The big one’s coming. If we don’t want to go the way of the dinosaur, it’s time to colonize the moon | Opinion
The commander of a multi-generational intergalactic spaceship in “Encounter With Tiber,” the epic novel by Buzz Aldrin and John Barnes, justifies the mission to her crew this way:
“There’s not a place in the universe that’s safe forever,” Osepok tells them. “The universe is telling us, ‘Spread out or wait around and die.’ ”
Consider the current imperative for us to social distance fair warning.
Astronomers and scientists around the world who have studied this solar system and beyond have seen damage to every solid body they scrutinized and know that the universe is as abidingly dangerous as it is beautiful, as Galileo observed when, in 1610, he trained that primitive telescope on the moon and saw impact craters.
Stephen W. Hawking, the brilliant British theoretical physicist, gave the home planet just 200 years before it succumbs to any of several deadly maladies including warming, overpopulation, nuclear war and a worldwide coup d’etat by artificial intelligence (as was vividly depicted in “2001: A Space Odyssey” when HAL 9000, the master computer, revolted against its human masters and tried to take control of their spaceship).
Solar-system exploration has borne out what astronomers have seen. Voyager 2, the first interplanetary spacecraft to scrutinize the four major planets beyond Mars on its aptly named 12-year Grand Tour, sent imagery home that not only provided scientists with a virtual library of information on the planets, but that, like its Pioneer 10 and 11 predecessors, showed the Jovian moons to be heavily cratered by impacts made by very large rocks moving at terrific speed.
Indeed, impacts that have left about 170 known craters on Earth, some of them huge like the Vredefort in South Africa, which is almost 120 miles in diameter. An impact off of Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula, which created a crater 112 miles in circumference and caused damage — some of it horrendous — sent so much debris into the atmosphere that it blocked sunlight. This killed off vegetation that, in turn, did in Brontosaurus, Tyrannosaurus rex, the Pterodactyls and other dinosaurs.
Gene Shoemaker, a planetary geologist, has said that the next time a really big asteroid or comet crashes into Earth could cause an explosion equivalent to all the world’s nuclear weapons going off at the same time. It could cause mass extermination.
Ask any dinosaur what that’s like.
It is therefore imperative that we adopt a dual strategy for survival: start an active planetary defense system that can spot potential impactors close-in and divert or destroy them; and establish colonies on other worlds, starting with the moon to spread out rather than die.
The astronomer Johannes Kepler foresaw that requirement and predicted in a letter to Galileo that humankind would eventually take to space:
“Provide ship or sails adapted to the heavenly breezes, and there will be some who will not fear even that void [of space] . . . So, for those who will come shortly to attempt this journey, let us establish the astronomy: Galileo, you of Jupiter, I of the moon.”
The notoriously competitive President John F. Kennedy responded to Sputnik and the Soviet space program by declaring in September 1962 that Americans would cross the “new sea” and alight on the moon before the end of that decade. An unprecedented scientific and industrial effort realized that goal. Apollo 11 finally rode the heavenly breezes across the new sea to the Moon and landed on it Aldrin and Neil Armstrong on July 20, 1969.
It was followed by five other landings, the last one in December 1972. By then, an awed world had mostly become indifferent to these feats, and NASA ended the program. The warning to those in Vaudeville to never follow a dog act became a fact of life for the space agency. Lunar missions after Apollo 11 and 12 — the dog acts — could not arouse broad public interest, nor could the International Space Station, which was supposed to lead to a return to the moon and the opening of space beyond it. The space agency was becalmed on the new sea — and still is, since the ISS is effectively irrelevant.
It is therefore time to reinvigorate the space program — on an international basis with the Cold War long over — that will finally bring diverse Earthlings together in a fundamentally vital endeavor and ensure their survival, cultural and economic growth, and spiritual ascendance. We should be sending successive international crews to the moon to establish a base that would grow into the self-contained colony that Arthur C. Clarke envisioned in “The Exploration of Space,” which was published six years before Sputnik 1 started the first Space Age. That would be followed by the exploration and settlement of Mars.
Space colonization would fundamentally and profoundly change our relationship with each other. While nationalism would continue, all peoples on this planet would begin to see themselves in a common denominator as united Earthlings — a unique and gifted species with unlimited potential — who share a common heritage, world and destiny that make borders far less important than membership in a world family. The United Nations would be replaced by The United People.
The members of the human race would understand that they are primarily, most fundamentally, Earthlings. And as such, they would protect and nurture their home planet together. That could make Osepok decide to come home.
William E. Burrows, a veteran journalist, is the author of “The New Ocean,” “The Asteroid Threat” and “The Survival Imperative,” among other titles.
This story was originally published December 14, 2020 at 4:12 PM.