One doesn’t have to read The Martian to know that the long-lived dream of the future has often contained space travel and interplanetary habitation of humans. Even if humans did evolve beyond Earth, the question would then become a matter of where they could go and how far they could get.
History chronicles the many trips that the United States has undertaken, which amounts up to, “six crewed missions to the moon.” Those trips proved that manned space travel, at the least, can be done. The dreamers and radical thinkers really want to go on family vacations to, say, Neptune, or even move there permanently. Those people want to say they live on Mars, the planet, not Mars Hill, North Carolina. At this time, Britannica shoots down those fantasies of casual travel because of, “[humanity's] current understanding of physics and the limits of the natural world.” The limitations mentioned refer to the fact that objects with mass cannot travel at or faster than the speed of light, which space travel requires in order to go beyond the Milky Way.
Another question follows—perhaps as a grounded person’s response to the dreamer’s whimsy—asking whether or not space travel would be a good idea. Nonetheless, NASA and companies like Blue Origin continue to develop ways to explore space and live off of Earth. For example, NASA recently discovered that, “Mars once rippled with rivers and ponds billions of years ago,” which means that life may also have been present there at some point and humans could possibly inhabit it in the future. Meanwhile, BBC reports that, “Blue Origin, the space tourism company owned by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, has announced plans to launch a commercial space station.” The news source goes into detail on Bezos’ and his collaborators’ intentions for the space station, including it being used as a location for film-making and research. Space travel, as relatively undeveloped as it currently stands, requires immense funding and casts a shadow eerily similar to historical colonization.
When it comes to humans in space, many details need to be considered. That being said, letting the dream of space travel persist doesn’t harm anyone, even if it may never come to fruition. After all, dreaming distinguishes where the ‘fiction” part of science fiction comes into play.
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