[Wōdnes-dæg] Elon Musk, Space Travel, and the Promise of the Future

Introduction
Interpretation
Individuals and Exploration
Playing at an Alternate History
Closing

{Part of the Falcon 9 rocket, while under construction. Photo by Jurvetson (flickr).}

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Introduction

There was an article of note in the Globe and Mail today. Something strange and wonderful. Not that the Globe and Mail having a good article is strange (though it is wonderful) but the content of the article is both of these.

The article is a brief piece that’s straight to the point about it’s headline: “Billionaire businessman cheers a new era of spaceflight.” It’s all about Elon Musk's ship, the Falcon 9, and its launch towards the International Space Station with nonessential supplies.

Marcia Dunn, the article’s author, notes that this flight marked “the first time a commercial spacecraft has been sent to the [International Space Station].”

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Interpretation

That an individual has managed to get a capsule launched into space is either a sign of progress in space exploration, a time when individuals can go into the vast unknown above on their own initiatives or with their own goals in mind, or it's a sign that there are finally people who just have too much money.

In either case, the fact that people can now do what only governments could before is an incredible fact.

And whether it leads to the Federation familiar to Star Trek fans, or to something more dystopian like a lone eccentric billionaire sending fiendishly irradiated spiders into space in capsules rigged with special sunbeam catchers that aggravate the arachnids, forcing them to somehow fully populate their capsules so that he can then threaten the earth with a terrible rain of falling, deadly spiders ('so thick as to blot out clouds and sun,' the eccentric billionaire might declare as his sinister grin appears on every earthly screen) unless his demands are met, is something that will mostly be left to fate.

Mostly.

But what can really be taken away from this article is that all of the talk of things like mining asteroids or sending teams to the moon (maybe Newt Gingrich’s moon colony is closer than any of us can fathom) or Mars have just become one step closer to being turned from science fiction into science fact.

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Individuals and Exploration

Individuals can be dangerous when leading expeditions, either intentionally (think Cortés, and his drive to conquer the Central American interior) or unintentionally (Columbus’ unwittingly bringing European diseases over to the Americas), but at the least they're untrammeled by the slow machinations of large bureaucracies.

Regulations are good, and things like environmental impact definitely need to be considered when launching rockets into space (Cid's launch in Final Fantasy 7 is a light version of what an unregulated launch *could* look like), but too many regulations can weigh down the human spirit and its curiosity.

{Cid's rocket in Final Fantasy 7: a light look at an unregulated launch.}

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Playing at an Alternate History

If Columbus or Cortés had to appear before a court of overseers and assure them that the environmental, social, and physical damage caused by their expeditions would be minimized or non-existent, then the Americas would likely not be the Americas. From a social standpoint, that might have been a much better option from the perspective of all of the First Nations peoples of the Americas who were displaced, destroyed, or disbanded by the Europeans, but from that friction so much was learned.

If there was such a group of overseers in 15th and 16th century Europe, and they turned down the major European explorers’ proposals to sail beyond the sea, would things like cars or planes or computers or the internet have been developed?

Maybe, but the world in which they were would be one very different from ours. And in this brave new world, anyone able to afford his own space capsule would have invariably been someone with a mind twisted by generations of knowing only a strict class system. Someone with the kind of mind that would probably use that fortune to launch metal clouds containing a doom rain of radioactive spiders into orbit rather than a capsule full of supplies to a place in the heavens where once-disparate nations meet and work together to advance human knowledge.

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Closing

Check back here Friday for a hunt for the good in the 2011 adaptation of The Three Musketeers.

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