Motivation

Why travel space at all? 🙄

Similarly to how I already explained in FAQ (opens in a new tab), there is no objectively correct thing to do, ever. That being said, explaining why we should travel space, learn about physics, chemistry, biology and much more is a very tedious task that makes me have to go a long way to do. If you want to skip the pseudo-philosophical aspects, feel free to skip to Pragmatic point of view (opens in a new tab).

"Philosophical" point of view

I will take a quick detour through other fields to be able to better explain our reasons to travel space. Taking regenerative medicine, gene editing and even everyday things like medicine as a whole as an example, you might ask yourself "Why are we doing this?". Besides natural curiosity towards things we don't yet understand, there's good reason to do so. Everyone working in one of these fields might just be trying to create wealth for themselves but the goal these fields were created with were aiming at making (human) lifes better and giving (more) people access to better health.

Assuming most people who die would look back at their life and would've rather lived it than never having been born, there's good reason to give way for more potential lifes to prosper. Spacetravel is the biggest leverage towards this. You can definitely support more lifes on earth than we currently do and you can definitely decrease hunger in the world to increase the average quality of life but that doesn't conflict with going to space to increase the amount of resources and living space you have as a species.

The most common argument against space exploration and space colonization is "Why not fix earth instead?" - However, for both of these activities to be conflicting with each others, it would have to take the same people for them to be accomplished. This isn't the case, though. You can have the small amount of people who are physically fit enough, intelligent enough and educated enough to travel to and colonize other planets do exactly that and you can have everyone else try their best to fight against climate change at the same time.

The only other argument that could make spacetravel irrational then would be if it took a great toll on our climate, which it does not because of the very low amount of spaceflights humanity takes as opposed to the gigantic amount of methane and CO₂ the meat-, oil- and car industry put out every day.

Pragmatic point of view

As we will learn throughout a later chapter (spoiler 😰), by using all resources from just our solar system, we could support more than a hundredful of the current population of our planet. If we assume human lifes to be worth living at all, there's no reason to hold all of these people back from living their lifes. In fact, every year we waste is a year of delay in our timely limited accumulation of human lifes that will ultimately lead to less lifes being lived.

Additionally to that, more people being alive means more work being done means more progress in any technological branch attended by those people, meaning we as a species are able to support better, more healthy and more happy lifes as we grow, similarly to how we did over the last couple thousands of years.

As you might have noticed, it's really not hard to reason for space exploration, so I'll go ahead and call it a day. I'm sure y'all got it by now.