The end is inevitable. One day he will definitely come. A warming planet, ocean acidification, impending mass extinction and tremendous resource depletion await us. You don't have to go far to realize that humanity has reached its peak and is preparing for shocks. But by taking such an apocalyptic point of view, we are missing something important. There is a way in the midst of despair. Between Scylla and Charybdis, a completely different future awaits us. And to find it, you just need to look up. This future is the solar system, and if we do everything right, we have something to strive for.
Interplanetary species: humanity
Climate change is just one aspect of a much broader planetary transformation. Ten thousand years ago, when the last glaciers of the Pleistocene epoch melted, our planet entered the geological epoch of the Holocene. Air, water, rocks and life were stable, mostly warm and humid (with a little ice). Now human activity is leading the Earth out of the Holocene into a new epoch of the Anthropocene, because it is humanity that now determines how the systems of the planet function.
The approaching Anthropocene is often depicted as a battle between one kind of politician over another: Republicans versus Democrats, or business interests versus environmentalists. But this opinion is wrong.
Over the past 50 years, humans have explored the solar system and all of its worlds. The insights we gained from these travels show us that the Anthropocene was a predictable transition. This change is inevitable when a species creates a civilization as energy-intensive as ours. From an astronomical point of view, the Anthropocene represents in some way planetary adolescence. You cannot prevent children from becoming teenagers. You can only hope that they will come over to this side with maturity, wisdom, and compassion. Likewise, in order to survive in the face of climate change, we need to develop into a new turn of relations, mutual support and cooperation with the rest of the biosphere and the planet as a whole.
It is believed that this is already happening
Promotional video:
This year marks 50 years since Neil Armstrong's first step on the moon. Five decades after this grandiose journey, there are signals that we are ready to conquer a higher frontier. Rocket billionaires and asteroid exploration robots are plotting a new scenario for the future. The next few hundred years shouldn't necessarily lead to exhaustion and death. Instead, they can become a great drama played out on many stages in many new worlds.
Until the early 21st century, it was generally accepted that NASA was stuck. Rather than sending astronauts on daring missions outside our planet, the space agency has become hostage to the whims of subsequent administrations that have left it without funding or choice. By the end of the space shuttle program in 2011, NASA was already sending its astronauts on Russian rockets.
Then the movement of the "new space" appeared. Private entrepreneurs have jumped into the exosphere and set a course for the future of space travel.
The movement has been spearheaded for the most part by Elon Musk and his SpaceX, a new generation of money-driven entrepreneurs who have set themselves the task of cutting the cost of getting materials and people into orbit. Together, SpaceX, Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin, among others, have developed working versions of their spaceships. Richard Branson has focused on space tourism, while Jeff Bezos and Musk are developing new classes of reusable rockets for space exploration and commerce.
But Musk, Bezos, and Branson are just the beginning. A small army of new companies enter the space venture. Today, this global space economy is already valued at $ 350 billion and is estimated to reach $ 1 trillion by 2040. Space companies received $ 3.9 billion in private investment last year alone.
But the era of the new space is more than just rockets. Companies such as Planet Labs and Spire Global are looking for ways to offer continuous space-based monitoring of the planet's agricultural, environmental and industrial health. Space manufacturing represents another frontier: companies like Made in Space are already exploring methods for 3D printing in zero gravity.
However, most of these efforts remain Earth-bound. If the long-term future of humanity is to be interplanetary, what will tear us off Earth?
Our growing understanding of the wealth of other worlds in the solar system provides much of the motivation. Despite the fact that since the days of Armstrong, no man has been outside the moon, our robot emissaries have proven fruitful travelers.
To date, our space probes have visited all the planets of the solar system. More than 20 missions have visited Venus. Mars keeps track of the tires of four different rovers. And we have visited not only the planets. Our space robots went to all kinds of bodies in the solar system: asteroids, comets, dwarf planets. We learned from these missions that the solar system is much more interesting than even the scientists of the Apollo era assumed. Most importantly, our research has shown us that the solar system is very, very humid.
Beneath the frozen surface of Jupiter's moon Europa lies an ocean 90 kilometers deep, which contains more water than our Earth. Many of the larger moons of Jupiter and Saturn have underground oceans. And although Mars is now a dry desert, scientists have strong evidence that it was once a blue world with huge lakes or oceans, on the surface of which streams flowed. At least some of the water remains on the Red Planet as ice at the poles and below the surface. Just last year, we learned that Mars has a liquid subsurface lake more than fifteen kilometers in diameter.
Water is needed not only to sustain human life and grow food, but also to produce rocket fuel. Finding a wet solar system means raw materials will help create a long-term human presence among the planets. Even a small asteroid orbiting the Sun can hold up to $ 50 billion in rare metals such as platinum. Therefore, interest in researching technologies that can form the basis of powerful space economies remains high.
However, none of the studies of our solar system have revealed a single world that is similar to suitable for humans. There is still no place in the solar system, apart from Earth, where you can walk without a spacesuit.
However, our research has shown that with the right imagination and technology, we could succeed in creating new territories for human settlement, trade, and culture. This is a project that will no doubt take several generations. Building human civilization beyond Earth will require more than machines. To thrive in a built environment, we need to figure out what the environment is in the first place. The giant domed cities on Mars that inhabit the imaginations of science fiction writers and Elon Musk need their own ecosystems. There will be plants. There will be germs. There will be soils and atmospheres. How will life, air, water, and rocks work together to maintain stable conditions?
To survive the Anthropocene, we must ask the same questions. Becoming an interplanetary species will require the same sensitivity to ecosystems that would-be climate scientists who save the Earth will have. In other words, figuring out how to do it in space could be a turning point in helping us understand how to do it on Earth.
What will the next 1000 years hold for humanity? We are used to imagining that we are going to the stars in ships with warp drives. But if you take the laws of physics seriously, the limiting speed of light and the vast distances between stars could make an interstellar civilization unlikely. Even with the most advanced technology we have today, it will still take at least 100 years to reach the stars. Unless a scientific miracle occurs, the next 1000 years are unlikely to mean the creation of an interstellar human empire.
But the development of the solar system can take only a few months, even with our current technology. Jupiter, for example, is very close. If we can cope with climate change and transform the Anthropocene, the solar system will be where the drama of the next millennium of human culture unfolds. All planets, moons, asteroids and comets will be our outposts.
Ilya Khel