The Next Billion Years: Space and the Human Challenge

Abstract

Nineteenth and twentieth century economic systems have been systematically focused on rapid economic growth and industrial throughput rather than on the longer range goals and objectives of human civilization. In the 21st century critical decisions will need to be made to adjust to the stabilization of global population growth, and to attempt to create a stable bio-system that can sustain humanity in the many millennia ahead, as well as a host of other challenges. The ability of human civilization to migrate to longer term planning mechanisms to sustain the species for perhaps a billion years is clearly in doubt. Survivability and current economic systems may well be in conflict. The rapid development of telecommunications in recent decades has created the “Global Village” in which a large fraction of the world’s population now lives. In another century or so we may have evolved to a new paradigm represented by the “Global Brain.” To achieve the true potential of the human species, pervasive, affordable and ecologically-centered education systems must be achieved across planet Earth.

Many of the solutions to the major problem of the long term survival of the species Homo Sapiens seem to be found in space based systems, such as remote sensing, telecommunications, environmental and cosmological research instruments. The greatest challenge of all is likely to be found in global educational and tele-health systems that allow a “sea change” in delivery systems which go beyond “running faster on the tread mills” of conventional learning and teaching systems that are now two millennia old. If humanity can shift to effective global educational systems and economic production geared to the protection of the biosphere and to achieving the full intellectual potential of humans the possibilities are almost limitless. The future could see the bio-forming of Mars and, in 50 million years, the colonization of the Milky Way. In a billion years we may even learn how to defeat entropy and solve the riddle of perpetual life in the Universe. The failure to develop new paradigms in global education, to maximize economic growth, and to create material wealth over survival could well seal our fate — the fate of the dinosaurs who were not clever enough to retain their eco-niche. The concept of space-based global education and tele-health systems is thus more than an interesting idea; perhaps it is an essential step along the road to the survival of the human species and to the full attainment of its potential.