1. The Environment
One trend in the changing landscape of human concerns that has become pervasive and persistent in the last few decades is the growing sensitivity to humanity’s relationship with the natural environment. While people still disagree about the extent to which human activities are currently damaging the planet’s Biosphere and about how long we can get away with it, few doubt that we cannot continue our current environmentally exploitive practices indefinitely. Everyone shares a vision of Humanity on Earth with a stable worldwide population, living on renewable resources, in balance with the global ecology. This vision is in theory achievable enough; in fact humanity has spent most of its four million year history living in this way. In practice, the vast majority of human beings on the planet today would vigorously resist living in balance with nature as humanity did in the past because that balance preceded civilization. Whether the human race was happier prior to civilization as some people argue or in reality life then was “nasty, brutish and short” as others contend, is beside the point. Very, very few people have ever been willing to abandon civilization once they have become accustomed to it.
2. Population
To make matters worse our species is currently experiencing explosive population growth. Affluent technical economies tend toward population stability but consume many times the energy and resources of non-technical ones. Both types of society currently inflict massive damage on the natural environment whether it is acid rain from power generation in the northern hemisphere or rain forest devastation due to subsistence farming in the southern. For all the talk about knowledge-base economies, human civilization is still dependent on three major areas of physical activity to support its infrastructure. These are mining, manufacturing and food production. While some progress has been made to make these activities less devastating to the natural environment, human civilization as we now know it and even as we might imagine it will always entail huge energy and resource requirements. Even if people can be persuaded to change their life styles to greatly reduce their consumption of energy and non-renewable resources, achieving an ecologically balanced civilization on renewable resources is still a technical and economic challenge of incalculable proportions. If large numbers of people cannot be persuaded to voluntarily reduce their consumption – should they be forced to? Who is going to make them? If no one, then the game is over before it’s begun, but if on the other hand force is used (legal force or otherwise), then the first casualty of the process will be the freedom and self-determination that civilization was created in the first place to secure. We might as well go back to the caves. The question then becomes, can we accomplish the key physical activities of mining, manufacturing and agriculture outside of the earth’s fragile biosphere? If so, human expansion into space is eminently desirable if not a necessity. Without it our species can likely look forward to an on-going population boom and bust cycle accompanied by war, famine and pestilence, all staged within an increasing corrupted natural environment. Much work has been already been done on the engineering issues involved with respect to utilization of extraterrestrial material and energy resources. Studies about how large numbers of people could live and work either in artificially constructed space habitats or on the surface of other solar system bodies have also been pursued in some detail. The results of these efforts are very encouraging. Planetary Resources, the first asteroid mining is already up and running.
3. War
Even without population pressure, war has always been a hallmark of civilization and violence at the retail level is a characteristic of even primitive human societies. Science fiction writer, Robert A. Heinlein, remarked that there will always be issues about which even reasonable people will disagree. Sometimes those issues will be too important to ignore and when that happens there will be a fight. When such issues are large scale – the fight will be a war. Going into space will not alter human nature but a civilization that has a frontier has an escape valve. It is not necessary to fight, even over important issues, when one party can get up and move away. Most wars are ultimately over real estate anyway. For this to work, of course, that frontier must be truly open. Individuals and even large groups of people must be able to go find new real estate and leave their conflicts behind.
4. Political Oppression
Most of humanity throughout most of human history has lived under variously repressive governmental institutions, usually varying from oppressive to crushingly oppressive. This is hard to explain when clearly a small number of people can only oppress a much greater number when they have tacit at least agreement from the general populace that the oppression is somehow legitimate. Whether this legitimacy is based on concepts such as the Divine Right of Kings or Communism or other arguments, all ultimately depend on a pretty negative view of human nature, namely that human beings are a pretty bad lot and will run amok if not stepped on. It has proven pretty easy to sell people on this concept when there is no visible evidence to the contrary. One shining exception to this history of oppression was the formation of the United States and the Bill-of-Rights. The difference was very possibly the fact that the United States was a civilization on the edge of a frontier. There was ample evidence that people could live and be civil to one another without being policed by an oppressive governmental authority. In fact whenever there was a tendency for the government to get a little too intrusive people could always move a little further west. While the people of the time were quite un-civil to the aboriginal peoples they encountered as they moved west – a matter of real estate again for the most part, they were quite civil and supportive to each other even in the absence of law enforcement. The lawless wild west was a myth started to sell dime novels.
5. Natural Disasters
Even if long-term and as yet unimagined technical or philosophical-spiritual developments make the prospect of remaining a forever earth bound species a palatable one, we may not get the chance. We now know that the earth is subject to massive meteor strikes from time to time and that these cause mass-extinctions. A civilization that has learned to move some or its entire physical infrastructure into space will likely be able to divert or destroy such an incoming nemesis.
An achievable Vision
Expanding human civilization into space won’t change human nature or eliminate all of civilization’s discontents but it very well could eliminate some, mitigate many and at the same time buy our species the time it needs to tackle the rest. The most far-reaching of those effects may only be achieved by the wholesale migration of technical civilization’s physical infrastructure into Earth orbit along with a large portion of Earth’s population. This might take centuries or it might be accomplished in mere decades. No matter how long it takes, it leads ultimately to a vision of human civilization that almost anyone everyone would desire. Earth, humanity’s planet of origin, is preserved and protected, its stable human population living in perfect harmony with the natural environment. No factories pollute the air, no mines mar the surface, no large-scale agriculture or harvesting projects disturb the ecological balance. Those portions of the planetary surface not given over to wilderness are managed as a lovingly tended garden. In space an expanding human population is engaged in large-scale engineering projects. New towns and cities are being constructed within huge rotating structures made from extraterrestrial steel and aluminum enclosing an exported bit of the home world’s biosphere, watered by ice harvested from comets. The twin blessings of unlimited material plenty and unlimited elbowroom have strongly mitigated the root causes of war and oppression and humanity has finally achieved a lasting peace. Freedom of choice, freedom of expression, and the freedom to pursue individual spiritual meaning are the unquestioned norms of human existence.
