Bugging Out

SpaceX to Save Humanity

With goals that extend far beyond its planned May launch to the International Space Station, privately owned space flight company SpaceX is expecting to not only change the way we go to space but save us all in the process.

The idea is simple enough: Spreading humanity out across the galaxy will work as a ‘safeguard’ against extinction. If one planet gets blown to bits or cooked by its own greenhouse gases, we’ll at least survive on another. (Sounds a bit too much like Parable of the Talents if you ask me.)

In an interview with 60 Minutes, SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk explained that “most people would agree that a future where we are a spacefaring civilization is inspiring and exciting compared with one where we are forever confined to Earth until some eventual extinction event.”

Considering the course we’ve been going, a contingency plan seems sensible enough. And while one could lobby a complaint with the space program itself for adding to the consumption and destruction we’ve wrought upon the world, SpaceX is hoping to curtail much of the environmental damage of space travel by developing a “fully reusable rocket.”

And it is this re-usability idea that might just get us into our Star Trek future. Or see the next hundred years of green earth, at least. Or we could, you know, stop raping the earth.

Read more at Space.com.