Techno-optimism: space colonization

According to archeologists, Earth met with a major asteroid around 65 million years ago. That asteroid and the effects of its impact on our planet killed off the dinosaurs, the only descendants of these magnificent animals being the birds. The asteroid brought about an extensive winter due to the amount of material thrown into the atmosphere and changed the climate quite fundamentally for years on end. This caused such a disruption to the living conditions of the dinosaurs that they were unable to adapt rapidly enough and, over time, died out.

The risk of a major asteroid hitting Earth is very low, but the implications would be devastating. Even if humans are more intelligent and resilient than dinosaurs, we’ve built up a global supply chain that keeps our economy and our lives going. It doesn’t require much, as we learned during the COVID pandemic, to disrupt the system and cause shortages everywhere on the planet.

Of course, an asteroid big enough would eradicate all of us, and none of the above would matter anymore. Even though humanity has evolved over millions of years, starting from prehistoric mammals alive during the dinosaur age, and nothing has wiped us out yet, the chance of this happening isn’t zero. The answer to this conundrum is simple in concept but hard in execution: we have to get off this rock and become a space-faring species that has more places than Earth to call home.

As a science fiction fanboy, the idea of space has been close to my heart for many years. For most of my life, this idea was squarely in the realm of SF, something we could only dream of coming true at some point in the far, far future. Rockets were single-use, incredibly expensive and unreliable and generally built in response to government contracts by large, slow and inefficient companies in the defense-industrial complex.

During the last decade or so, though, something happened: small, nimble and commercially oriented companies started to build rockets that had the promise of lifting payloads into orbit at a fraction of the cost of these traditional companies. The leading player here is, of course, SpaceX, but there are others following the same playbook. The idea is to make the base booster reusable, meaning it needs to land after having lifted the payload into a low-level orbit and be prepared for a new launch soon after.

Not only that, SpaceX has announced that it wants to send rockets to Mars with the intent to start preparing for humans moving there and establishing a base. The idea that seemed far-fetched is suddenly becoming real: we may become an interplanetary species during my lifetime! What could possibly be more exciting than that? We have new frontiers to explore, with all the risks and rewards that come with it.

The benefits of low-cost lift into orbit aren’t just relevant for getting humans to the moon and Mars. There are very sensitive manufacturing processes that only work outside of a gravity well. We can lift solar panels into space that can generate electricity and send the power back to Earth’s service.

The most exciting application, in my view, is that it becomes possible to start mining resources outside of Earth and bring scarce minerals, metals and other materials from asteroids and planets back to our planet for use in our economy. The same resources could be used to build bases on the moon and Mars as well as for constructing space stations.

All of this may read as science fiction, but the point of this post is to convince you that the topics I raise are rapidly entering the realm of the possible. We can do these things or soon will be able to. Of course, the research and engineering challenges are enormous, but if there’s one thing that humans are good at, it’s to chip away at big challenges until we wrestle them to the ground. All we need is the will to do so.

If nothing else, I believe we have an ethical and moral obligation toward our children and the generations that come after us to ensure the survival of our species in any way possible. Having the possibility to make humanity interplanetary and not acting on it is, in my view, indefensible. There’s no doubt in my mind that we need to make this real!

One of the key existential risks of humanity, small but none-zero, is the fact that we all live on this one planet and, in that sense, have all our eggs in one basket. We need to get off this rock and spread ourselves throughout the solar system and beyond if only to avoid the extinction of humanity through low-probability events such as asteroids crashing into Earth. Thanks to the surprisingly rapid progress of private, commercial rocket companies, the cost of lifting payloads into orbit is a fraction of what it used to be even a decade or two ago. Thanks to companies like SpaceX as well as others, it’s highly likely humanity will become an interplanetary species during this century. All that’s required is for us to have the will and desire to make it real. To end with a quote from the famous science fiction author Isaac Asimov: “Today’s science fiction is tomorrow’s science fact.”