1. INTRODUCTION

This is an historic time for humanity and also one of the most challenging times as well. We stand on the threshold of becoming a space faring civilization shedding the bonds that have tied us to Earth since the very beginnings of the planet’s history. In the last 40 years, we have looked back at Earth from space, walked on our moon, sent robotic probes to most of the planets, moons and even some of the asteroids of our solar system. We have explored the depths of our galaxy and the visible universe with both Earth and spaced based telescopes and instrumentation. Later this century we will very likely walk on the surface of another planet. Why? Humanity has always had an insatiable appetite to know, for adventure and a remarkable curiosity to explore the unknown. In spite of the sacrifices and challenges required, history has shown over and over the benefits and rewards of exploration have always far exceeded expectations and mostly in ways that were impossible to predict. No doubt such will be the case again in the exploration of space.

There are many other reasons to travel to other worlds and beyond besides the urge to explore the unknown. One is the obvious long term motivation to become an inter-stellar space faring civilization. At some point in the distant future we will have no choice but to leave our home world. Our sun, already a middle aged star, is powered by fusing hydrogen in the nuclear inferno at its core. As the remaining fuel is consumed, the sun will continue to expand in size and with it the intensity of the radiation increasing at the planets. Already the sun’s output is 15% greater than it was a few billion years ago and eventually it will destroy all life on the planet. The long term prognosis is that the sun will expand to such a large degree that in due course it will cause our oceans to boil away into the vacuum of space leaving an uninhabitable desert wasteland behind.

More immediate concerns for inter-planetary travel but perhaps less well known by most of humanity are the issues associated with insuring a sustainable future for our civilization. Much of our planet’s non renewable resources such as ores and precious metals will not last forever especially with our already large and exponentially growing population. Mining and refining these ores in space for shipment to Earth will be necessary within short order if we are to maintain and broaden our current standard of living on the planet. Establishment of space colonies will also teach us much about sustainability issues and many will have direct applicability to the future of Earth. Until now our planet has had a thriving ecosystem because nature has long ago evolved and fine tuned Earth’s biogeochemical processes to maintain its long term stability. That stability is now being threatened by our own doing.

2. SPACESHIP EARTH

The visionary Buckminister Fuller often referred to our planet as “Spaceship Earth”. It was his firm belief that we must all work together as a crew of Spaceship Earth if we are to survive let alone continue to thrive upon it, along with all other living creatures that share our beautiful planet. The available evidence suggests that global population growth fueled by our modern technologies of the last 100 years have created an unsustainable trajectory for all life on the planet. Our unprecedented consumption of nonrenewable resources and increasingly strong indications of run-away climate change have been greatly exacerbated by human activity of the last century. Together these factors suggest that we may soon be facing our first mass extinction event due to human activities. All previous extinction events have resulted from natural causes such as large meteor impacts or super-volcanic eruptions. Are we about to experience one due to our own inattention and misperceptions of how nature has maintained Earth’s environment over its entire history by our propensity to interrupt her natural processes on a massive scale?

Exploiting resources of the solar system, creating colonies in space, exploration of other planets, establishing colonies on them and eventually travel to other star systems offers us many lessons for a sustainable Earth although initially on a much smaller scale. Of necessity space colonies will have to be mostly self sufficient because of the vast distances from Earth. Aside from the long travel times to reach these remote outposts, the associated costs of shipping supplies and replacements parts will be prohibitively expensive. Our space colonies will be forced to live as close to self sufficiency as possible by utilizing local resources whenever practical. They will also have to make extensive use of recycling, reusing discarded materials and reducing consumption on a scale that has here-to-for been unprecedented. In a very real sense, space colonies will have to emulate consciously what nature has been doing for billions of years on Earth.

Because of vested interests, short sightedness or personal short term gain all at the expense of long term sustainability, our politicians, many of our leaders and most of our citizenry have ignored, misunderstood or misrepresented the magnitude and nature of the issues facing our civilization for far too long. Perhaps even most pressing is our propensity to resolve our differences by violent rather than by peaceful means. Our technologies are now so powerful that not only do they enable us to explore the solar system but they are the very same ones that may lead to our demise if used to promote the goals of one group at the expense of others. Clearly before we can truly call ourselves a space faring civilization we must put aside these petty differences that are often driven by intolerance, greed, the need for power or the need for control that divide us.

