Space and Human Survival, Part I

Until recently, the reason most commonly offered for believing our survival depends on space travel was that our species will need to move elsewhere in order to survive the ultimate death of our sun, or the possibility of our sun turning into a nova. (Scientists now believe that these specific scenarios won’t happen; but the sun will eventually become a red giant, which as far as Earth is concerned, is an equally disastrous one.) This is not of such remote concern as it may seem, as I’ll explain below. However, it surely is a remote event, billions of years in the future, and I don’t blame anyone for not giving it very high priority at present. It is far from being my main reason.

A more urgent cause for concern is the need not to “put all our eggs in one basket,” in case the worst happens and we blow up our own planet, or make it uninhabitable by means of nuclear disaster or perhaps biological warfare. We would all like to believe this won’t happen, yet some people are seriously afraid that it will—it’s hardly an irrational fear. Peace with Russia may have drawn attention from it, yet there are other potential troublemakers, even terrorists; the nuclear peril is not mere history. Furthermore, there is the small but all-too-real possibility that Earth might be struck by an asteroid. We all hope and believe our homes won’t burn down, and yet we buy fire insurance. Does not our species as a whole need an insurance policy?

Even Carl Sagan, a long-time opponent of using manned spacecraft where robots can serve, came out in support of space colonization near the end of his life, for this reason; see his book Pale Blue Dot. And in an interview with Britain’s newspaper Daily Telegraph, eminent cosmologist Stephen Hawking said, “I don’t think that 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.” Hawking is more worried about the possibility of our creating a virus that destroys us than about nuclear disaster. However, he said, “I’m an optimist. We will reach out to the stars.”

My novel The Far Side of Evil is based on the concept of a “Critical Stage” during which a species has the technology to expand into space, but hasn’t yet implemented it, and in which that same level of technology enables it to wipe itself out. The premise of the book is that each world will do one or the other, but not both. I have believed this since the early 50s, when there was real danger of nuclear war but no sign of space travel. When the Russians launched Sputnik in 1957, my reaction was overwhelming joy and relief, because I thought that at last our energies were going to be turned toward space exploration. I felt that way through the era of Apollo. Since Apollo, as public support of the space program has waned, my fears have grown again; because I don’t believe that a world turned in on itself can remain peaceful. A progressive species like ours has a built-in drive to move forward, and that energy has to go somewhere. Historically, when it was not going into mere survival or into the exploration and settlement of new lands—which is the adaptive reason for such a drive—it has gone into war.

This is the price we pay for our innate progressiveness. I know that it is now fashionable to deride the concept of progress, and certainly we cannot say that progress is inevitable. It surely doesn’t characterize all change in all areas of human endeavor. Nevertheless, overall, the human race as a whole advances; if it did not we would still be cavemen. This is what distinguishes our species from all others. And like it or not, this drive is inseparable from the drive toward growth and expansion. Many successful species colonize new ecological niches; this is one of the fundamental features of evolution. When a species can’t find a new niche, and the resources of the old one are no longer sufficient, it dies out. If the resources do remain sufficient, it lives, but is unchanging from era to era. There are no cases in biology of progressive evolution unaccompanied by expansion.

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