Where Will We Go Next???

Space colonization simply summarized is the hypothetical (for now at least) settlement and extraction of natural resources from locations outside of planet earth. According to the Wikipedia article I read, they’re two leading theories as to why humans will end up settling on a foreign planet. The first theory is that some tragic global event occurs causing our planet to become non-hospitable which will end up forcing us to leave in search of refuge on another planet. And the second theory which I personally believe will come true is that our civilization will move to another planet in search of more resources and land. I strongly believe that in the near future space exploration will start to ramp up due to the excess needs of natural resources by society. As a result of our population continuing to rapidly increase and overuse resources on earth, soon enough we’ll run out of resources for good. Our planet is heading in the wrong direction because as a civilization we prioritize our own needs over the needs of our planet and the thousands of other species that also live on it. I believe that the Anthropocene era and human greed will one day completely deplete our resources and instead of looking for more resources in the ground, we’ll have to look somewhere much further away.

Space exploration and settlement is no easy task at all. The article gives a bunch of good examples of the troubles we face today with traveling and settling in space. The two that stood out to me though was humanity's adaptation to a completely different environment and lack of funding for this extremely expensive project. Mankind has always been good at adapting to whatever challenge is up against them, but space settlement is a completely different story since humans would have to be completely self-sufficient in an extremely hostile environment. Simple things like gravity, water, and food aren’t necessarily a given, so basically you have to bring everything you need with you and that can get expensive. According to the Wikipedia article, it costs roughly 640 American dollars to bring one pound of materials with you to space. So this brings us to the second biggest problem facing space exploration, funding. The whole space talk is a very interesting topic and has plenty of people curious about the future, but as of right now it doesn’t get much help in the funding department. We have organizations like NASA and people like Elon Musk who have made many proposals about space settlement, but that’s all talk. I believe that space exploration and settlement won’t get the correct amount of attention and funding it deserves until we run out of resources or are forced to leave Earth. A similarity to this would be how we are dealing with climate change right now. People have pretty much come to the consensus that we need to change how we do things before we completely destroy our world, but nobody’s actually changing anything. Not until we have some world-changing effect will everyone stop what they’re doing and try and make a change. If we want a chance to successfully make space settlement a reality, we need to start today. Hopefully, we won’t be forced to have to settle on some other planet for a long time, but if that day does come it was because of humanity's greed for resources and neglect to make a change.