We gotta get out of this place (Earth, that is)

by Brian Mann on January 4th, 2014

So let’s start with the good news. As 2014 dawns, the earth has emerged as an increasingly global society. We’re not quite the United Earth government envisioned in Star Trek, and may never be.

But the internet and increasingly rapid transit along with the steady globalization of commerce and the rapid acceleration of technological discovery have created a relatively prosperous, integrated planetary human ecology of roughly 7.1 billion people.

War is already on the wane, prosperity is increasing rapidly, medical science is pushing back frontiers, and democracy is spreading at a rate that no one would have envisioned in the last century.

We have tamed many of the demons of our past, from rampant hunger to Medieval ignorance. This is a moment when we humans have the luxury, the opportunity, of thinking big about where we go next.

Now let’s pivot to the bad news — and it’s very bad news indeed. Despite our successes and our rapidly advancing technological prowess, our entire species remains cloistered on one exceptionally fragile chunk of rock.

There are a very large number of precious eggs sitting in one astonishingly unstable, precarious basket.

That may seem an extreme and ungrateful way to describe Mother Earth. After all, this is the birthplace, the cradle, the evolutionary hothouse that literally made us what we are. We owe everything to this chunk of gassy, fertile, spinning island.

Its magnetic fields, layers of cocooning chemicals, and salad bowl of edibles are a perfect fit for us, a relationship that has evolved over millions of years.

But here’s the dirty little secret about our home world. She is a murderous orb not a loving one.

Scientists have identified at least five different moments in the planet’s bloody, fiery history when plants and creatures — including many of the most dominant organisms — faced tidal waves of death.

In the Permian period, roughly 96% of all living things on earth were wiped out in a relatively short period known to researchers as the Great Dying. These regular tsunamis of death have been accompanies by smaller, more frequent tides of destruction, some caused by our own ancient ancestors.

The new global ecology of human society that has emerged over the last century is frighteningly vulnerable to this sort of mass-destruction event.

The spread of a single aggressive pandemic, the eruption of a super volcano like the one under Yellowstone, the impact of a large meteor, a rapid tipping-point event in human-caused climate change, nuclear or biological conflict, environmental disaster in the earth’s oceans — the list of threat factors is long.

Some catastrophic events wouldn’t wipe us out as a species, but they could very easily unravel the complex, highly-advanced society that we have cultivated. Look how long it took us to sort out the single city of New Orleans after Katrina. A global event of that magnitude might set us back decades or centuries.

It’s worth pointing out that the most dangerous of these threats aren’t human-caused and there’s probably not much we can do to prevent them.

A meteor-like object large enough to cause a mass-extinction event on earth — or even simply a societally devastating event — is probably too massive and moving at too rapid a rate for us to destroy or divert.

And if the caldera under Yellowstone decides to erupt next year or next century, there’s nothing FEMA can do but wish people luck. It’s Morgan Freeman time. (Corrected. I suggested earlier that the caldera existed under Yosemite.)

I think there’s also a strong argument to be made that humans are essentially explorers. It’s wired somehow into our DNA to want to be on the move, looking over the next hill, establishing a foothold in the next valley.

The reason, one might suppose, is the powerful evolutionary advantage of spreading out, of not choosing to sit isolated in one place where your entire race is vulnerable. The race that spreads itself out is the race that survives and thrives.

Space, meanwhile, poses immense technical challenges, but its scope and resources are essentially infinite. If we can make this leap, emerging as a space-faring species, we will have opened a door into a permanent, unfence-able frontier.

So what do we do to take that first step? How do we prepare? The simple answer is that we begin moving as rapidly and aggressively as possible to go elsewhere. For decades, space travel has been cursed and crippled by the question of practicalities.

The conversation goes something like this: “Sure we could go to other worlds, we have the technology, but why should we? What do they have that we don’t have here in the home nest? And why should we spend all those resources sending people Up There when we could be addressing things like hunger and homelessness Down Here?”

The answer, we now know, is that we would be investing — first and foremost — in the long-term viability of humanity. More accurately, we would be investing in the long-term viability of a highly-advanced, aspirational human society.

Even a generation ago, this idea would have fallen firmly in the realm of science fiction. We lacked the resources and the technology to realistically consider the development of long-term self-sustaining colonies on places like Mars or in orbital structures.

We’re now at a very different place. And while a permanent settlement off-world is unlikely in our lifetimes, this is the moment when we lay the groundwork. We continue to expand and invest in the space station now orbiting above our heads. We move toward a manned expedition to Mars.

We continue to develop the technology that would allow things like large-scale sub-surface settlements in the polar region of Mars, where water (in frozen form) and other resources are abundant.

But even before we invest the next dollar in building our space capability, we have to make one other step — a cognitive one. We need to permanently flip the conversation.

We have to make it clear that the conservative, practical vision for our future involves a commitment to space. That’s the common sense dream, the smart-money bet. Meanwhile, only a wild-eyed gambler or someone who accepts that we humans lack a long-term future would turn their back on the heavens.