One summer night last year I found myself at a dinner party that had stretched late into the evening. Enjoying a good Côtes du Rhône and watching distant lightning flickering through the trees outside, I hadn’t been saying much until the subject came around to space. Suddenly I was challenged to justify the notion of exploring not just distant stellar systems but even the nearby planets. And before long I was talking about the need to develop technologies that could help us deflect a potential life-threatening asteroid. At which point one of the guests stopped me cold by saying, “Why should we deflect it? The human race has done little enough. What does it matter if we’re all destroyed?”

Try to talk someone out of that. It’s early 21st Century weltschmzerz in its purest form, writing off all future generations because of a perceived sense of human failure. Not even half a bottle of Côtes du Rhône could take the edge off it.

Reading a recent essay in Acta Astronautica by Giancarlo Genta (Politecnico di Torino) and Martin Rycroft (CAESAR Consultancy, UK) brought that party back to mind. The authors, surveying our cultural attitudes toward discovery and progress since the Renaissance, note that mistrust in science has now, coupled with widespread scientific illiteracy, given way to irrationalism, a belief in pseudo-science, and an acceptance of conspiracy as the dominant mode of human activity. From the paper:

Books asserting absurd ‘truths’, like the belief that humans never set foot on the Moon, even became best sellers. Post-modern philosophy piled confusion upon confusion. When used in an arbitrary way some concepts (usually just sentences, because there are few concepts among these verbal displays) from modern science further enlarged the gap between the ‘two cultures’. In this atmosphere the idea of a space frontier and of a spacefaring civilization was seen by many as the ultimate manifestation of pride. The human species, after wrecking this planet, would only do the same in a larger context.

Which is more or less what my dinner companion believed. But Genta and Rycroft argue that irrationalism may be on the wane and that a movement for long-term space exploration is regaining momentum. This is cheering news for those of us whose focus is on long-term thinking, and in that context the authors discuss the critical need for such exploration in generating resources for sustainable development on Earth. Potential drivers such as advertising and virtual and real space tourism may help to promote public interest in the enterprise. A key is to attract commercial development in areas where profits are too often seen as distant and perhaps unlikely to emerge at all.

In fact, this paper argues that space exploration is as much a matter of commitment as technology, calling for a focus on cost reduction and more research in fields allowing for a return on investment, thus lighting a fire under private and commercial investors. And while the paper examines advanced propulsion, from fusion to still more exotic methods, an equally significant society-changer is materials science, for all major technological revolutions were accompanied by the use of new materials. After a discussion of nano-engineered materials like carbon nanotubes, there follows this interesting thought:

…technology transfer is a powerful means of making progress. Enabling technologies are often not so much the direct consequence of intensive, ‘focused’ research, but the outcome of a progressive technological environment. While in the 1960s and 1970s many new technologies diffused from the aerospace sector into other fields, a transfer in the opposite direction is now possible. Space technology might receive much from fields in which the large scale of production encourages intensive research, such as the automotive field.

But just how large is the space opportunity, and how long will it last? With planetary resources becoming scarcer, our possible future impoverishment could make the exploration of nearby planets, much less the stars, all but impossible. That makes it important to press forward without long delay to bring the benefits of new technology and resources into our culture, obeying what the paper calls the ‘Conscious Life Expansion Principle,’ according to which space exploration is neither an option nor a casual event, but ‘an essential way to spread high-level life beyond the place where it developed.’

Unless, of course, we listen to the argument of my dinner companion, whose bleak outlook finds neither the need for exploration (we’re doomed anyway) nor a real interest in it (our species is flawed — why spread the corruption?). Perhaps a post-prandial Cognac would have brought him out of his torpor. Genta and Rycroft quote Primo Levi, who writes of ‘the obscure obedience to an impulse which originated with life and is inherent to it, the same which causes the seeds of poplars to surround themselves with wool to fly far in the wind, and frogs to migrate obstinately from pond to pond, at the risk of their life…’

Yes, the embrace of risk is a big part of all this, and a stiffening of the collective spine. The lightning is moving closer. Cognac, anyone?

The paper is Genta and Rycroft, “Will Space Actually Be the Final Frontier of Humankind?,” Acta Astronautica 58 (2006), pp. 287-295.