If you read the leading scientists and authors such as Stephen Hawking, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Kip Thorne and others, you’d realise that space travel is not just a fancy phrase but also a survival strategy for the human family. The Earth is the only spaceship carrying the human race in the wilderness of the black space. An incoming meteor, climate change or a nuclear war could end the entire life on earth and with it the entire humanity in an instant. This would be the sixth and perhaps the last extinction because whatever life might emerge after that may not be the life as we know it.
The Earth’s human population is at a whopping 8 billion. The world’s resources are very soon not going to be enough to feed everyone. Biodiversity is dwindling. The oceans are drying because of taking in the excessive heat created by fossil fuel driven climate change. We kill more than a 100 million sharks per year. The sharks have been on this planet before the trees and we might witness their extinction. That’s how lethal we are.
In a nutshell, it cannot be business as usual in our quest for keeping the human race alive. Just as the US and its allies pre-emptively went to other countries in their search for hunting terrorists, the Earthlings must go out in the space and find another planet in the goldilocks zone, which can host life as we know it, before the end of humanity. When did Noah build the ark? Before the rain.
After President Kennedy’s moon landing ambitions, the United States and the world in general lost interest in making forays into space. The selfish politicians made self-serving arguments that we have more problems on Earth that we should be solving, which lacked the vision that Earth’s problems could be solved by finding another Earth. NASA’s budget went from 0.3 per cent of the US GDP in 1970 to 0.1 in 2017. The scientific community and some concerned activists continued to make the arguments in support of space travel. Imagine if Christopher Columbus had not discovered what we now know as the USA. It is not just about human curiosity but also the benefits that come with such adventures.
After decades of lackluster work, it took mainly one entrepreneur to rejuvenate the space travel interest. Elon Musk started SpaceX with the mission to send humans into space, specifically Mars. Some of us may not realise but Musk is an African. In the distant past about 200,000-300,000 years ago, it was the Africans that dared to travel beyond their land and find the Neanderthals in present day Europe, giving rise to more human species. Musk is an immigrant too. Jezz Bezos, the Amazon founder has his space travel company called Blue Origin. His father was an immigrant.
Everytime I see that group of astronauts in movies or the real ones, the group always has Americans, Europeans, Russians, at least one Indian, and now we see some Arabs too. The diversity among the astronauts is a good idea and would capture human imagination, which is fuel for keeping the public interest alive in the space program. However, the people who will make a difference in actually moving humanity to another world out in space most likely would be the immigrants in America.
The need to go out to a different place because life here is becoming harder and harder to live, a place which you have only heard about and seen pictures of and where you must go in order to improve the lives of the people you care about back home. Once you’ve found that home, you must also then work hard to bring your loved ones to that nice and safe place where you have found a better life. If these are not the traits needed for the brave space immigrants, if you will, then I don’t know what are.
Published in The Express Tribune, November 6th, 2022.
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