Space Colonization Is A Dumb Thing To Focus On Right Now

 Space Colonization Is A Dumb Thing To Focus On Right Now

    What if I told you there was a planet capable of sustaining life, with lush skies, massive continents, and vast oceans to appreciate? You'd say "Earth," and I would say, "yea." There's always been this fetishization of space colonization, which while cool for science fiction, simply isn't where we should want our focus to be. Colonizing Mars, or the moon, would be a major league PITA and only serves to reinforce mankind's inherent need to conquer wherever and whenever.

    As a disclaimer, I won't claim to be a tree hugging hippy. I buy my meat products and drive my car around like most of everyone else. It's what our world is built around, and I wish it wasn't so. Hypocritical as my points may be as an individual, I still think space colonization is dumb. While science is great and all, there are times where it becomes science fiction.

    Firstly, space is MASSIVE. It is bigger than the human mind can even conceptualize. It took 35 years for Voyager 2, launched in 1977, to leave our solar system. Not our galaxy or the local group, just our tiny mole in an armpit of the Milky Way. This leads to the concept of faster-than-light space travel. Light in the grand scheme of things, is actually quite slow. It takes eight minutes for the light from the sun to reach Earth. Our sun doesn't even look that far away, and it isn't really that far away, but it is. When we look up in the night sky, we are seeing the universe as it was an inconceivably long time ago. As far as faster-than-light travel goes, we have concepts, and nothing more. Wormholes are a mainstay of the concept, bending time and space. Imagine a piece of paper representing the universe. Fold it and cut a hole in it, you just made a wormhole. Too bad we have no idea how to do that. In summary, space is inconceivably large and technologies to work around that are no more credible than magic. We are not gods.

    Actually colonizing a planet is a ton of work too. You've got an atmosphere, different gravity, is the planet volcanically active, does it have a magnetosphere? We'd have to survey so many planets before even trying to step foot on it. Mars is a barren wasteland. The Soviets tried to send a rover to Venus which lasted minutes before succumbing to the insane pressure and temperature. I've heard of supposed Earth like planets, which are again, ridiculously far away and basically exist in a different time period. There's also the Fermi Paradox, which can be summarized as "if we exist, and we're smart and can probably find a way off this rock, where is everyone else?" For some reason or another, we have no evidence to suggest intelligent alien life, other than anomalies in our atmosphere (which is a whole other can of worms). There's the aforementioned massive distance, there's the limitations in technology, maybe there's some kind of interstellar super predator that strikes down those dumb enough to dare leave their neighborhood. Or maybe, intelligent life ends up destroying itself through warfare, natural degradation of their surrounding environment, or by weakness enabled by miracle technologies. This brings me to my next point.

    Earth. It's all we have. And many of us have unwittingly participated in a society that is built upon the idea of infinite growth despite finite resources. It costs. Our ecosystem is facing a crisis not unlike the extinction event that wiped dinosaurs off the Earth 66 million years ago. We've got one planet, an ocean that has barely been explored, and who knows how many species we haven't discovered. And for some reason, there's this prolonging idea we'll get off the planet and secure our rightful place as the rulers of the universe. If we did, the process could just repeat again.

    For all I know, I'm completely wrong. There were people that never believed humans could achieve flight. If I told a peasant from Europe in the 1600s about cell phones and how I can have a face to face conversation with someone on a different continent, or if I told them we went to the moon, they'd probably tell me that's blasphemy. However, we saw birds and bugs fly. We found out at some point that the moon exists because of a collision with the Earth, and that proximity is possible. Yet it seems like such a jump for there to be interstellar space travel, or even making it to Mars. There are simply so many difficult variables at play that it is truly hard to imagine it ever working out. If society were to place a lot of emphasis on the research and development of advanced logistics and technologies to make such things possible, I'd hope it's after we solve the Holocene extinction crisis and figure out how to travel and get food without it adversely impacting the environment as much as it does. As I touched on before, there is so much we still don't know about Earth. How life began, what's going on in our oceans, how we can move past this sort of diminishing return of technological advancement. A cure for all the different cancers, improving equity in society, holding the powerful responsible for abhorrent actions they knowingly did.