Imagine you are an alien species that has evolved on a small green island somewhere on a very large planet, whose surface is mostly water with a sprinkle of small islands, most of which are either frozen or blazingly hot, or for some other reason, inhospitable. With recent advances in technology, your species is beginning to discover other islands nearby, and a realization is starting to dawn among the intellectuals in your society that your island is perhaps too good to be true - lush forests with eternal streams of fresh water surround fertile farms that produce plentiful and a wide variety of crops every year. Over the last few centuries, your species has mastered enough technology, and with technological and social advancement, the population of your Island called Earland, has now stabilized to a densely populated but an efficient and culturally enriched civillization. Most individuals of your species are preoccupied with living on this beautiful island, and they do not understand why anyone would look for more space to live.
In spite of these gains, some of your species, including you, are extremely curious, just like your nomadic ancestors who eventually expanded and settled the whole Earland island. You want to find out what other kinds of islands are out there, and if there is anyone like you out there, also wondering about you. You are also worried about the future. Your scientists have found archeological evidence that many other species existed on your island long before your species came along, that have long since vanished without a trace. Evidence has also been found for others that went extinct because of disease, and that at certain prehistorical times, large Tsunamis and volcanic events destroyed virtually all complex life on your island. You believe that all the eggs are in one basket. For your species to survive, a second island is needed as a home.
This is the first time your group is trying to set up a permanent base on another island to save your species from the virtually guaranteed long-term extinction. Not surprisingly, the general lack of awareness among most members of your democratic society has resulted in only small amounts of public resource being allocated for this task, which is a lot less than the amount your society spends on football games. Assuming no major technologicalbreakthrough, for the next 20 years there is only going to be enough money and resource to perhaps explore and settle just one new island. Maybe after 20 years, if you can prove to your society that all the eggs do not have to be in one basket, and that there is really an alternative, they will allocate you more resources for further exploration. If you fail, perhaps the current trickle of funds will also dry up, and perhaps it would be too late for the next Tsunami, the next eruption of the dormant volcano on your island, or the next big plague. With the increasing integration in the recent years of people from various parts of your island, the risk of a disease wiping everyone out has becoming more likely.
Your recently developed telescopes have revealed a nearby island called Marland which is barely habitable, but which can be easily improved within a few decades to become lush and green like your island, and support a large population - it has large amounts of fresh water and land that could be made arable, and is only a bit colder than Earland. In fact there is some evidence of existing and past greenery on it. Discovering these organisms would reveal answers to your own origins. Did you come to Earland from another island, or did you evolve independently.
The other options are extremely hot, cold, or very far away islands that could be habitable - no one even knows for sure that another fertile island exists. It might be 50 to 200 years before your technology will allow visiting one of these farther, potentially habitable islands, and without technology to visit the nearby Marland, such technology will never develop. You will have to develop ships that can travel 10,000 times or more faster than current ships, and then travel to these distant dreamlands over many years. And once you reach there, for all you know it might be already occupied by other people, who may not welcome the colonization effort. You are also scared that they might be having the same ideas. For now, your species is trying to build stronger telescopes to find if there are any other fertile islands at all.
There is also a nearby extremely barren land, called the Moonland, where you can only live inside caves, and it has perhaps a tiny amount of fresh water frozen deep inside one cave. There is no life on this island, and can never be. You enjoy looking at the strange desolate landscape of Moonland from your island; the contrast with the lush greenery around you is bewildering and a bit disorienting. Someone has to be crazy to want to settle down on the Moonland, although there are a few astronomers who would love to be under the clear sky of this dry island. The promising island of Marland is reachable in 6 months with your boats. Now the dumb question is- where should your species go first?
- Distant frozen islands. Not reachable for another 50 to 200 years.
- Marland: a large island that could be easily made habitable, and that can support a large population. 6 months trip.
- Moonland: the barren nearby island that is 2 days trip but has nothing on it. You have explored it before and found nothing too interesting on it, besides a base for astronomy.
- Camp in the open sea nearby.
