Imagine, if you will, a piece of fruit, say a nice, round, firm orange. Now imagine a tiny spot of mold on its unblemished skin. Imagine then watching this orange through the lens of time-lapse photography: that singular spot of mold begins to grow. Slowly it begins to spread. The larger our spot grows—the faster the rate of spread, until finally the entire skin of the orange is covered. Now watch what happens: with no room left to grow the mold begins to die, our orange, once so firm and ripe, softens then shrivels, until it becomes a lifeless, wasted husk.
Our planet, the Earth, is like that orange. We, Humanity, are like that mold. And like the mold, we need to keep expanding and growing to survive.
Emerging out of Africa we have spread to cover the globe. All the arable land has been claimed and is being pushed to its limits to produce its maximum yield as we struggle to feed our growing population. Marginal land is farmed in desperation as the hungry poor seek to sustain themselves on subsistence rations. Advances in technology and agricultural science have barely kept us ahead of the curve. We are fast approaching the upper limit of sustainable carrying capacity.
There are, at latest estimates, approximately 7 billion of us sharing this world today. Most population forecasts predict 10 billion as early as 2020, with most of that growth happening in the developing world, those who can least afford the burden.
There is no uninhabited land left for us to expand to. Our national borders are fixed. Without room to grow, like the mold, we will eventually be forced to feed upon ourselves until nothing is left but that dead and withered husk. Along our present path I believe this outcome to be inevitable.
Yes, we may forestall our eventual demise, but only at a heavy price: the price of a drastically lower standard of living, the price of a substantially reduced calorie allotment, the price of a world which struggles to feed its teeming multitudes to the exclusion of all else.
Right now we still have the resources available to chart another path: a path which takes us to the Moon, Mars and beyond; a path which leads to our colonization of space.
Space, with infinite room to grow, with endless resources to harvest, with all our eggs not in one fragile basket.
Globally, in 2010, the aggregate spending on defense budgets was nearly 1.7 billion dollars. We are all armed to the teeth. Who are we going to fight? Each other? The next war, if we are insane enough to allow it to happen, will be the last one—for most of us. And there won’t be many of us left when it’s over (which, I suppose, would make most of the above moot. But it’s a hard, painful and ugly way to go.)
Let’s take that money and put it to work for a sustainable future for all of us. Let’s utilize the expertise of the military-industrial complex to build spaceships rather than cruise missiles. Let’s train a new generation of engineers and scientists to take us to the stars, rather than the brink of annihilation. Let’s harvest the wealth of the Asteroid Belt. Let’s give ourselves room to grow.
Horace Greeley, may have advised in the 1830’s, “go west, young man.” Now a new sense of manifest destiny is needed, it’s our shared human destiny. And my advise is, “Go up, young man, go up!”
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