Yesterday marked 50 years of the space-age, half a century since Sputnik became the first human object to be put in orbit around the Earth. What I want to know is where are our day-trips to the Moon? What happened to getting to work by jetpack, or boldly going where no-one has gone before?
It all seemed to go so well: just twelve years from the first satellite to man on the moon. But things seem to have quietened down by now, with the moon programme abandoned, and space no longer having the same excitement and glamour as in the heady days of the space race.
Part of the reason is the end of the Cold War reduced the need for competition between Russia and America. Also, it’s now far more efficient to send a computer to explore our solar system than it is to send humans. Progress has continued, though without the glamour of manned missions.
But now America and Russia are looking to revive their space programmes, with hopes of putting man on Mars within the next couple of decades. China also looks set to get in on the act, and private enterprise could become an increasingly important force in space exploration as the twenty-first century continues.
Is it worth the bother? Well, given the mess that humans have made of planet Earth, we may well be forced to look beyond the circle of our own planet for resources, space and maybe even just plain survival. For the first time in history, we are approaching the point where we may actually be able to do something to avert the possibility of catastophic asteroid impacts, to protect against natural disasters from space.
In the short term, however, there aren’t necessarily any immediately useful benefits. But to be human is to go beyond just the immediately useful. If this weren’t the case, we’d probably still only be hunter-gatherers; very good hunter-gatherers after however many thousands of years of human history, but still doing fundamentally the same thing. The driving force of civilization has been men and women saying words to the effect of “wouldn’t it be cool if…”, to make that leap from not just making the status quo work more smoothly, but into a whole new way of doing things.
On the other hand, according to some estimates, eliminating extreme poverty would cost $60 billion. This might seem a lot of money, but if you consider the billions of dollars a space programme to put man on Mars (which would be an amazing step for humanity, admittedly), or the billions of dollars spent on “defence” by Western governments, then it begins to seem a bit more bargainous.
Why can’t we try and do the two things at the same time? Rather than choosing between sorting our present situation or taking human achievement to new heights, can’t we balance the two?