The answer is trivially obvious to you, but unfortunately there is politics involved, and people are still arguing about which island to visit first. Many are not even aware of the differences between the islands' habitability and are clamoring for setting a big camping site on the nearby barren island first, and then trying to grow food in caves by using a complex set of mirrors to get sunlight in. And even more amazingly, there are people who have been camping a few 100 feet out in the Sea for months and years, in open, unprotected boats. It takes them a few minutes to get to this 100-feet-off-the-shore camp, and these campers keep coming ashore for food and your society keeps sending them everything they need, although support has recently been declining after a few fatal accidents in which some people drowned trying to make this back-and-forth trip for more food/relief. This has been going on for over 30 years now, and it has been 35 years since your people last camped on the barren Moonland.
The campers are being funded by many groups in your island, and they claim their camping in the open, nearby water is justified because they are trying to figure out the effects of spending many years in the ocean on members of your species - especially the effect of open sun, wind, and saline water. You try to tell them that we could design enclosed vessels to go to Marland, so they don't have to waste time figuring out the long-term effect of open weather on travellers, but all goes down a deaf ear. Obviously you cannot deprive them of the only argument they have for their existence; a large number of people are employed by your government to keep these camping trips going, and these people are scared of losing their jobs. It is a political hot-button issue, but the utter wastefulness of the whole situation is very evident to exploration-minded people like you. What should you do (besides writing and reading this blog)?
Connection with reality:
I guess at this point, to anybody who is interested in space exploration, it must be clear that this story was a metaphor to demonstrate all sorts of issues with (1) exploration focussed either on low-Earth-orbit, or (2) on the Moon, or (3) no exploration and colonization at all. The large open ocean is our solar system, camping in space is bringing all your consumables along and throwing the unprocessed trash out. The open-camping is worse and corresponds to a space-station with no gravity- it is somewhat trivial to create artificial gravity by spinning a habitat on a long tether with a counterweight on the other end. There are ways to get around radiation problem similarly with just water and fuel surrounding you! The main motivation people give for the space-station is: "We are trying to figure out the long-term effects of zero-gravity and radiation exposure on human beings and how to mitigate it before we can go to Mars!"
Exploration of other places for the sake of exploration is good and I support that, but until we learn to live as a separate colony on the most hospitable planet outside Earth i.e. Mars, it would be pointless to try to develop a base on all the more inhospitable places using more exotic technology. It is equally pointless to camp in space where there are no resources, or to try to design near-100% recyclable systems- if you are on the surface of a planet, the system does not have to be closed, as you can draw in resources (air, water, soil), use it to generate useful materials, and then dump the treated waste out- similar to the process used by responsible but densely populated countries such as Belgium, Germany or Japan (a popular misconception is that US is good at this just because it is a developed country. Ask yourself if you live in USA- how do you dispose off your AA batteries and plastic wastes?).
There are very few locations in our solar system which will support more than just a camping mission in the foreseeable future. One such planet is Mars. It has all the raw resources that Earth has in a readily usable form- water, minerals, soil, air and last but not the least, protection against cosmic rays and solar wind in large areas of the planet (see my earlier blog on this issue). It is the stepping stone to exploring and colonizing the rest of the Universe. That is what all the fuss is about!
The Planetary Society represents the largest public space advocacy group, and it has made an official policy over the last few years that the manned exploration of Mars should be THE next goal for us. Unfortunately, soon after the big Moon-Mars initiative was announced by President Bush in 2004 (which prompted the original version of this story), the implementation got bogged down in petty politics and it has now become mainly a Moon initiative, with a use-and-throw program that provides the capability to camp on the moon for a few days by 2018, with hardware that will be hardly of any use beyond that. Things are already starting to break down as the political support for even the Moon program has started to waver, and the funding is once again not being given to the point needed- NASA is slowly shrinking the Moon program by throwing out critical pieces that would have made the program usable for Mars missions. All this is happening even though the Moon manned program is supposed to be a rehearsal for the eventual colonization of Mars. Tens of billions of dollars are still being wasted on keeping the camping in the low-earth orbit going, in spite of the fact that if this money was diverted on developing systems for a robust and permanent settlement of Mars, we would get the low-earth camping (by 2010) and the Moon-base (by 2012) for almost free, and we would reach Mars by 2016 rather than in 2036 (A date 30 years in the future means that for all you know, it will not happen).
