Benefit or Bust?
I’m a space nerd. This is well documented; a good portion of my articles for this paper have been in relation to space. As such, I enjoy talking about it immensely with people who aren’t as into it, trying (often in vain) to express just how important it is to the future of humanity as a whole. I recently wrote an article to that effect… But, consistently, one of the main gripes that I hear from people is that “we should focus on fixing our problems here on Earth.” This sentiment has become especially popular as of late with the issue of space exploration somehow becoming politicized due to the presence of Elon Musk, a controversial man whom I’m fairly certain I don’t have to explain further.
But is this a valid critique? At first glance, it seems reasonable. Space exploration is, after all, quite expensive, and in many cases has no tangible or immediate benefits for our lives here back on Earth. But this of course, is indeed only a first glance. The reality is that space exploration, even in its most mundane and scientific endeavors, has already benefited humanity to a massive degree.
How so? Well, to start, let’s look at just some of the inventions that only came about as a result of space exploration. Ever had a bad mattress and upgraded to a nice, form-fitting memory foam one? You have NASA to thank for that one, who invented memory foam in the 1960s to better cushion astronauts against extreme G forces. How about your smartphone? I assume you use that quite often. Did you know that CMOS cameras, the cameras in Smartphones, webcams, etc, only came about because NASA was trying to create incredibly tiny cameras for interplanetary exploration probes? Think about that the next time you upload a selfie to Instagram…
But both of those things seem relatively mundane; sure, they’re nice, but they aren’t lifesaving. We could probably do without them, ultimately. But, although numerous, nice quality-of-life inventions aren’t the only things that space exploration has helped us come up with. Food and water tend to be necessary for people to survive, as I assume you’d agree. Without space exploration, freeze-dried food, something used for emergency provisions around the world, probably wouldn’t exist! Not only this, but far more importantly, space exploration has seen the significant development of water filtration systems used around the world which have saved millions of people from waterborne illnesses and gotten developing countries access to crucially needed drinking water. Life straws, for instance, probably wouldn’t have been possible to create without the advances made in water filtration for space exploration.
But all of this stuff has already been made! What about future benefits to humanity? Wouldn’t it be more cost effective to focus on Earth again, now that we’re reaching 8 billion people? It’s tough to predict the future, of course, but we already know some potential developments that could change life back here on Earth if we just had a little bit more investment into space.
Do you like clean energy? I’m a pretty big fan myself, even if I remain skeptical about some of the methods we’ve turned down historically… (I hope you consider nuclear to be a form of clean energy!) But what if we could have a form of energy that’s truly clean. No wind farms massacring birds, no giant solar fields creating a blot on an otherwise pristine and beautiful landscape. Well, this is very possible with further investment into space. Massive solar power satellites, which could beam the energy back to Earth, are completely feasible with current technology; it’s simple a matter of cost. While the upfront on that might be a bit high, the long-term benefits are staggering. Scaling the technology up enough, we could create effectively limitless energy back here on Earth, making a wide variety of energy and pollution related problems things of the past.
Manufacturing, too, could be revolutionized by further investment into space. Gravity, as nice as it is for us, tends to be a bit of a hindrance when it comes to the energy used for manufacturing things. It turns out in an environment where no force is constantly pulling you downwards, the energy costs for manufacturing tend to drop dramatically. The resources for this manufacturing also exist in abundance; asteroids close to Earth host more accessible Rare Earth Metals and other raw materials than we have on the entirety of Earth, and with the right infrastructure, it’s far easier to extract!
If everyone on Earth lived as we do in America, it would take 5 Earths worth of resources to sustain long-term. While reducing waste is nice, ultimately, there comes a point where in order to maintain our quality of life we simply cannot reduce it any further. If we want everyone in the world to live a high quality first world life, those five Earths worth of material, out there in the asteroid belt and other planets, will one day be required. But, with the aforementioned space-based energy and manufacturing, this future is possible!
But in order to make this future possible, we must dispel the myth that fixing our problems on Earth is a more viable solution. Ultimately, if that’s the path we choose to take, we will be doomed to a forever decreasing quality of life, and one where humanity’s imperative to expand is forever put down by an artificial order. I’d prefer to go to space! The stars, and the resources they hold for us, await.
