Credit: NASA
Why should we go into space? What is that justification for spending all that effort and money on getting a few lumps of Moon rock? Aren't there better causes here on Earth?
In a way, the situation was like that in Europe before 1492. People might well have argued that it was a waste of money to send Columbus on a wild goose chase over an almost unimaginable distance. Yet, the discovery of the New World made a profound difference to the old one.
Spreading out into space will have an even greater effect; it will completely change the future of the human race and maybe determine whether we have any future at all.
It won't solve many of our immediate problems on Earth, but it will give us a new perspective on them and cause us to look both outwards and inwards. With luck it could unite us to face a common challenge.
This would be a long-term strategy – and by long term, I mean hundreds or even thousands of years. We could have a base on the Moon within 30 years, reach Mars within 50 years even the moons of the outer planets within 200 years.
By 'reach', I mean with manned space flight. We've already driven rover and landed a probe on Titan, a moon of Saturn, but if one is considering the future of the human race, we have to go there ourselves.
Going into space won't be cheap, certainly, but it will take only a small proportion of world resources. NASA's budget has remained roughly constant in real terms since the time of the Apollo landings, but it has decreased from 0.3 per cent of U.S. GDP in 1970 to 0.12 per cent today.
Even if we were to increase the amount spent on space endeavours internationally by 20 times, to make a serious effort to send people into space, it would only be a small fraction of world GDP.
There will be those who argue that it would be better to spend our money solving the problems of this planet, like climate change and pollution, rather than wasting it on a possibly fruitless search for a new planet. I am not denying the importance of fighting climate change and global warming, but we can do that and still spare a quarter of a per cent of world GDP for space. Isn't our future worth a quarter of percent?
We thought space was worth a big effort in the '60s. In 1962, President Kennedy committed the U.S. to landing a man on the Moon by the end of the decade. This was achieved just in time by the Apollo 11 mission in 1969.
The space race helped to create a fascination with science and led to great advances in technology, including the first large-scale integrated circuits which are the basis of all modern computers.
However, after the last Moon landing in 1972, with no future plans for further manned space flight, public interest in space waned. This went along with a fall in enthusiasm for science in the West because, although it had brought great benefits, it had not solved the social problems that increasingly occupied public attention.
A new manned spaceflight program would do a lot to restore public enthusiasm for space and for science generally.
Robotic missions are much cheaper and may provide more scientific information, but they don't catch the public imagination in the same way, and they don't spread the human race into space, which I argue should be our long-term strategy.
A goal of a base on the Moon by 2020 and of a man landing on Mars by 2025 would reignite a space program and give it a sense of purpose in the same way that President Kennedy's Moon target did in the 1960s.
A new interest in space would also increase the public standing of science generally. The low esteem in which science and scientists are held is having serious consequences. We live in a society that is increasingly governed by science and technology, yet fewer and fewer young people long to go into science.
bleh
meh,to the moon
grammar
Dear Stephen,
Perhaps it was because it was an American audience that you used the word 'lay'.
Do Planets lay moons as hens lay eggs?
The content of your article is 'spot on'. You might have suggested that 25% of the world's expenditure on armaments be spent on space exploration.
Is there any possibility that an intelligent race on Mars destroyed itself by destroying its planet's environment?
looking outside ourselves for answers
I am sorry, I truly admire SH but to me the final frontier is one inside of ourselves. It is time to go back in time and look at what we had and to look at what we buried it under and reclaim for ourselves the promise of who we are. Sure we can explore, sure we can help those in other places, surely it is a defense mechanism for not dealing with our own patch. i.e. Planet Earth.
amen brother
lets take the planet we have and learn to live on it
The Final Frontier
Albert Einstein said,"Problems cannot be solved by thinking within the framework in which they were created". In that sense, Stephen Hawking, part of the intellectual framework that is failing mankind, can only project the same problems into space. Underlying his sentiments is a dishonesty that is rarely spoken of out loud. That is, why is it mankind is unable, by any existing intellectual or spiritual tradition, to realize a ethical/moral conception that would resolve the very problems Prof. Hawking is hoping to escape. No, the final frontier is not in outer space, but inner space, within mankind itself. And it is only prejudice, human vanity and arrogance that is preventing that search from making progress.
re: The Final Frontier
I almost hate to point this out, but Stephen makes a factual error in the following:
"Furthermore, despite an extensive search by the SETI project, we haven't heard any alien television quiz shows. This probably indicates that there are no alien civilisations at our stage of development within the radius of a few hundred light-years."
Fact of the matter is that if a civilization identical to ours was located no farther away than the nearest star (~4.3 ly) SETI would be incapable of detecting it. The electronic emissions from our planet are just too weak for SETI to detect. Look it up on the SETI web site.
space travel
let's just stick to moviesabout spacetravel
It's a wonderful dream, but
It's a wonderful dream, but unrealistic. For one thing, public interest in space exploration didn't diminish because there were no plans after Apollo; rather, public interest rapidly diminished after Apollo 11 (by Apollo 13 interest was almost zero until the accident, then after 14 succeeded interest diminished again) resulting in Congress canceling funding for the last few planned Apollo missions. Any future such missions would have some interest at first (but probably not as much: we've been there, done that), but likely diminish just as rapidly. For another, the time and distances for interstellar travel would condemn many generations of a small group of humans to living on a small space station flinging through a void before some future generation might possibly find a place to land and live (it takes light over four years to get to the nearest star, and it would be quite difficult to approach light speed ourselves). Even if it were feasible, we have nearly 7 billion people on the planet now; could we send even 7 thousand on such a trip? As for the Moon or Mars, yes we could make small permanent colonies there, but they aren't North and South America with their rivers and lakes and fertile land ready to spread across. For better or worse, our future is here on Earth. Let's make the best of it.
UFO's
Stephen Hawking writes, in his otherwise excellent article, "We don't appear to have been visited by aliens. I am discounting reports of UFOs, of course – my main reason for this being, why would they appear only to cranks and weirdos?"
That crack may be good for an easy laugh, but it's not really a thoughtful formulation on a worldwide phenomenon worthy of a scientist, much less an eminence. While acknowledging that the whole subject of UFO's exerts a fascination in the public imagination and that -- ahem, yes -- tales of alien abduction do indeed strain credulity, the author's assertion, nevertheless, is a calumny of the first magnitude.
If not exactly an Einsteinean thought experiment, I would ask Dr. Hawking to imagine himself before an auditorium (a stadium?) filled with all the military personnel of every nation who have ever reported seeing an unidentified flying object with special emphasis on meteorologists, radar technicians and above all, for obvious reasons, pilots, both military and civilian.
Would he, I wonder, be prepared to say to them the following: "In spite of your considerable training and dedication to professional standards, it is my opinion that you are all cranks and weirdos -- incompetent observers, the lot"? I don't believe that he -- or anyone else for that matter -- credibly could. So just maybe the joke barrier can be broken and the whole subject of UFO's be more dispassionately examined. It's asking a great deal, I know.
Final Frontier?
Space race. 1960s. Final frontier. So very 20th century.