SPACE AND THE FUTURE

If we put the killer satellites up there, then we want to put laser particle beams up there, which are said to be defensive. But whoever does it first, the other side will do it, and then you have to find some way of escalating beyond that to counter that weapon. And it takes trillions of dollars to go into another round of escalation, which is more deadly than nuclear. I believe if we go along that path, we will not be allowed to continue very far as a human race because it’s simply too deadly.

The beauty of this space issue is that it’s not just an anti-issue. If the United States were to say we are going to put no more weapons in space, no weapons in space, we are going to start initiatives with the Soviet Union and others for peace keeping, monitoring and surveillance systems, and we are going to initiate a totally life-oriented act—to utilize the resources in space for all people who wish to cooperate with us. You could take this negative issue and build on it the positive option, which is the development of a new environmental niche for the human race. I think the U.S. should take this positive initiative and place in it the demilitarization of space as a secondary element. In other words, go for the positive, and the positive is so powerful that it will require any antagonist on earth to follow us in the positive.

Right now, the United States is reacting in the negative. Somebody does something, we react, and then we do something, and they react. I like to see us proact for the positive and change the game of the world.

The potential for space in a nutshell is that the human race is a universal species. We are no longer bound to planet Earth. Right within our solar system there are the materials of 1000 earths, on the moon, the asteroids, solar energy from space. Once we establish a non-terrestrial resource base on the moon, where we no longer have to cart things up from earth to build in space, where we gain access to those new materials, the human race has an infinite environmental niche. This is as significant as the fish coming out of the sea onto the dry land. But first they had to go back to survive. Eventually they became reptiles and then mammals and now us. When we establish a non-terrestrial base, we will become a new species. There will be no resource shortage, no energy shortage, no space shortage. We have a 20-to-50-year time frame, an evolutionary window, before we run out of energy and collapse into disintegration.

To establish that, when we do, we will be able to restore the environment of this earth without suppressing human growth. Space is a necessity. Space is an absolute necessity for human survival if we wish to optimize and fulfill our potentials. Now there are scenarios you can imagine where we suppress growth, stay in a closed system and cut out our high technologies. But that is like being a retarded child. We could become a retarded planet and there are people advocating that we retard ourselves. I don’t think that’s at all right.

And there’s an interesting phenomenon that there’s a whole set of high technologies that are appropriate for outer space and destructive on Earth. They include nuclear—the sun is a thermonuclear explosion. Nuclear energy and nuclear bombs could be used to propel us for long distance space travel where there is no biosphere to be damaged. So nuclear is perfectly alright and space.

Secondly, the whole technology of bioengineering, and new life forms and life extension would not be good on this earth because we’re already overpopulated. You wouldn’t want to live to 100, 150, 200. What if you could do cosmic travel? You may need all these capacities to extend life or hibernate your body or clone your body, because this body was designed for Earth, not for space. But in space we’re going to be able to change our bodies. Cybernetics and robotics can do all the work. On Earth, it becomes a deadly dehumanization. But if you’re going to travel throughout the universe and send the little machines out there as your eyes and ears, you need those robots. So we’re going to take some of those high technologies, use them in outer space. This Earth becomes a new garden, and the human individual has a choice—of becoming an earth person or a star child.