To Infinity and Beyond...

45 years ago today humans first landed on the Moon. We’ve all seen the famous footage of Neil Armstrong as he says those famous words “this is one small step for a* man, one giant leap for mankind”. Unfortunately, Mr Armstrong was wrong. It should have been a giant leap forward for mankind and it probably felt like it at the time but nothing really came of it.
In the three years after Apollo 11, another ten astronauts walked on to the Moon (one of them played golf). The last was 1972 and no human has even been in the Moon’s orbit since then. For only three years was there a regular succession of humans stepping on another ‘world’. And that was it.
apollo-17-commander-Eugen-011
Apollo 17, December 1973
This worries me. In the 21st century the idea of humans colonising other parts of the solar system, the galaxy and even more seems a ridiculous idea, something out of science-fiction. But back in the middle of the 20th century it seemed perfectly logical, the way we were heading. We really need to get a shift on and start doing this.
We all know about climate change for one thing. If we as a species carry on like we are the Earth will become pretty much uninhabitable within a few hundred years, perhaps less. It might seem a long time but at modern lifespans that is only two or three generations. It is is entirely plausible that an ancestor you actually meet could be one of the last human beings to ever live.
That might seem a particularly gloomy view but it is entirely plausible. Whatever happens, even we somehow manage to keep going for considerably longer than that eventually the planet will be of no more use, the Sun will die and to survive we will have to have moved elsewhere. In the much shorter term the growing population and diminishing resources is a further problem. There are currently around 7 billion people on Earth and it is expected that by 2050 there will be as many as 10 billion and by the year 2150, 24 billion. This is simply not sustainable. Only by travelling into space can this number of humans exist, by living out there and sooner than that by extracting resources from asteroids and the like.
In order for humans to survive we must expand beyond this planet; it is unavoidable.
The stupid thing is, the technology is there. We got to the Moon with a computer with less processing power than your mobile phone. When Arthur C. Clarke was writing about humans making expeditions to the Moons of Jupiter, virtually everyone about the mission was scientifically sound. And that was thirty years ago, imagine how much we have moved on since then. Yet we still remain firmly on Earth.
Humanity has at least been exploring the universe more than ever. Voyager recently became the first probe to leave the Solar System, the Curiosity Rover is trundling around the surface of Mars, the Hubble telescope is spotting all sorts of amazing galaxies and the Kepler telescope is looking at Earth-like planets. There are plenty more. And let us not forget that there are humans in space right now aboard the International Space Station, doing lots of experiments and tweeting photos†.
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NASA Concept Image of Apollo footprint on the Moon/Mars
Still, we desperately need to get going again with humans travelling into space. Mars is the next step and whilst there are numerous missions across the world working on getting people there, it is unclear if any of them will make it any time soon. The big hope is of course from NASA, but they don’t actually have a launch system that could send people to Mars yet. The likes of China and India give us hope- in an ideal situation there would be a new space race between the USA and China, which would really see some steps forward.
On this anniversary day let us celebrate what we have achieved so far but more importantly look to the future. Now is the time for us to make science-fiction science-fact.
*There is debate about the “a” of course. Without it the sentence doesn’t really make sense and if you listen to the clip it sounds like there is no “a”, but Armstrong insists there is. We all know which version sounds better though.

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