A recent article in
Scientific American titled
"Oh the Placed we Won't Go," had a quote from the Planetary Society's co-founder Louis Friedman's book
Human Spaceflight: From Mars to the Stars:
Humans will become a multi-planet species by making it to Mars, but no farther. That is, they will never travel beyond Mars...Exploring beyond Mars will be done virtually, by processing information
from other worlds while our bodies stay at home (albeit, I hope, on a
multi-planet home of Earth and Mars)...To be clear: I believe that human space exploration will continue forever,
but that human spaceflight will stop at Mars. This is not a
contradiction—it is just a new way of thinking, a problem perhaps for an
older generation but not for future ones where already ideas about
connectivity, networking, exploration, and virtual reality influence the
perception of “being there.”
I find this assessment to be consistent with our space missions to date, where robots have sent back amazing images from throughout the solar system, and telescopes have peered billions of years into the past, yet also a sad commentary on the future of man stuck on either the third or fourth rock from the sun. Scientists are currently looking for evidence that distant civilizations have colonized a complete galaxy, with little luck thus far. Are we now to believe that all past and future planetary species stay at home and can only explore remotely? That is like saying I will never go to Paris, but I can send my iPhone. Not a very hopeful view of vacations.