Five hundred years ago Christopher Columbus convinced Queen Isabel and King Fernando of Spain to fund a voyage to find an alternate route to India. Imagine the courage it took to make that journey. Even though most scholars at the time knew that the world was spherical, the consensus view of humanity was still that of a flat Earth. Casting aside those concerns of his crew, Columbus was aware that the trip would likely to be fraught with many unknown and unforeseen dangers. There was also the problem of estimating the duration of the trip and determining the provisions required to sustain the expedition on their journey. As the days stretched into weeks and the weeks into months, the mutinous clamor of the crew increased daily. Finally after 2 1/2 months that eventful journey finally sighted land and what followed became our history. Unfortunately for Columbus he never reached India, but instead opened up a whole new world that happened to be in the way.

If we can get beyond the issues described above and some day land on that first foreign planet, surely whole new worlds will open up for us just as they did for those early European explorers. At that point we will finally be ready to assume our destiny as a space faring civilization. We will go not as citizens of the United States, the United Kingdom, China, Russia or any of the other 195 or so countries of this planet but instead as citizens of planet Earth. We will go with a common vision and mission for the betterment of all mankind. No other activity will unite the citizens of the world in a nobler endeavor. After early exploratory missions, our first objective should be a permanent colony on the moon and our second will most likely the establishment of one on Mars. The first manned colonies on both will be far more expensive and far more perilous than Columbus or his crews could have ever imagined. Columbus’ journey was financed by the court of Spain. Permanent colonies beyond Earth will be far too expensive for even the richest nations on Earth. They will likely be funded of necessity by a consortium of nations representing all of mankind. Our explorations and colonization will be full of challenges, fraught with dangers, but filled with incredible and unforeseen rewards and benefits to us all and to our progeny for many generations to come.

3. THE HUMAN MISSION TO MARS

Our first manned mission to Mars will not be too different from the first moon exploration, simply short term and exploratory. The long distance and long travel time to Mars of 9 months or more one way (with existing technologies) require special consideration which is the subject of a separate paper. Plans to originate Mars colonization from moon colonies established for deep space exploration have been proposed. It is argued that the moon’s lower mass and therefore much lower gravity, 1/6 of Earth’s, translates to greatly reduced costs of launching missions into deep space. Many of the raw materials and resources required to sustain the crew on our early interplanetary missions might possibly be mined from the moon greatly reducing the costs. Newly discovered water if available in sufficient quantity might be mined for human use, and its constituents, oxygen for human consumption along with hydrogen for fuel. Carbon, iron and several other elements will also likely be mined for a variety of purposes. Together they will make up a significant portion of the total resources required for our first interplanetary colonists.

Establishing a fully self sufficient colony on the moon as a stepping stone to the planets will not come cheaply and may prove not to be feasible at all. However, the moon will be a great laboratory and learning environment for the kinds of obstacles, living conditions, and hazards that will also have to be faced on Mars or more distant venues. In some cases the hazards on the moon are even more severe than the Martian environment. For example solar radiation, solar wind, micrometeorites, and 500 degree temperature gradients are far more indicative of what our space explorers will experience during the trip to Mars than the extremes that will be encountered on the Martian surface. The knowledge gained and the technologies developed to support permanent bases on the moon will greatly benefit both for our first voyages to Mars as well as the first Martian colonies and even worlds beyond.

4. A FRIENDLY UNIVERSE?

Interplanetary exploration aside, there is no certainty that we will survive the gathering storm on Earth of the man made challenges to our survival. If we do endure, it is likely that we will eventually meet other intelligent technological civilizations in this increasingly apparent life friendly universe that we live in if we haven’t already done so. Hopefully these civilizations will have solved once and for all many of the dilemmas currently facing humanity. Clearly any civilization that mastered the technological challenges of interstellar travel will most likely be much older and far more advanced than us in many ways that we cannot even conceive. They will also likely be much wiser in how they utilize their technologies. When we begin a dialogue with them, perhaps our first order of business should be to find out how they managed to get beyond the civilization threatening technological adolescent stage in which we on Earth are now engaged.

What might such a civilization be like? Because they will likely have evolved under very different circumstances and timeframes, they would certainly have taken evolutionary pathways very different from us. Once they reached the technological stage they would have many different alternatives for future evolutionary growth. Some might be based on unpredictable natural events but eventually most will be accomplished by conscious evolution.

It is very easy to fall into a trap by speculating why we have not already encountered signs of extra-terrestrial civilizations using Fermi’s 50 year old paradox “Where is everybody?”. Anthropic assumptions and arguments must be evaluated with considerable caution and thought. As I (Edgar Mitchell) have often pointed out in my lectures, 140 years ago, my great grandparents migrated from Georgia to Texas in a covered wagon. The automobile, trains, airplanes, indoor plumbing, electric lights, telephone, radio, electronics, etc. had not yet been invented. And, yet, one hundred and forty years later I went to the moon. The rate of technological advancement in such a short period of time has been absolutely astounding. Where might we be in ten thousand, one hundred thousand, or even several million years hence?

