The Final Frontier

Attention denizens of Earth: it’s time to give up the losing battle for saving the environment. The planet has already lost 80% of its forests and continues to be destroyed at the horrifying rate of 375 kilometers cubed per DAY (for those of you who like me are more confused than horrified by that number, it is approximately equal to the total area of the northeastern strip of states from New Jersey to Vermont not counting Pennsylvania, New York.) And just in case forests don’t really float your boat and you’re more of an oceans person, don’t fret, there are hope-abandonment inducing facts for you as well. 27% of coral reefs are already dead and 70% more will join them in their watery demise over by the year 2050.

So now that we have ruined our own planet in a less-than-apocalypse-film-worthy fashion,

Sorry Will Smith, no zombies for you to kill this round

we have one option before us: find a new planet and try our luck again. You live and you learn right? Unfortunately Earth is far to tied up in its political, social and religious conflicts to focus on the most important problem facing us all, our feeble lack of any real progress in space exploration since we stuck it to those Russians in 1969.

Even in the most conservative science fiction, we (at the very least) have lunar colonies by the year 2010. And the worst part of our failure to even attempt further space exploration, is that it isn’t as much from a lack of technology as from a lack of budget (AKA the government not taking space exploration seriously). NASA’s general consensus is that "Human exploration beyond low-Earth orbit is not viable under the FY (fiscal year) 2010 budget guideline."

While NASA is busy ironing out their financial woes and helping Toyota with their “Moving Forward” problems*, the heavy lifting in space exploration has fallen to the private sector. Entrepreneurs like Elon Musk, the South African CEO of Tesla Motors, co-founder of Pay-Pal and Jon Favreau’s inspiration for the character of Tony Stark, have started private space exploration contractors. Musk’s is called SpaceX and it’s Dragon spacecraft successfully completed it’s final high altitude drop test a mere 5 days ago and will be demonstrating it’s first fully operational flight in the near future.

Personally, I don't see it

SpaceX is not the only private space contractor, Virgin Galactic is currently working on its famous passenger spacecrafts and selling tickets to space for the bargain price of $200,000 (monopoly is a beautiful thing, isn’t it Branson?). Even with innovations like these, we are still eons behind in our “continuing mission to explore strange new worlds...to seek out new life; new civilizations. To boldly go where no one has gone before”

And we should probably hurry it up, before this happens

*http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/03/29/AR2010032903784.html

Other references:

http://www.networkworld.com/news/2010/020310-layer8-nasa-future-challenges.html

http://www.networkworld.com/slideshows/2009/091809-layer8-nasa.html#slide1

http://www.spacex.com/press.php?page=20100820

http://www.worldcentric.org/conscious-living/environmental-destruction

http://www.virgingalactic.com/