“Fuck Earth!” says eccentric billionaire Elon Musk in face of what he thinks is humanity’s impending future: the exhaustion of space, natural resources, and ecological stability. Although the number of usable years we have left on Earth is widely disputed, few will argue that humanity’s current practices are sustainable in the long run. Of even more certainty is Earth’s limited nature in terms of being able to harbor human lives; some say Earth’s capacity does not exceed 9 billion, some say 10 billion—it doesn’t matter: as Al Bartlett said, “The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function”. Regardless of how modest of a yearly population increase to which our growth may decelerate, the compounded growth of our population (and hence of our resource consumption) presents two possible outcomes. The first outcome involves reaching and staying at capacity, choking human population size at however many billion and letting any excess die off. But choosing this path, according to Elon Musk, is undutiful for anyone who loves humanity—and not everyone does. For some, humanity is a bacterial infection naturally met by the fever that is global warming. For others, like proponents of the Gaia hypothesis, humanity is but a cog in the mechanism by which Earth enjoys its self-regulating nature and inherent state of balance through negative feedback cycles and the such. This scenario falls under fire by the likes of Musk: they argue that an insular Earth renders “the light of consciousness” vulnerable to any extinction event in the future, and it is the plight of humanity that such events are not uncommon. The second outcome is one that affords humanity a contingency plan to preserve human consciousness elsewhere in the solar system. However, despite Musk’s ambitious plan of establishing a Mars colony of one million strong starting the mid 2020’s, it is imperative that we keep thoughts of previous colonization endeavors at bay. There was once a time when the world was arbitrarily big. It was not explored in its entirety, and it would probably never be. While Western colonization attempts in the Americas started off largely unsuccessful, the waves of settlers quickly adapted to the new circumstances in which they were placed, and the rest is history. The reason for why this does not constitute a precedent for extraterrestrial colonization is that the Americas were habitable as they were when the settlers arrived; but as they are, all celestial bodies within reach are a far cry from suitable for human colonization. As such, these celestial bodies necessitate the devising of an entirely new approach towards colonization. If we truly want to make the dream of expansion into outer-space a reality, then it must be said that it behooves humanity to shift its paradigm with respect to its worldview in such a way that we assign some degree of plasticity to the world itself—this is called terraforming, and has so far been exclusive to science fiction. In doing so, we would “zoom out” the viewfinder through which we observe the world, and adopt a point (and field) of view such that we relinquish our currently and deeply held notions in regard to our relationship and position relative to the universe itself. It is worth noting that progression in this field is very current and very real. Just this week, on November 12th, the European Space Agency successfully circled the Rosetta spaceship around comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko and sent its Philae lander to land on the comet moving at around 135,000 km/h. This heralds a new era in space exploration, as it constitutes definitive proof that humanity’s reach surpasses half a billion kilometers, and is ready to go beyond. Through both mankind’s demonstrated potential and clearly predicted need, it has been evident that, as things stand, the Space Age is upon us. This article was written by Steven Chien. Send an email to [email protected] to get in touch. Photo Credit: Ricky Guidice