Do We Need to Find Another Planet?

I was reading the New Scientist magazine just recently and was drawn to a discussion of humankind’s role in space. The question was, “Do we belong there?” There was a quote by Sir Richard Branson that sparked my imagination. His take on the issue was if we wanted the human race to survive we’d need to embrace space, and not just that, we’d need to find another habitable planet. He said “If we do not have a place in space, then we have nothing to live for.”[1]

Branson then paraphrased famous British physicist, Stephen Hawking whose actual quote is:

“I don't think the human race will survive the next thousand years, unless we spread into space. There are too many accidents that can befall life on a single planet. But I’m an optimist. We will reach out to the stars.”[2]

I find it an amazing concept that one day we might have humankind on two planets, or at least in an environment within space. How we would live in comparative means to how we live on earth now is a tangible a bit hard to grasp at this stage. And it’s even too hard to predict how things might progress in these technological ways within fifty years, let alone twenty years from now, such is the rate of progress.

And how will the human race survive? How will ‘the good’ continue to triumph over ‘the evil?’ In the 1930s and 1940s we had Nazism as the great threat to humankind; roll forward to the 1980s and it was the Nuclear arms race (which continues to be a threat, albeit a sleeping giant); in the 1990s it was the AIDS/HIV epidemic, and whilst the Western world have it controlled, parts of the world’s population are still being wiped out to it. Now it’s the issue of Global Warming and climate change, but also terrorism--is this the most major threat?

Aren’t we threatened with making ourselves extinct? Or will we continue to successfully negotiate these issues that threaten our existence? Can you imagine living on a space station or on another planet? Well, that’s a possibility for our distant future descendents. Space appears to be our destiny, if we make it that far.

Copyright © 2008, S. J. Wickham. All Rights Reserved Worldwide.

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ENDNOTES:
[1] New Scientist, 8 September 2007, Volume 195, no. 2620, p. 53.
[2] Wikipedia, Available: http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Stephen_Hawking "Colonies in space may be only hope, says Hawking" by Roger Highfield in Daily Telegraph (16 October 2001).