Our days on Earth are numbered. Great minds predict that humanity must resettle itself to other planets if it wants to avoid complete extinction due to some probable natural disasters. According to the same Stephen Hawking, this kind of catastrophe can happen to the Earth within the next 100 years, which leaves us not much time to prepare.
Will humanity be able to colonize space before the end of the world? The Port of Futurism decided to ask its readers for their opinion, and the answers were, as expected, quite divided. More than 70 percent of the people who took part in this survey believe that the first space colony will be built during the first half of the 21st century, with more than 36 percent of these respondents confident that this is the 2030s, and about 10 percent are confident that man will build the first space dwelling in the next decade.
One of these respondents is, for example, Satish Varma, a software engineer. In his opinion, we will be able to settle on another planet within the next decade or two. His response is driven by the level of pace at which spacecraft, artificial intelligence and bionics technologies are evolving, which will be the driving forces that will allow us to stay in space in the long term.
“There is a tremendous technological upswing in space exploration and AI development right now by companies such as SpaceX, Google, and Tesla,” Varma says.
Varma's observations are correct. Companies like SpaceX and Blue Origin have recently made some headway in developing reusable rockets that will definitely be the key to making space travel accessible. Google, in turn, is actively developing AI and recently noted the creation of an algorithm that can learn almost as quickly as we do, which makes this technology more practical for real-life use, for example, for controlling spacecraft.
What do the experts say?
The technological revolution prompted not only various companies, but also governments of different countries to seriously think about the idea of space colonization. The two most attractive targets for human occupation at the moment are Mars and the Moon. The latter, in turn, is receiving undeservedly little attention today, but, according to expert scientists, humanity will be able to build a colony there in just about 6 years and a little less than $ 10 billion. The Chinese and European space agencies are very closely considering the possibility of building a base on the moon, since in this case it would be possible to seriously reduce the cost of sending spacecraft to other planets in the solar system, including Mars.
Promotional video:
As for the Red Planet itself, the latest example is the statements of the government of the United Arab Emirates (UAE), which announced the desire to build a settlement on it by 2117. Other countries are likely to do so much earlier. For example, the US government has instructed the NASA aerospace agency to get a man to Mars by 2033. China has an even more ambitious goal over the next ten years.
However, the same SpaceX CEO Elon Musk hopes to prove how much more efficient a private space company can be compared to a government bureaucratic machine. His plans also include sending people to Mars by 2020, but this is far from the only goal of both Musk himself and his company. The businessman wants to make travel to the Red Planet quite an affordable undertaking, which is why he set the bar at $ 200,000 per ticket. Musk thus wants to really turn us into an interplanetary species rather than just organize a research expedition. This approach, in his opinion, will be critical for the future of the human race.
“History tells us that sooner or later, a great catastrophe will come. I think you will agree that by this time we better turn into an interplanetary species,”Musk said during last year's press conference.
“I want to make the trip to Mars really real. And I think that we have the opportunity to implement this plan within our generation."
It would be interesting to know the opinion of our readers. Indeed, humanity has reached the point where it is time for us to think about the possibility of resettlement to other planets, or is it all still science fiction, which will not be realized soon?
Nikolay Khizhnyak