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HUMANITY BEGAN IN Africa. But we didn’t stay there, not all of us—over thousands
of years our ancestors walked everywhere the continent, then out of it. And once
they came to the ocean , they built boats and sailed tremendous distances to islands they
might not have known were there. Why?
Because it’s something citizenry do.
Space is, of course, infinitely more hostile to human life than the surface of the sea;
escaping Earth’s gravity entails an honest deal more work and expense than
shoving faraway from the shore. But those boats were the cutting-edge technology of
their time. Voyagers carefully planned their expensive, dangerous journeys, and lots
of of them died trying to seek out out what was beyond the horizon. So why keep doing
it?
I feel that it'd be good for us to unite behind a project that doesn’t involve killing each
other , that does involve understanding our home planet and therefore the ways we
survive thereon and what things are crucial to our continuing to survive thereon .
“Humanity was born on Earth. Are we getting to stay here? I suspect—I hope—the
answer is not any .” —Ann Leckie

Powerful forces conspire against you if you would like to urge faraway from Earth—
specifically, gravity. If an object on Earth’s surface wants to fly free,
it must increase and out at speeds exceeding 25,000 mph.
Composite materials like exotic-metal alloys and fibered sheets could reduce the weight;
combine that with more efficient, more powerful fuel mixtures and you get a much
bigger bang for your booster. But the last word money saver are going to be reusability.
SpaceX’s Falcon 9, for instance , was designed to relaunch time and again. The more
you attend space, the cheaper it gets.

The larger an object’s mass, the more force it takes to maneuver it—and rockets
are quite massive. Chemical propellants are great for an initial push, but your precious
kerosene will spend during a matter of minutes. then , expect to succeed in the moons of
Jupiter in, oh, five to seven years.

Suppose you've got successfully launched a rocket into orbit. But before you forced an
entry space , a rogue little bit of broke-ass satellite comes from out of nowhere and caps
your second-stage fuel tank. No more rocket.
This is the matter of space debris, and it’s very real. The US Space Surveillance Network
has eyes on 17,000 objects—each a minimum of the dimensions of a softball—hurtling
around Earth at speeds of quite 17,500 mph; if you count pieces under 10 centimeters,
it’s closer to 500,000 objects. Launch adapters, lens covers, even a fleck of paint can
punch a crater in critical systems.
Pulling the sats out of orbit isn’t realistic—it would take an entire mission to
capture only one . So starting now, all satellites will need to fall out of orbit on their
own. Put decommissioning programs in 90 percent of latest launches or you’ll get the
Kessler syndrome: One collision results in more collisions until there’s such a
lot clog there, nobody can fly in the least .

Outside the safe cocoon of Earth’s atmosphere and magnetic flux , subatomic particles
zip around at on the brink of the speed of sunshine . this is often space radiation, and it’s
deadly. apart from cancer, it also can cause cataracts and possibly Alzheimer’s.
When these particles knock into the atoms of aluminum that structure a spacecraft hull,
their nuclei magnify , emitting yet more superfast particles called secondary radiation. a
far better solution? Plastics. They’re light and powerful , and they’re filled
with hydrogen atoms, whose small nuclei don’t produce much secondary radiation.
Lettuce is when astronauts on the ISS ate a couple of leaves they’d grown in space
for the primary time. But large-scale gardening in zero g is hard . Water wants to float
around in bubbles rather than trickling through soil, so engineers have devised ceramic
tubes that wick it right down to the plants’ roots. Proteins, fats, and carbs could come
from a more diverse harvest—like potatoes and peanuts.
All that’s for naught, though, if you run out of water.

Weightlessness wrecks the body: It makes certain immune cells unable to try to to their
jobs, and red blood cells explode. It gives you kidney stones and makes your heart lazy.
Astronauts on the ISS exercise to combat muscle wasting and bone loss, but they still
lose bone mass in space, and people zero-g spin cycles don’t help the opposite problems.
Artificial gravity would fix all that. A spinning spaceship might be shaped sort of
a dumbbell, with two chambers connected by a truss. because it gets easier to send more
mass into space, designers could become more ambitious—but they don’t need
to reinvent the wheel.
When space caravans embark from Earth, they’ll leave filled with supplies. But you
can’t take everything with you. Seeds, oxygen generators, maybe a couple of machines
for building infrastructure. But settlers will need to harvest or make everything else.

Luckily, space is way from barren. “Every planet has every element in it,” says Ian
Crawford, a planetary scientist at Birbeck, University of London, though concen¬trations
differ. The moon has many aluminum. Mars has silica and iron oxide. Nearby asteroids
are an excellent source of carbon and platinum ores—and water, once pioneers find
out the way to mine the things . If blasters and drillers are too heavy to ship, they’ll need
to extract those riches with gentler techniques: melting, magnets, or metal-digesting
microbes. And NASA is looking into a process which will 3-D-print whole buildings—
no got to import special equipment.

Dogs helped humans colonize Earth, but they’d survive on Mars about also as we might .
To opened up on a replacement world, we’ll need a replacement best friend: a robot.
To beat the clock, you would like power—and many it. Maybe you'll mine Jupiter for
enough helium-3 to fuel nuclear fusion—after you’ve found out fusion engines. Matter-
antimatter annihilation is more scalable, but smashing those pugilistic particles together
is dangerous.