Space Exploration: Will it Help Unify Earth?

The less than two hundred human nation-states of Planet Earth appear doomed to endless squabbling and bloodshed despite grand proclamations of international cooperation. And who can blame them? Our problems feel too vast and overwhelming for the average person including our politicians to understand.

It is easier to go to war and kill each other. It is easier to pollute our environment. It is easier to bail out our faux economy with made-up money. It is easier to go shopping, buy shoes for the kids, and get drunk while watching the latest celebrity scandals on television. Nuclear disarmament in an age of terrorism? Biological warfare? Global warming and climate change? Global climate disruption? Global warming leading to ice ages? Fundamentalism and extremism on the rise in most religions? Poverty? Disease pandemics, hunger, bigotry and discrimination, pollution, deforestation, desertification, overpopulation and mass extinction of species along with weapons of mass destruction freak us out. What are we to do?

Go to Mars.

Explore the Solar System.

Yes. Launch probes beyond the Kuiper Belt toward the nearest stars. Build colonies out in space, on the Moon, and on Planet Mars. Prepare to study exobiology on Earth-like planets outside our Solar System. The current issue of The Christian Science Monitor: A Weekly Review of Global News & Ideas features on the cover an American rocket blasting off into the title “SPACE: Where Next? Why Now?” followed by the heading of a collective of articles entitled “Star Trek: This Generation.”

Peter Potts, staff writer for the Monitor, wrote “as exploration of space becomes increasingly expensive, many experts around the world think we have reached a hinge moment in history when joint ventures are the best – and perhaps only – way to undertake distant exploration, both manned and unmanned, of the cosmos.” Peter Potts goes on to give voice for many who “now believe it’s time for true collaboration…. to push mankind to the next threshold of space exploration and to forge a new spirit of cooperation among nations. In other words, a sort of Star Trek Starfleet Command.”

Packing a doomsday punch, Potts quotes space historians Roger Launius and Howard McCurdy who write “An important bloc of the space community believes that humanity has a finite period of time to colonize other worlds before conditions on Earth no longer sustain human migration.” Folks, we are talking about the survival of our species and perhaps of Earth life itself … as we know it. This ain’t a disaster flick like the upcoming “2012.”

The challenges are many to overcome. National pride, suspicion between the Europeans and the Americans on one side and the Chinese on the other, the militarization of space with to us futuristic weaponry, funding amid roiling economic turmoil and an epic global recession, the spread of atomic weapons and ballistic missile technologies, and incessant warfare on the ground.

It is time, however, past time, to put aside our national, ethnic, and religious differences in the name of planetary unity and integration. Only a world government with world law can successfully address the next stages of world peace with space exploration and colonization. Science fiction including Star Trek is full of interstellar empires. Instead of these tyrannies let us remember the United Federation of Planets. Let us take a stand this world government, our world government shall be a constitutional, democratic republic and not a dictatorship or worse, a dictatorship cloaked as democracy. Vote “Yes!” in the Global Referendum for Democratic World Parliament at, https://voteworldparliament.org/.

Space exploration gives humanity a singularity of purpose we can all grasp amid the magnitude of scientific evidence that our global civilization releasing so much carbon will negatively change the next 100,000 years of Earth’s climate.

The bottom line is world government of one kind or another is likely to be established if humanity survives. Let’s determine this government is a democratic world government. Or survival isn’t worth it.

Sources:

Archer, David. The Long Thaw: How Humans Are Changing The Next 100,000 Years of Earth’s Climate. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009.

Potts, Peter. “Star Trek: This Generation.” The Christian Science Monitor: A Weekly Review of Global News & Ideas. Volume 101/Issue 113, 25 October 2009: 13 – 18.

 

William Dudley Bass
23 October 2009
Revised and reposted 12 January 2012
Seattle, Washington

NOTE: This article was originally published as “Will Space Exploration Expedite the Unification of Earth?” on my earlier current affairs blog, At the Brink with William Dudley Bass, on 23 October 2009 at, http://atthebrinkwithwilliamdudleybass.blogspot.com/2009/10/will-space-exploration-expedite.html. It was revised, rewritten, and re-published here. Thank you.

Copyright © 2009, 2012, 2016 by William Dudley Bass. All Rights Reserved until we Humans establish Wise Stewardship of and for our Earth and Solarian Commons. Thank you.

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