A Common Project for Humanity

I recently spoke to a Danish journalist about how to colonisation of space could unite people around a common project.

Last month, I was interviewed by Andreas Thorson for the Danish magazine Zetland. The article is now available here, and includes quotes from Robert Zubrin and some discussion of the Artemis program. The machine translation works well enough so you should be able to read it in English.

The theme of the article was space as an optimistic, uniting goal for humanity, and I expanded on some of the ideas I put forth in my new years post. Many people feel that their societies lack much of a purpose or direction, and a broad effort to colonise space could potentially provide that, and restore some of the vigour to stagnant societies.

I also explained how mere brute force might be the crucial tool for expanding humans into space. Once the problem of cheaply lifting enough mass - or finding it - is addressed then all the other difficult questions of living in space can be answered by collective effort, as many more people will be able to access space and contribute.

To look more deeply into that …