Becoming a Spacefaring Civilisation — and Saving Earth

We need to expand beyond Earth, but not abandon it: just stop relying on Earth as our only quarry and only site for factories.

Artist’s impression of two O’Neill cylinders anchored together between the Moon and Earth. The spinning cylinders replicate Earth’s gravity, are climate controlled and serve as home for millions of people — with agricultural areas, parkland and cities [Glenn Clovis]

FEEL ANGUISHED about the state of our planet? Care about the future of human civilisation? Then you should heartily support our exploration and settlement of space, because it’s the only thing that’s guaranteed to save us, and our world.

If you think these are bold statements, then your perspective is overly narrow. We almost never take a long-term view to try to understand how we got here — and that’s part of the problem. We can only really understand why we’re edging toward a collapse of our global technological civilisation if we take a long term, holistic view of our world, and our history as a species. From the very beginning.

Homo sapiens first appeared about 250,000 years ago in Africa. For the longest time, we used basic, multipurpose hammering, chopping, and digging implements made by flaking shards from stone, as well as spears, first developed by our hominid ancestors some 3.2 million years earlier. As Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari put it in Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, humans “were insignificant animals with no more impact on their environment than gorillas…