Better luck next planet?

In the run-up to the inauguration, there’s no shortage of significant developments, yet the most exciting news today seems to me Jeff Bezos’ successful launch of his New Glenn rocket into orbit. Not that I care about Bezos. What I care about is the competition between him and Elon Musk, or what the media calls the commercial space race. Commercial or not, we need to conquer space and maybe get a chance to establish not only a human presence in the galaxy at large, but also a better society.
Stephen Hawking famously warned that we need to find ourselves a new home within 100 years and he was probably referring to the high chance of us destroying this planet that we have. That is always a possibility given our track record, but even if we are lucky enough not to mess up Earth we still need to reinvent ourselves. Hopefully somewhere else.

Source: Blueorigin

Many say conquering space would solve the overpopulation issue or the problem of us exhausting our natural resources. There’s also the problem of us failing to establish a decent human civilization. We’ve had thousands of years to work it out, but we didn’t come up with a society that is fair, where people don’t starve to death or get blown to pieces in some stupid war. We’ve tried various political isms, but none really works. Democracy is a joke, capitalism is only marginally better than communism, not to mention the endless types of dictatorships that have come and gone.

Source: Unsplash

Space is our best bet at this point. I cannot say I believe Musk or Bezos are visionaries animated by the best ideas for humanity’s future. Maybe they are, but it’s safe to say that anyone investing huge sums of money in the space race has significant returns in mind. Just imagine harvesting resources on far away asteroids. And yet, once they come up with safe space travel technology, it’s just a matter of time before it becomes available to the rest of us. Not tomorrow or next year, but maybe our children or grandchildren will be able to board a rocket just as easily as we can now get on a plane to London.
Most of the attention is focused on what the Americans are doing, but obviously they are not alone in the space race. Fear of American dominance in space will prompt other nations to come up with their own rocket design.

The sky is no longer the limit

Famed Jungian analyst Marie Louise von Franz once said that our modern culture’s appetite for science-fiction means that, on an unconscious level, we have given up on Earth. Deep down we know we cannot survive here. We need to find other homes and give it another try. I am one of those people who reads almost exclusively fantasy and sci-fi. The other day I tried an apparently good book which lost me at the first pages. Do I care about some guys living in New York? Nope. I’d rather immerse myself in another Universe.
I will never reach the stars, but it’s fun to imagine how human civilization will evolve when people are free to take their chances elsewhere, without the ever-present fight for resources that has fueled most wars on Earth. Can we escape our own greediness? Not really. Not easily. We can assume that given time our space-faring descendants will engage in fierce battles over some rare mineral as yet unknown to us. But, if we do it right some humans might be able to escape and create a decent society for themselves.

Source: Pixabay

I think it’s in the Foundation series that Asimov imagines a planet with only a handful of inhabitants, each living on a huge domain with robots taking care of all their needs. It was sad as human interaction was almost non-existent, but there were also no wars, no injustice, and no famine. As it is, social media is for many the most significant type of interaction they have. I expect you’d still be able to post on Hive even if you lived in the farthest end of the galaxy. Not bad, if you think of it. Or how does a Hivesfest on Epsilon Eridani b sound? A mere 10.5 light years from Earth.
The coolest thing though would be us becoming the aliens visiting other planets, if, of course, we'd have evolved enough to be nice to others for a change.

Thanks for indulging my out-of-this-world ramblings