Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space

acclaim, that 3,500 years ago Jupiter spat out a giant “comet” which made several grazing collisions with the Earth, causing various events chronicled in the ancient books of many peoples (such as the Sun standing still on Joshua’s command), and then transformed itself into the planet Venus. There ire still people N% ho take these notions seriously.

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Io’s volcanos are also the copious source of electrically charged atoms such as oxygen and sulfur that populate a ghostly, doughnut-shaped tube of matter that surrounds Jupiter.

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Although in a few places, such as the slopes of the elevation called Alba Patera, there are multibranched valley networks that by comparison are very young. Somehow, even in the most recent billion years, liquid water seems to have flowed here and there, from time to time, through the deserts of Mars.

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Short for Shergotty-Nakhla-Chassigny. You can see why the acronym is used.

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Even then it wasn’t easy. The Portuguese chronicler Gomes Eanes de Zurara reported this assessment by Prince Henry the Navigator: “It seemed to the Lord Infante that if he or some other lord did not endeavor to gain that knowledge, no mariners nor merchants would ever dare to attempt it, for it is clear that none of them ever trouble themselves to sail to a place where there is not a sure and certain hope of profit.”

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Russell’s phrase is noteworthy: “adventurous and hazardous glory.” Even if we could make human spaceflight risk-free-and of course we cannot-it might be counterproductive. The hazard is an inseparable component of the glory.

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If it had not, perhaps there would today be another planet, a little nearer to or farther from the Sun, on which other, quite different beings would be trying to reconstruct their origins.

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Asteroid 1991JW has an orbit very much like the Earth’s and is even easier to get to than 4660 Nereus. But its orbit seems too similar to the Earth’s for it to be a natural object. Perhaps it’s some lost upper stage of the Saturn V Apollo Moon rocket.

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The Outer Space Treaty, adhered to both by the United States and Russia, prohibits weapons of mass destruction in “outer space.” Asteroid deflection technology constitutes just such a weapon—indeed, the most powerful weapon of mass destruction ever devised. Those interested in developing asteroid deflection technology will want to have the treaty revised. But even with no revision, were a large asteroid to be discovered on impact trajectory with the Earth, presumably no one’s hand would be stayed by the niceties of international diplomacy. There is a danger, though, that relaxing prohibitions on such weapons in space might make us less attentive .bout the positioning of warheads for offensive purposes in space.

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What should we call this world? Naming it after the Greek Fates or Furies or Nemesis seems inappropriate, because whether it misses or hits the Earth is entirely in our hands. If we leave it alone, it misses. If we push it cleverly and precisely, it hits. Maybe we should call it “Eight Ball.”

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There is of course a wide range of other problems brought on by the devastatingly powerful technology we’ve recently invented. But in most cases they’re not Camarinan disasters-damned if you do and damned if you don’t. Instead they’re dilemmas of wisdom or timing-for example, the wrong refrigerant or refrigeration physics out of many possible alternatives.

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In the real world, Chinese space officials are proposing to send a two-person astronaut capsule into orbit by the turn of the century. It would be propelled by a modified LongMarch 2E rocket and be launched from the Gobi Desert. If the Chinese economy exhibits even moderate continuing growth—much less the exponential growth that marked it in the early to mid-1990s—China may be one of the world’s leading space powers by the middle of the twenty-first century. Or earlier.