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The promise of space The exploration of the solar system is going to be a very difficult, dangerous
and expensive task. The difficulties, at least, must not be exaggerated, for the
steadily rising tide of technical knowledge has a way of obliterating obstacles
so that the seemingly impossible rapidly becomes commonplace. Mere
distance is nothing; only the time that is needed to span it has any meaning.
Unmanned probes already journey to distant planets in the time that early
sailors took to circumnavigate the globe. Given a sufficiently powerful motive,
there seems no limit to what the human race can do; history is full of examples,
from the pyramids to putting men on the Moon, of achievements whose
difficulty and magnitude were so great that few people would have considered
them possible. Such marvels have been achieved through the power of religion
or under pressure of political or ideological rivalry. Space travel, however, if it
is to develop, needs a more permanent basis than national pride.
Will increasing pressure of population bring about the conquest of space? For
a long time to come it will be more profitable to exploit the underdeveloped
regions of Earth, for we know that other worlds cannot be colonized as they
stand. It would be far easier to make the Antarctic bloom than to establish
large colonies on Mars or Titan. One day, the waste places of the world will be
brought to life and space science will play a great part in that process through
orbital weather stations and, perhaps, direct climatic control by the use of
space mirrors. After that will be the time when men will start looking hungrily
at the planets and their large-scale development will begin. But there are
already too many people on this planet. It would be no cause for boasting if,
after centuries of prodigious achievement, we merely enable ten times the
present population to exist on a dozen worlds. The importance of planetary
colonization must lie in the diversity of cultures it will produce, since the
environments of Pluto and Mercury, for example, will inevitably shape the minds
and outlook of their inhabitants. What will be the long-term effects on the
evolution of the human race? The effects on our character, thought and artistic
creativity of many of the great scientific achievements of the past -- Copernican
astronomy, Darwin's theory of evolution, Freudian psychology -- have far
outweighed their immediate practical results. We may expect the same of
space exploration.
Because curiosity is a fundamental human trait, man would still yearn to explore
the planets if there were not a single good 'scientific' reason for doing so. But,
from our experience of the infancy of space travel, it seems likely that
astronautics will produce an expansion of scientific knowledge unparalleled in
history. Many people dread the uses to which new knowledge and new
technology may be put - in wars of annihilation or in the destruction of the
environment. But surely it is ignorance and the narrow prejudiced outlook
which accompanies it which is the real threat to our survival. It is not easy to
see how the more extreme forms of nationalism or the more short-sighted
aspects of the consumer society can long survive when men have seen the
Earth as a pale crescent dwindling against the stars, until at last they look for
it in vain.
First by land across mountains, deserts and through impenetrable jungle, and
then by sea in tiny fragile ships across trackless oceans, man has gradually
explored and unified this planet. But the completion of the process, by means
beyond the imagination of men before this century, is being achieved through
the conquest of a third and totally alien element. The swiftness with which
mankind has lifted its commerce and its warfare into the skies has surpassed
the wildest dreams of our ancestors. Unknown lands have been opened up
and the concept of a 'global village', with all that it implies about common
standards and values, has begun to seem possible - indeed probable - as
radio, television and other means of instant communication also use the airways
to accelerate man's conquest of his native planet.
But the victory is turning to ashes in our hands. Every previous age had its El
Dorado -- its unknown land to conquer. It is a somber thought that as all
possibility of expansion on Earth has practically ceased, the momentum of
human culture must be exhausted in the foreseeable future. Civilization may
endure for centuries, but will be inherently unstable. It may decay quietly and
crumble into ruin, or it may disintegrate violently by internal conflicts. Space
travel is a necessary - though not in itself sufficient -way of escape from this
predicament. When Mars, Venus and the Moon become what the Americas
were four hundred years ago, worlds of unknown danger, of infinite promise
and opportunity, they will be the new frontiers of the human mind.
It is fascinating, if premature, to try to imagine the future of space travel. In the
footsteps of the first explorers will follow the scientists and engineers, shaping
strange environments with technology as yet unborn. Later will come the
colonists, laying the foundation of cultures which may in time be utterly unlike
those of mother Earth. Over the first cities of mankind, the desert sands now
lie centuries deep. Could the inhabitants of Ur or Babylon - once the wonders
of the world - have pictured Tokyo or New York? Nor can we imagine the
citadels our descendants may one day build beneath the blistering sun of
Mercury or under the stars of the cold Plutonian wastes. And beyond the
planets, though ages still ahead of us in time, lies the unknown and infinite
promise of the stellar universe
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6. |
Clarke advances three arguments supporting the inevitability of space
travel. First, progressively developing technology removes seemingly
insurmountable obstacles. second, when earth's full spatial potential
has been exhausted, and to avoid destructive rivalries, an increasing
population will force man to seek to colonize first the planets then the
start. Third, man has an insatiable curiosity, which goes beyond the
need to research for practical benefit. Clarke sees the benefits in
the creation of new planetary cultures relevant to alien conditions, not
as places of easement for world over-population. The science of
astronautics will enhance technology through its own development.
Earthly preoccupation with nationalism and consumerism will disappear.
Air travel and media development already move towards a one-world
concept. When human endeavor on planet earth loses momentum, space
travel will offer new frontiers to the human mind; first the planets,
then the stars. ( 143 words ) |
