Water on our moon and the promise of a watery world on Jupiter’s moon, Europa, moves our game-pieces forward a few spaces on the board. The game is interplanetary colonization, and we’re learning it’s more like chess than tic tac toe. Each move is a branch in a path that discloses other branches. We can explore a number of them at once, then keep what works.
When I was a kid, it was only governments that sent up satellites. Now its a polyglot mix of governments, multi-nationals, and start-ups like Kelly Space and Technology Inc. and Space Access LLC, all exploring new and cheaper ways of getting stuff up. With nearly 1700 satellites scheduled for launch in the next decade, near-earth space is at a premium.
It’s the possibility of life in those Europan oceans, though, and a base on the moon or Mars that catches the imagination. Sci-fi stories have anticipated some interesting economic and political possibilities, colonists on Mars becoming real Martians the way English colonists were transformed into real Americans. The growing need for independence may indeed create a federation of planetary societies setting their own conflicting courses.
So what will be different? Everything and nothing. From within the expanding field of consciousness, it is always “now.” The past is an abstraction, a way of framing memories and information that every generation does differently. Inside, we always look like … ourselves. Outside, we rewrite history, including events that we decide in retrospect were budding nodes of a new web. No ages are “middle” for those who live them, “post-modern” is a stripe of paint on an endless bridge, and the pencil-mark on the wall that told us how big we were getting is in fact so close to the ground we have to kneel down to see it.
