I was glued to my MacBook the night of August fifth. Watching the live stream of the NASA’s latest and greatest rover landing on the Red Planet. The signal that Curiosity had touched down on Mars was received at NASA 10:32pm August 5 PDT.
And she announced via Twitter: “I’m safely on the surface of Mars. GALE CRATER I AM IN YOU!!!”
As much as I hate to admit it, this social-media/PR approach with the speak of a 20-something hipster pulled out of a cafe’ in Portland (no offense to Portlanders, I was wrestling with NYC or Seattle as well) works, it’s reflective of the current wired, social-media-ized society, and it’s gotten them over a million followers. It’s all in good fun to rack up attention and followers in hopes of increasing NASA’s budget I’m sure.
I can’t help but thinking of what comes next.
It took less than 30 years (1903-1927) to go from the Wright Brothers to scheduled commercial airline flights on Pan Am. Now that we have computers to model designs of rockets, and vastly improved communications technology, etc., it should be a short period of time before the average person can afford to go into space. How short, we don’t know yet.
In the future, people will be going up every day. More people will live beyond the Earth than live on it. Eventually Mars will be terraformed and have breathable air (albeit possibly at a lower pressure than sea level on Earth) and oceans, and various moons of the gas giants will be the same way, and people will live on planets orbiting other stars as well! I think even a hundred years in the future you will already be able to buy a relatively cheap ticket into orbit (less than 2000 USD let’s say).
Aside from the obvious, there aren’t any resources out there that we can’t get here, trying to find freedom and innovation in space is a considerably more difficult task when you need a major corporation or national government’s resources just to survive getting there, never mind trying to live for any length of time. It isn’t a matter of walking west with a pack and an axe, and it never will be.
Generally the rule of thumb is that people overestimate what can be done in the short term, but VASTLY underestimate what can be accomplished in the long term. So the longer into the future you look, the more certain it is that we will have accomplished a Star Trek/Star Wars type future. Minus the FTL, transporters, and magic gravity floors…unless that turns out to be possible with real life science.
Still, despite being in the midst of global financial collapse, in an era of perpetual war at a time when we are facing imminent, permanent energy shortages…it is difficult to believe that one day we are going to become a space faring race.
Perpetual war is nothing new. There are solutions with existing tech to our energy needs. Renewable solutions. Things are cyclic, but historically, things keep trending upward in terms of the standard of living that people have and human rights keep advancing too. That doesn’t mean things don’t get worse for periods of time, but they do get better overall. Do you think people were optimistic about the future when WWII was happening and Nazi occupation of much of Europe was in full swing? But we got through that and came out on the other side with a better world. The same will happen with the challenges our species faces today.
The more rovers we send to Mars, the more our appetite gets whetted to actually go there ourselves.
And…If I were sent to Mars on a one way trip, I’d be a happy tweeting little rover too. On my final day, I’d crack open the local brew I brought with me, chug it raw-dog, and tweet back, “I’m dying in a place far better than any of you piss ants are….SWAG!’
-Dagobot