If we were somehow able to transport modern technologies back just two thousand years, what would that ancient society make of it? What if we went back ten thousand years and tried to explain to a caveman the operating principles and purposes of the international space station (ISS)? Clearly our ancient ancestors would not have any basis for understanding what we were trying to communicate. To take this to the extreme, how about trying to explain the ISS to an ant colony? Perhaps this analogy is the appropriate one with regard to advanced extra-terrestrial civilizations.

UFO lore aside, one of the common arguments that many use claiming why we have not yet been visited by intelligent civilizations is due to the difficulty in traversing the tremendous distances in interstellar space. Our current understanding of nature tells us that the maximum velocity that any object can reach is the speed of light in a vacuum or 186,000 miles per second. At that rate at trip to the nearest star system Alpha Centauri, would take about 4.2 years. Clearly reaching that speed is currently well beyond the realm of possibilities for humankind. At best we can currently achieve is 1/1000 of light speed so at that speed it would take us 4,200 years to reach this destination. By extrapolation and linear projections using today’s technologies, perhaps in several hundred years we will have advanced our technologies to the point where we can reach a reasonable fraction of the speed of light.. At 1/10 the speed of light a trip would only take 42 years or so.

5. THE UNIVERSE REMAINS TO BE DISCOVERED

Travel time is not our only problem though. Imagine the supplies needed and the problem of maintaining an appropriate sustainable environment for the crew for a 42 year one way trip. And then there’s the issue of keeping the ship operational for such a long period. Think of the energy requirements that would be needed to sustain such a trip just to keep the ships systems working let alone the energy requirements for the ship’s propulsion systems. For all these reasons plus several others we have not bothered to mention, many “experts” conclude that we are a very long way away from the practicality of embarking on such a trip. According to them our only hope of interstellar contact would be to stay at home and try to communicate with an alien civilization via some form of communication mechanism such as powerful narrow band radio or laser beams. And, even then the round trip delay of such a message to our closest neighbor would take about 9 years. Certainly this does not seem like an encouraging prospect for two-way interstellar communications. A monologue perhaps.

The speed of light limitation is based on current human knowledge and our current understanding of the laws of nature. But, history has shown over and over how quickly our understanding can change. One hundred years ago the British scientist Lord Kelvin was discouraging physics students from entering the field of physics because, according to him, all the laws of nature had already been discovered and all that remained was to improve the accuracy of nature’s constants to 6 decimal points. Of course we now know how naive that opinion was because within just a few years after his pronouncement, relativity, quantum physics, and many new discoveries in astronomy and cosmology burst upon the scene. Without many of these discoveries our modern technology based civilization would not be possible.

Nature reluctantly reveals itself and scientists often have a vested interested in maintaining the status quo. Max Planck, the father of modern quantum theory eloquently pointed this out with his now famous quote “Science advances funeral by funeral”. The universe has had at least 13.7 billion years to evolve to its current level of complexity. Surely our science which has only been a formal discipline for the last 400 years is incomplete, in some areas likely incorrect and has a long way to go before it reveals all of nature’s secrets to us.

When Columbus made his first voyage across the Atlantic Ocean, the average speed of travel by ship was about 2 miles per hour. Even today, 500 years later, the maximum speed of surface ships traveling in the open ocean has increased only by a factor of 20, enough of an improvement to reduce the ocean transit time from 2 1/2 months to less than a week. But that’s based on a linear projection of the past. We have also developed new technologies that have given us exponential improvements in transit time. Today’s commercial airplanes cross the ocean in 5 hours or another factor of 24 increase in speed. With rocket propulsion we gain a further reduction of transit time to a mere 30 minutes, a factor of 10 in further reduction of transit time. Could Columbus have ever imagined technologies that could reduce his transit time by a factor of 3600?

6. THE FUTURE AND ADVANCED CIVILIZATIONS

It is highly likely that our not too distant progeny have an understanding of laws of nature that will be far beyond what we in the 21st century understand. Consider the current rate of growth of knowledge which has been following an exponential growth curve; thus doubling the rate of new knowledge acquisition every two years. Think about the fact that our science is on the verge of being able to genetically engineer the human genome. Based at the current rate of progress in molecular and cellular biology and genetics, it is not very difficult to extrapolate that within a mere few hundred or so years we will have the ability to engineer ourselves with capabilities beyond our wildest dreams of today. By then we will probably have conquered all genetic diseases and will have deliberately endowed ourselves with an immune system that can survive any known viral or bacterial infections. Perhaps, barring accidents, we will also be able to live indefinitely. Certainly our planet, our social systems and our cultural systems will not be able to deal with a human population with such extreme longevity.

