BOLDLY GO WHERE NO MAN HAS GONE BEFORE - BUT HOW?
A friend in another forum, noting and agreeing with comments from Elon Musk, who is all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed about colonizing Mars, expressed the feeling that mankind’s only hope is indeed to get off Mother Earth and go to the stars.
Though I am a hardcore science fiction fan, I disagree - and for what I think are very practical reasons.
No man - not the most brilliant among us - has remotely approached an understanding of the height, depth and breadth of the cosmic sphere of things within which we exist on our little blue spec floating in the immensity of space, with physical laws finely, precisely tuned in myriad ways to allow us to exist and, more, to provide a perfect environment for us.
Physics can't tell us with certainty how or even if our universe had a beginning. If it did, what existed before the beginning, and what force, power or intelligence brought it into existence? We don't know if the universe is finite or infinite, and, as the celestial bodies fly ever farther apart (as space expands) and stars burn away their limited nuclear fuel, the only end of it we can see, projecting current expanding universe dynamics into a distant future, is a heat death and universal darkness - no fun at all. We don't know if there is one universe, many, or, as some speculate, an infinite number - a "multiverse".
We don't know even the most basic things about our existence - what matter is (not to mention “dark matter”), what space is (why is it expanding?), what time is. In terms of the science of physics - the science that hubristically aspires to tell us everything there is to know about the physical world - we have no idea about the central driving force in our world - human consciousness. Physics cannot tell us who or what we are.
I enjoy a good science fiction story as well as the next guy - probably more than most. In that imaginative realm, the laws of physics do not apply. Anything is possible - and it's fun out there. But not so in the real world, the real universe. Mother Nature has rules - like the speed of light - and she won't let us break them... You can't fool Mother Nature...
There is one glaring fact that egoists and science fiction enthusiasts like Elon Musk conveniently ignore as they indulge themselves in imaginative dreams of the conquest of space and travel to distant planets - a new home for mankind out among the stars - or, more modestly - and, in terms of the distances involved, far more realistically - somewhere else in our own solar system.
Here in our own solar system neighborhood, though it might be interesting to go for a look-see and come back, there is simply no place, including Mars, that any rational person would want to live, or that mankind by any stretch of the imagination could render livable. Mars has an atmosphere 100 times thinner than Earth's, composed of 95% carbon dioxide. The average daily temperature is about minus 80 degrees Fahrenheit. Ah! The Good Life!
Everything we see outside our own atmosphere is absolutely, non-negotiably hostile to human life. This includes everything we have seen within our own solar system - stuff that might conceivably be within travelling distance - and especially stuff light years away - places and things the laws of physics will, by any means realistically within our reach, forever deny us access to. The closest star is 4.24 light years away... The Milky Way galaxy is 100,000 light years across... The closest major galaxy - the Andromeda Galaxy - is 2.5 million light years away…
In its every aspect, then, the cosmic scale of that extra-terrestrial, multi-faceted hostility to life as we know it utterly dwarfs any means that mankind might have or conceivably ever have of moderating it - and especially of moderating it sufficiently to bridge the universe's great chasms of time and distance and create even a marginally habitable environment, to say nothing of a luxuriant living space - a place like Mother Earth.
Like it or not, by whatever means Earth came to be and we upon it, we are, by time and distance and the myriad physical laws that govern the vastness of the universe and allow our fragile existence here, absolutely marooned on our earthly home. Imagining otherwise is a pipe dream. A fun pipe dream, admittedly, but a pipe dream, nonetheless. If we want to visit distant worlds, if we want to "go where no man has gone before", we're going to have to settle for Star Trek reruns.
Of course, there is an alternative to all this hubris and wild flights of fantasy. We can pay attention to the Creator's own explanation regarding the creation of this world and the purpose of our lives upon it. Simply stated, he tells us the Earth was created for mankind, and, for the short period of our mortal lives, each of us is placed here as a test. Presented with both good and evil, we will we choose. How we choose will determine the quality of our lives in the eternal world to come. Those who choose good - those who choose to walk in the strait and narrow way - will live life as God lives it - eternal life. The rest will enjoy something less - something that corresponds to the choices they made. Not that complicated, really...
Seems to me it makes vastly more sense to come to terms with that understanding of things - an understanding supported by more than enough witnesses and evidence of various kinds, most especially our own direct experience with both good and evil in the world - concentrating on the critical issues of right vs. wrong, truth vs. lies, reality vs. fantasy, order vs. chaos, justice vs. injustice, law vs. lawlessness, light vs. darkness, good vs. evil, happiness vs. misery, God vs. the Godless - rather than waste time deluding ourselves into thinking we can escape these core issues of human existence by imagining, as some do, eternal life with our digital essence implanted inside an undying robot machine and a warp-drive flight to the distant stars when our Sun burns out.
Speaking of what is out there in the true, eternal dimension of things, scripture says this:
"Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither hath it entered into the heart of man, the things that God has prepared for them that love him."
Now that sounds a lot more interesting to me - a dedicated sci-fi fan - than the best Star Trek has to offer...
Right vs. wrong, truth vs. lies, reality vs. fantasy, order vs. chaos, law vs. lawlessness, justice vs. injustice, patriotism vs. treason, light vs. darkness, good vs. evil, happiness vs. misery, God vs. the Godless…
Time to choose… You will, like it or not…
If you can be fooled, you will be…
These are the times that try men’s souls…
Torquemada