Could Exploration be our Salvation?

Carl Sagan, the american astronomer, famously said that if the dinosaurs had a space program they would never have gone extinct. As perilous as space missions are, it makes sense in the long term to try not to have all our eggs on one planet.

Another interesting point is that, despite the fact that as many as 500 billion planets exist in our galaxy, we have never found evidence of civilisations on other worlds. No radio signals from Vega, no friendly visits from our neighbours in Alpha Centauri and no technological remains in over 4 billion years of geological data. What if extraterrestrial civilisations in the galaxy never had space programmes either? Or, maybe more scarily, what if their space programmes fell back to the ground before even getting to the nearest planet...

Although this is purely speculation, we must take note from these observations. Could we be living in a unique era of human history? An era when resources have not been exhausted. An era when countries, democracy and social mobility are still being created. An era when the population of this planet is booming, and there is still enough space, water and food to go around. If civilisations are like economics, society as we know it could begin to crack as growth stalls. And even if it this unlikely doomsday scenario is just the slimmest of possibilities, surely we should try our best to avoid it?

And one of the best ways is with human space exploration. Not only would spreading our precious civilisation across the solar system help safeguard our species from random extinction events, it would also continue to grow our population. Resources may even be discovered, making these planetary excursions profitable. But steady investment in space programs is exactly what is not happening. Russia, for example, spends 80% less on space than 20 years ago. Since the retirement of the Shuttle, the US has no operating spacecraft capable of taking humans even to orbit, let alone beyond Earth. And no country has dedicated plans to push to new frontiers of Mars and beyond for the foreseeable future.

So without funding and inspiration, is human space flight and possibly humanity itself doomed? Possibly not: Some hope comes from history. In 1911 Amundsen and Scott made bold, perilous missions into the unexplored. Following that race for the South Pole, exploration in Antarctica all but stopped. For 50 years, it lay barren and untouched as the rest of the world slowly progressed. And then, in the 1950s and 60s people returned. And they didn't do so at huge cost on wooden ships and dog-sleds. They jumped in newly-build planes and flew taking entire houses, research stations, vehicles and scientific equipment with them.

We can only hope that the current lull in space exploration is just a pause waiting for technology to catch up. And if that is the case then maybe we, unlike the dinosaurs, can survive into a distant future.