Space Investment

Humans have always been invested in space. Well, if not invested, then generally interested. We’ve always been obsessed with just trying to get higher.

The Space Race lasted almost twenty years, as the US and the Soviet Union kept launching animal after animal and person after person into space. Before that, men were constantly trying to come up with more ideas and inventions that could make humans fly until the Wright brothers finally figured it out. If we go even further back, you may remember that myth about the Tower of Babel, a massive structure built in an attempt to reach heaven.

Anyway, now that we’ve reached the moon and begun to send drones and ships to other planets, humanity has begun to ask itself a very important question: Now what? We’ve broken through the atmosphere, flung ourselves into the void of space, and have even started reaching for the other planets. Now what do we do?

Luckily for us, that question is no longer just for sci-fi writers or science journalists. It’s becoming more and more plausible that humans will be able to live in a place like Mars. So now we have a new question: Should humans install settlements on other planets?

Well, logic says that we absolutely should. For one, humans have mostly trashed our planet via climate change. Everything is on fire, we’re causing extinction after extinction, the oceans are being bombarded by oil spills, and the other slew of problems we’re bringing to our fragile world. It only makes sense that we move somewhere else, and if we start now, we’ll be getting a head start.

You could argue that this would be morally wrong, but humans have demonstrated time and time again to have pretty much no complete moral compass. I don’t need to bring up any examples for that one. Besides, it’s like that old rule of nature: Survival of the fittest. If “fittest” in this situation is being able to build spacecraft and escaping your past mistakes, then so be it. We don’t even need to completely abandon Earth. We can continue technological advancements on Earth while being on Mars or on the Moon.

Also, trying to get a settlement on a non-Earth planet might be a pretty good long term investment for the sake of the general population. Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell, an organization that produces educational science videos, predicts that the human population is currently on a decline, but finds that it will spike back up again. If we figure out extraterrestrial settlements right now, we could have more time to solve overpopulation, because we’ll have much more space to work with.

So yes, it’s probably a good idea to look into setting up some kind of space-settlement plan now. We’ll get a head start on things, and if it works, it works! If it doesn’t, we’ll have to find another solution.

Nonetheless, humans should probably move on from being invested with space to investing in space.