Have we given up on space?

Spaced Out - Aeon Magazine

I was more a child of the 80s than the author's 70s; but on the other hand, I was raised more on older science fiction novels than contemporary science fiction movies.

It does seem like we've largely given up the explorer's impulse--one that still seemed part of the geekier side of the culture into the 80s, or even into the 90s with the popularity of Star Trek: The Next Generation. But there's no talk now about going boldly. It almost seems...with the second space shuttle disaster, we turned out the lights and shut the door on that era.

Have we no more tolerance, let alone appetite, for risk? Then we have entered the senescence of our species.

The Fermi Paradox

The Fermi Paradox. On the search for extraterrestrial life, and why we haven't found it.

There's a lot here, a lot to ponder and chew on. So go read the article and give it some time.  I'll need to re-read it, for sure.

A couple of largely pessimistic reactions that I have:

•  The "we're fucked" option is highly likely, if not so iron-clad as the article and accompanying diagram present. Because of the following fairly straightforward logic: it's easier to be clever than wise.  Our technology will develop faster than our personal-ethical or social-political structures. Through a combination of inadvertence and malevolence, we will have the capacity to destroy ourselves before we have the restraint not to. And this will be true in principle for any sufficiently technological civilization.
• Once civilizations become interplanetary, on their way to becoming intergalactic, they will encounter, and fight with, other such. It's hard to imagine life forms that have succeeded in the competition of evolution that are not aggressively competitive for resources. It's hard to even imagine them evolving beyond instinctual xenophobia, though I think that's at least possible. In any case, the resulting conflicts may not leave many such civilizations living at the end of them. Maybe more than one in the galaxy--but maybe not many more. 

Exploring

The universe is probably littered with the one-planet graves of cultures which made the sensible economic decision that there's no good reason to go into space -- each discovered, studied, and remembered by the ones who made the irrational decision -- Randall Munroe

There is a left-wing critique of space exploration: it's too expensive, too resource-intensive, and too diverting of attention when there are (often grave) human needs to be attended to right here.

This ignores the question: what are we living for? As individuals. As a species. As nations, if we insist in continuing to divide ourselves in that manner. One of the answers we have consistently found, at least since the days that humans left their African homeland and spread out across the earth, is to explore new places, learn about them, and settle them.

The last point--the settling--points to a dark side to this tendency. We have a tendency to destroy what's already there. We should maintain our awareness of this tendency and let it temper what we do when we explore. But explore we must. It is an essential component of who we are, one of the reasons and rewards for carrying on with our lives.