Ah yes, the Saturn V Nasa Space Rocket…
Iconic. Majestic. Impressive. And almost technically impossible!
Some might notice that this is actually the Lego version and not some 3D technical drawing. Why did I choose this image?
Simply because it’s one of my favourite Lego builds and I loved putting it together.
But that’s not just why I’m posting that image…
Some might say I’m an optimist, and that’s probably true. I look at things and wonder how quickly we can keep improving our technology and our outlook on life. But then I wonder why aren’t we further down the line?
If you think about it, there have been times in our history that can simply blow your mind. Yes, we all know how incredible it is that things like the pyramids were built, or Stonehenge etc, because quite simply, the technology did not exist to move such heavy items.
But it was done.
Out of sheer persistence and determination, it was done. (Unless it really was the aliens)
Then you look at the more recent past. The ability to build things like the London Underground more than 100 years ago. Or the massive skyscrapers in America built nearly 100 years ago. Think about that…100 years. That’s a hell of a long time when you think about the human lifespan.
But in the real world, that’s just a mere millisecond based on how long we have been around and how long the world has existed. However, since we started those technical abilities, we’ve come on a ridiculous amount.
The bit that bugs me though, is really the things like space travel. In 1961, we knew next to nothing at all about space. About the environment. Or even how to actually conquer it properly. But President Kennedy made that incredibly bold statement, that he wanted the US to not only get people up there, not only traverse the distance between us and our moon, but land on it safely, then come all the way back safely and tell the story of what it was like. All within that same decade! Now, if you look into it properly, this was mainly because the US didn’t want Russia to beat them to the “Space Race”. The fact is, Russia did. They put the first man in space, and also completed the first spacewalk. So, America decided to go big or go home.
And they did it.
Imagine the sheer effort that took. The money, the brains, the time, and also the number of people involved. Going from little or no knowledge at all, to learning, testing, and completing the mission. And it didn’t stop there. They went back numerous times and created better equipment to do it with.
And then it all stopped…
We’re now talking about going to Mars. But this has been a long time coming. We went from doing that entire start, middle, and end process with the moon in just 8 years. We’ve been sending things to Mars since 1965. Yes, if you weren’t aware of that, whilst we were still focussed on getting us to the Moon landings, the US sent Mariner 4 for a flyby of Mars. (The first Mariner mission failed and the first attempts by the Russians also failed)
Since then, there have been a further 25+ (I believe) successful missions to Mars. Some orbiters and some landing on the surface. Yet, our current desire to get humans onto the surface is estimated around 2035!! When Kennedy said we’re going to the Moon, we hadn’t even been there. Hell, we’d hardly even built a rocket capable of escaping our own gravity! But we’ve spent Fifty-Five years flapping around sending things there and expect not to go there ourselves for another 15!? 70 years of exploring a planet before going!? Now, I know the technical aspects of achieving this goal are probably pretty incredible, but we need to take the bull by the horns a little like Kennedy did and just start making these things happen!
I imagine there are now lots of people ranting on about spending money leaving the planet when we should be spending money fixing our own. Yes, I do get that thought process, but the human race will never truly explore, expand and learn more history etc without also getting its backside in gear and pushing boundaries more and more. We are rapidly destroying our own planet and need to do 2 things.
1. Get a bloody move on regarding things such as recycling, creating replacement materials for plastics, creating better methods of fuelling our vehicles.
And…
2. Pushing ourselves to find out if there really is somewhere else out there for our massively expanding population to also exist.
Most of us are aware of the fact there are more than 7 Billion people now existing on the planet. Think about this fact a little more…
It’s one of those numbers you can say, and kind of know it’s big. But try and count it out loud. Actually, don’t bother…It will take you more than 200 years to get to the number if you started now and literally never stopped counting again. In addition to that bonkers fact, 1 in 20 people ever born are currently alive!! Not only are we populating faster than ever before, but we’re living longer than ever before. It doesn’t take a genius to work out that the more of us there are, the more of us are created.
Let’s get our heads around this for a moment:
10,000 BC = 4 Million People. That’s it – a total of 4 million just over 12,000 years ago. (That’s not even the current population of Ireland these days)
Moving quickly to the year 0, the population had grown to just 190 Million. Ok, that sounds a lot still, but that’s over 10,000 years of population growth. By the mid-14th century, the population had grown to a point where “The Black Death” wiped out 200 million people in Europe alone, without making us extinct. (That’s in just 1,300 years)
The year 1700 = 600 Million People.
By the year 1800, we had already boomed nearly another 400 million to 990 million.
In just 100 years!
Now it starts to get really serious, and a little scary as you watch the numbers…
The year 1900 = 1.65 Billion!
Just 28 years later in 1928, we hit the 2 billion milestone.
Boom – Another billion people in 32 years = 3 billion population already.
15 years later – the year I was born – 1975 = The 4 billion milestone.
It took just 12 more years to smash through the 5 billion mark.
Then another similar 12 years to 6 billion and the same again – by 2011 – 7 billion people on our planet. We will be at 8 billion in a shorter timescale than that 12-year trend again. Literally anytime now….
I’m only turning 46 this year and, in my lifetime, we’ve gone from 4 billion and doubled it to 8 billion.
Remember this bit…
It took us over 12,000 years to do the first 4 billion!!!
How staggering are those numbers!?
Now let’s go back to why I started rambling on about that…
We simply cannot sustain that growth on one single planet called “Earth”. We’re already utterly destroying it. Imagine, if we can do double from 4 to 8 billion in my teeny 45 years on the planet, if I do live to the grand old age of becoming a nonagenarian (someone in their 90’s), we could quite easily have double again and be booming through the 16 billion population figure…
I fear that at this point, not only will we be killing the planet too quickly, but probably killing ourselves in a far more prolific manner than we already are.
We simply have to get ourselves spread out a little and we aren’t going to achieve that by dripping the odd robotic rover onto a dead planet like Mars. We need to think bigger and produce a way of propelling ourselves much further and much faster. To be fair, it’s already rumoured that there are secret locations around the world working on things like “Warp Speed” engines such as what we see in things like Star Trek!
I can quite honestly believe it too. But stop with the secrecy on all this stuff. Let’s be an open book planet and start being honest about these things. The sooner we all realise this, the better. And our governing members of our countries might actually get a bit more support from the likes of us normal folk!
I want to add a little bit here if I may.
It’s a little while since I wrote this piece, and I’ve just been listening to the news where it has been announced that China and Russia have agreed to build a base station on the Moon of all places! (And apparently, other countries are allowed to use it)
Whilst this excites me, it also annoys me based on what I was saying earlier. That base station should be planned for Mars, not the moon!!
Although it will be very cool to know we’ve got a base up there!
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