"'Everybody wants to run, Karl. At some point in life, everybody thinks about walking away. Life's always better on the beach or in the mountains. Problems can be left behind. It's inbred in us. We're the products of immigrants who left miserable conditions and came here in search of a better life. And they kept moving west, packing up and leaving, always looking for the pot of gold. Now, there's no place to go.'
"'Wow. I hadn't thought of it through a historical perspective.'"
-John Grisham, The Partner (London, 2010), FORTY-TWO, pp. 394-395.
No place to go but up. In Poul Anderson's Technic History, people from Earth settle on Hermes, Aeneas, Dennitza, Vixen, Avalon, New Vixen etc. Even if exo-planets are not that easily accessible or habitable, we can do a lot in space, as Anderson also shows.
(New Vixen is a good example of "Flandry's Legacy." Flandy rescued the colonized planet, Vixen, from alien conquest. Millennia later, there is a "New Vixen.")
1 comment:
Kaor, Paul!
Absolutely! And we could have and should have done a lot more in space before Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos came along to kick start a REAL effort in getting off this rock!
My view is that once it becomes not too impossibly expensive to leave Earth then it's the ambitious, frustrated, adventurous minded, or those who feel oppressed who will be among the first to leave Earth.
This needs to be stated over and over, because so many people still poo poo the idea of leaving Earth, of settling other worlds. It's so much easier to stick with what one knows and never try anything new.
Ad astra! Sean
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