Humankind stands on the brink of a threshold of a new post-global era. Perhaps we should take slight pause to reconsider our possible future prospects, following the universal general system observation that: “everything in space is in complex motion that is fundamentally random and stochastic in pattern.”
We remain earthbound and it has only been in the last century that we have rapidly developed the rocket technologies that have entailed our repeated and increasing missions into the depths of outer space. Early experiments (Biospheres 1 and 2) proved simply how incredibly complex is the challenge of sustaining life artificially on-board floating greenhouses in these depths of outer-space, where we simply cannot expect to simply, deterministically occur the natural integration of human-made biomes for indefinite self-sustaining futures. Nor can we simply colonize Outer space or distant geological objects in Outer Space in a manner that would not critically depend upon periodic but vital and indefinitely long-term resupply and support from the earth.
We have been discovering these truths about our relative earthboundness of all living systems that are yet known, just during the same era in which we are coming to realize the inherent circumscription of the earth and its bio-geophysical systems platform for the perpetuation of life on earth into the indefinite future. We have arrived at the edge of the human post-historical “Anthropocene” (the global age of Human Kind) to realize the very real possibilities not only of our own mass extinction but of human caused mass extinction of much or most of life on earth.
My science fiction writing, conceived since the late Sixties, and somewhat buttressed by reading Asimov’s “Foundation” Trilogy, witnesses an alternative future of “Space-Bound” humankind not as Star Trekkies or Star Warriors who travel at many times greater than the speed of light, but as deep Space Voyaging super-ships the population of which are permanent members of the crew and life-time colonists traveling in space in the hope that their future generations might find suitable places in the vaster Cosmos, increasingly distant from our Sun, to establish new worlds and new “planets of life” if not Trekkie “living planets.
Space voyaging remains a primary long term goal of human civilization on earth (and beyond earth) and this system of deep space voyaging will long depend upon its capacity to periodically interact with other stations and vehicles, all of which are in some kind of permanent complex motion in Outer Space. Future humankind taking on the evolutionary challenges of survival and reproductive survival in the vastness and emptiness of Outer Space is one that seeks to overcome the challenges beyond our threshold of remaining earthboundness and dependence exclusively upon earth’s resources for our continuation, growth and support of deep Outer Space efforts.
Perhaps in time, after the fashion of H. G. Wells, but not in the form of the underground “Morlocks” and childlike “Eloi.” Rather, they may well prove to become Space-bound Human species that evolved itself to be dependent upon its own capacities in survival of life across the vast emptiness Space. This will not be of the Age of Homo aquarius, but perhaps a new form (or alternative evolved forms) of “Homo mobilitas.”