At the same time surely our space faring technologies will advance to a much more highly developed state. Will we have any choice but to head for the stars? With extreme longevity, will it matter how long it takes at sub light speed to travel to the stars? If our interstellar travelers got bored with such a journey there would always be the possibility that they could used some form of suspended animation or hibernation for most of the journey. Perhaps they will undertake such journeys with a complete self contained colony within their space craft.

Let us now imagine an alien technological civilization thousands or millions of years beyond our own. If we are within several hundred years of having the capabilities described above, what might an advanced civilization be like? Would they have revealed nature’s secrets such that they could traverse the void of space by faster than light travel? Could travel to Alpha Centauri be reduced to a matter of a few days similar to today’s trip duration to the moon? Could that be accomplished by manipulating gravity or even the speed of light itself, perhaps by warping space or traversing it through wormholes, or, even by some other means we cannot even begin to imagine? Futurist and science fiction author, Arthur C Clarke, is often quoted “With any highly advanced technological civilization, their technologies would seem like magic to us.” To think that we have already uncovered all of nature’s secrets is certainly sheer folly.

Given the incredible multitude of stars, the vastness of space, and the possibility of several thousand space faring civilizations thousands to millions of years older than us in our galaxy alone, can there be any doubt that sooner or later we will finally meet them? What might be the consciousness, ethics, morality and values of such a civilization? Certainly nature requires no special morality or ethics to tap into and utilize its secrets. Whatever is built into the belief systems of the discoverer will be utilized when these capabilities are finally unveiled and understood. These belief systems can be highly evolved and saintly or war-like and demonic; either way will be fine with nature for it takes no sides. Humans, for example, have uncovered many of the secrets of unleashing the energy stored within atoms. This knowledge can and has been used for peaceful purposes such as the generation of electricity or it has also been used to build nuclear weapons which can destroy us all. Certainly for humans, our morals, values and ethics have not kept pace with our technological prowess.

Perhaps for these reasons, by necessity, extra-terrestrial civilizations have survived and evolved far beyond technological adolescence and have developed the technologies for inter-stellar travel because they have evolved to higher states of consciousness. If so, they will likely have recognized the need to live in harmony with nature and all that that implies. This would likely include highly evolved self-discipline, ethics, and universal spiritual values first less they would have otherwise long ago destroyed themselves by their command of such powerful technologies.

7. THE CONSCIOUS COSMOS

States of consciousness have been studied for centuries by Tibetan Buddhist monks. The most profound state they refer to is known as Nirvikalpa Samadhi. It is a level of the highest spiritual attainment and evolution, the state of deep undifferentiated awareness in which there is only the Self within a transcendent observing entity. There are no thoughts or objects in mind. It is a state beyond time and space. The Self expands and merges into the entire field of mind so that pure awareness is all that exists. After attaining this state one has complete understanding of cosmic wisdom and one feels that he is in complete union with the Creative Source of all that is. At this point all ordinary concerns and everything else become subordinate to this union and lose all meaning. In this state unconditional love is the organizing principle of the universe. We do not mean to imply that all highly advanced extraterrestrial civilizations have reached such a state. Perhaps the oldest and most advanced have. It is likely that if their entire civilization and all individuals comprising it had reached it, they likely would no longer be interested with the Earthly concerns of humans on this little remote planet in the backwaters of the Milky Way Galaxy.

It is more likely that for evolved self reflective beings throughout the cosmos, there is a spectrum of consciousness that reaches from two extremes. On the left end of this spectrum a state of consciousness exists with concern only for promoting the self, accompanied with outright disdain or malevolence towards other living beings. On the opposite end of such a spectrum perhaps is a state of consciousness similar to Nirvikalpa Samadhi. On such a cosmic scale most humans would be placed to left of center busily pursuing their own self interests where their use of technology has far outpaced the values and ethics necessary to use them wisely. Our expectation is that extra-terrestrial intelligences are shifted by varying degrees beyond human civilization more to the right end of the spectrum. Hopefully as humanity takes its place among space faring civilizations we will evolve more to the right as well. If human history teaches us anything, failure to do so is no longer a viable option.