For my 100th post, I would like to ask this question: what do we know about space habitation? When I envision humanity's path to becoming spacefaring, I see a person walking towards a large object in the fog. We are very far away from this large building. Close enough to see that it is, most likely, a building or a boat. You can make out the rough shape of the object, you think. But, by no means can you say for sure what that object is. You have heard myths about a grand temple where the holiest of men gathers and this could be it. But, you do not know all the details of that object, it's name and it's purpose. It's color and it's appearance. You can not tell how well it is maintained from this distance, you just know it's large. You also know, from experience, that it's better to keep move forward then to stay in one place, so you walk towards this object. You follow myth and predictions, but you do not know.
I compare human's place in it's development to the first seconds of sunlight after the darkest part of night. You can make up the rough shapes of objects in the light, it's better then the pitch, black darkness, but you can not exactly tell. You can not read the licence plates and billboards outside your window. We are not even at the dawn of the space age, we are at the first few seconds of the space age's dawn (in terms of our development).
You see, the space community has created tons of predicts on what space habitation will bring humanity. But, we do not know. We can only extrapolate based on what we see in this little bit of light. I think we must wait till the sun raises further on the dawn of the space age to know what benefits space habitation will bring us.
I want you to think about the first seconds of light that glowed on the interconnected age. How could the people who worked with and had passion for the telegraph realize that the idea of sending messages through wires would later change the very social fabric of humanity? Would collapse so many walls and change so many rules? Would they have seen would the telegraph lead to the Internet?
We are in a similar time period. A time period where we do not know what becoming a space faring species will bring us, how it will change us and how the human spirit will adapt to it.
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Am I off base? Can we predict what benefits space habitation will bring us from what we know now? Are we further along in the dawn of the space then the time I predicted (a few seconds in).
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Photo by Steve took it
In Case You Skimmed
-Humanity is not experienced enough in space to know what space will bring us.
-We have enough date to make predictions.
