SPACE NOW!

     The human race is standing today at the edge of a dangerous abyss. One more wrong move and all of us humans will fall to our collective doom. There are, however, many positive moves that we can make that will help to avert our fall and will instead lead us on to safety.
     We can stop polluting our Mother. We can halt global warming and our other self-inflicted eco-disasters before it is too late. We can stop killing innocent civilians in all these Mad Max wars we are fighting to gain control of our planet's dwindling oil reserves. We can stop vying for power over others. We can deal with our own shadows too and stop projecting our own negative unconsciousness onto others. We can also leave behind our childhood and move on out from our Mother Earth out into space.
     In fact, the single, most important undertaking that now awaits humankind is to leave Earth behind, to escape its gravity well while we still can. The human race has to do this in order to continue to exist. If we don't leave Earth behind soon, then, no matter what else we do, we will soon destroy it and ourselves with either our crazed violence or by fouling our nest. We need to grow up and move on out. We need to begin exploring the rest of the universe while we still can.
     We need a strong presence in space--before we have killed ourselves in a nuclear war or from global warming or have been killed by an asteroid or comet smashing into Earth. If we don't leap out of our nest soon, the human race will not survive. This is obvious. We shouldn't be keeping all our eggs in this one planetary nest anyway, not when we already have the means to spread ourselves out around the solar system.

     The various writers of science fiction have long been aware of the possibility that Earth might be destroyed. However, the manner in which they have approached this theme has changed radically over the past fifty years. Advances in space-related technology and in understanding consciousness have been two major factors leading to this change.
     These writers of science fiction have done more than mirror these advances in technology and consciousness. By sharing their visions of the future, they have actually been instrumental in helping humankind to mature and to raise its sights to the stars themselves.

     In the late forties, the eminent writer of science fiction, Arthur Clarke, wrote a short story titled "If I Forget Thee, Oh Earth...." His poignant story ends with the boy Marvin and his father, together in their little lunar scout car, looking out upon the distant, unobtainable, and ruined Earth. Together with the other survivors of the Moon colony, they are all that remain of the human race. The rest have destroyed themselves in a terrible war that has left Earth poisoned and uninhabitable.
     In this short but powerful story, Clarke evokes a feeling of longing and terrible sadness. Marvin and his father know that they will never "walk beside the rivers of that lost and legendary world, or listen to the thunder raging above its softly rounded hills." They know that it will be many hundreds of years before Earth will be freed of its radioactive poisons.
     Clarke wrote his story in the late forties. In it, humankind was still in its childhood and had just left its nest, just before its Mother Earth had been destroyed. In it, Clarke had his characters looking backwards, back down the gravity well to their past, to their womb, yearning only to walk once more upon the Earth.
     Clarke showed the destruction of Earth again in his novel, Childhood's End, written in the early fifties. In this novel, the end of humanity's childhood came through the intervention of benevolent aliens. Other authors from that era also wrote about the destruction or near destruction of Earth. Issac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, and Walter M. Miller Jr. all wrote during this same time period, and they all showed humankind still in its childhood and being overwhelmed by the near or complete destruction of Earth.

     However, for later writers of science fiction, humankind is being portrayed as having already grown past its childhood and no longer dependent upon Earth. It is not unusual or exceptional for these writers and their characters to view Earth as a nest that has become used up and boring, a home suitable only for those too timid for the adventure of space.
     It is more common for these writers to expect Earth to eventually become uninhabitable or to fade into irrelevance and obscurity now that people have begun to feel at home in the solar system and beyond. For example, in Charles Sheffield's novel, The Ganymede Club, a woman says, "if you ask me, the war (that destroyed much of Earth) was a blessing in disguise. It moved the center of power of the solar system from Earth out here to Jupiter, where it rightfully belongs."
     These contemporary writers--Charles Sheffield (often touted as the new Arthur Clarke), Joe Haldeman, Spider and Jeanne Robinson, David Brin, Greg Bear, Larry Niven, and Jerry Pournelle, among many others--all have their characters looking outwards towards Mars and Venus, towards the asteroid belt, and beyond to the outer planets with their many moons. For all these writers, escaping from the gravity well of Earth for the higher ground of space, while there are still sufficient resources to do so, is the next great adventure, the next collective goal for humankind.
     Sheffield, in particular, shows how humankind could fill the entire solar system, using the various resources of the asteroid belt, as well as those of both the inner and the outer planets. He shows how this would be much simpler and more economical than dragging resources up out of the gravity well of Earth. And when he recounts, in several of his novels--Cold as Ice, Dark as Day, and The Ganymede Club--that much of Earth has been destroyed by a war between the peoples of the asteroid belt and those of Earth, the focus isn't at all upon the tragedy. Instead, the focus is upon the future for the human race, living freely and productively in space.

     There have been at least two major changes since Arthur Clarke's timid and pessimistic days. One has been technological. Since the late forties, there have been major advances in both space ship design and safety and in computers and guidance systems. Also, with the various exploratory solar system probes such as Voyager and Galileo, humans have amassed a great deal of knowledge regarding the solar system itself and its incredible potential for resources.
     In Clark's day, human beings had not yet reached space, let alone touched down upon the moon. Aircraft and computers were primitive then compared to those of today. Perhaps from his point of view, humans would have been very lucky to reach the moon and to maintain a colony there. Perhaps that is also why, in his story, the technological aspects were left completely vague.
     Today, human beings are much better prepared for venturing out into space than in Clarke's day. In spite of the Challenger and the Columbia disasters, the space shuttles really work. The international space station is up and running. There are already plans to land humans on Mars. There is the amazing and farsighted Hubble Telescope. Several of the moons of Jupiter are already attracting great interest as rich sources of water. The asteroid belt is also been seen as a rich source of water, as well as a source for metals and others substances that would be extremely difficult and costly to bring up out of Earth's gravity well. Because of all this and more, humanity has become much more confident in its ability to leap into space.

     In addition to the many technological advances since the late forties, humanity's attitudes both towards itself as a conscious and self-directed species and towards venturing into space have also matured in the past fifty years. With the help of psychedelic exploration, psychology, psychotherapy, meditation, and other growth enhancing disciplines, as well as the shared future visions of science fiction, humankind has matured psychologically, both individually and collectively, and has come to a much better understanding of what it means to be a human being.
     Humanity needs a vision of its future. It is human nature. Human beings are the only species that can make goals and envision the future. However, unlike Clarke's characters who were still clinging to Earth, human beings of today are beginning to see that the next great adventure will be to finally grow up and leave our nest to live in space in all its many and varied habitats.

Eugene Marks