave Earth and travel throughout the Cosmos. Shows like Star Trek encourage this fantasy, but few people have given enough thought to how totally dependent we are on other life forms, let alone how tied to Earth we actually are. First, and foremost, we are, and will always be, Earthlings. For humans to exist for long periods in outer space will require complex life support systems well beyond those currently available. In addition to controlling things like temperature, gravity, and gases, we must eat, and food cannot be created in magical replicator boxes as depicted on TV. Rather, we will have to find means of growing food on space ships. This will require much more space than anticipated, probably more than is possible. Attempts at constructing self-contained biospheres here on Earth have been limited but so far all have failed.

If we can, we ought to get to Mars while we still can. Some brave Pioneering souls should go out on a one-way spaceship to Mars. They will have to build themselves a greenhouse to grow their own food and hold in and recycle oxygen and water and figure out how to survive in a hundred degrees below zero, whatever it takes. We should take the Library of Congress up with us on DVDs so that when humans wink out in this little sphere, there will be a record of what happened here on Earth somewhere else.

On that new planet, a book little kids read in kindergarten will be "The Rape of Earth," its lesson will be let's treat our new planet better. But, based on past experience, it does not look as if humans learn from mistakes.

Certainly, conquest of space and getting humans and human knowledge off Earth is desirable and something we should strive to accomplish before we destroy this planet and everything on it. A great deal of energy is required to break free of the gravitational bonds of Earth, so very few of us will be among the chosen few allowed to escape its bonds.

Although, in the early 1970's, I suggested mated pairs of brave pioneering colonists, it now seems more prudent to send only young females out to colonize space, well supplied with banks of frozen sperm from highly qualified males, so that genetic variability could be maintained in the long term. Even though males and their y-chromosomes wouldn't be among the first chosen to leave Earth, they would nevertheless be born off planet and thus represented in future generations. Imagine, men who have never seen or lived on Earth!

If and when humans finally do depart from Earth, almost all of our descendants will remain stuck here crowded together deadlocked in a hopeless stalemate, competing for what (if any) limited resources remain.

In this stalemate, those of us who do care about Earth, by living an ecologically sensible low impact life, in fact, are merely allowing those who don't care to continue raping the planet. Unfortunately, even if you do all you can to minimize your own footprint on Earth, many others will not. Cleaning up the trash along highways merely makes things seem better and fosters litterbugs.

Educated people tend to have fewer children than uneducated people. Garret Hardin pointed this out, and said those who don't have any conscience about the Earth are going to inherit the planet, because those who don't care are leaving more progeny than those who do care and make fewer babies. And so human conscience is on its way out -- if we persist on our present course, we are going to evolve into uncaring humanoids. That's probably already happening and IQs are falling for the same reasons, too [Herrnstein, The Atlantic, May 1989 v263 n5 p72(7)].

Humans could be Gods, real stewards of this planet, but the disparity between what we could be and the pitiful creatures we actually are is the real tragedy. If only more people would try to live up to their full potential.

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