Surviving the Next Doomsday Asteroid Impact

One day, as has happened many times before, a large asteroid thousands of metres in diameter will hit our planet.

The result of the impact will rain hot debris across the entire Earth, heating the atmosphere to an oven-like temperature and shrouding it in dust clouds. Fires will burn for years adding billions of tonnes of soot to the atmosphere, and then the global temperature will fall dramatically. Photosynthesis will grind to a halt. Almost all species of plants and animals will perish. The only survivors will be those lifeforms that are able to eat the remains of long dead life, such a cockroaches and deep sea creatures.

The collision of a large asteroid thousands of metres in diameter with our planet will almost certainly result in the extinction of most lifeforms. It is unlikely that humans would survive.

If such an impact happened now humans would not survive. The extinction of our species would be certain. Essentially, life on Earth would be reset to the point just after the last massive impact event 66 million years ago (the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction event that caused of the extinction of the dinosaurs).

By the next century we are likely to have permanently inhabited colonies on the Moon, Mars and possibly even beyond, but there will be a few hundred inhabitants at best. And most crucially those colonies will not be self-sufficient. If Earth is rendered uninhabitable and our civilisation destroyed then those colonies will die soon after. It will be a couple of centuries until self-sufficient colonies with tens of thousands (preferably millions) of people exist away from our planet. Until then we will need sanctuaries on Earth where a significant human population can survive should a massive asteroid impact occur. And by 'significant' I mean several million people at least.

The cost of building such underground sanctuaries would be extreme, and it would take decades or longer before they were ready for habitation. Hundreds of billions of dollars would be needed each year, and a workforce of millions. But it is actually affordable and achievable, if only the world's governments could be less paranoid and divert some of their defence spending to the project. The total spending each year by NATO members (29 European and North American countries) is more than one trillion dollars. If just a quarter of that budget could be redirected then the underground sanctuaries for North America and Europe could begin construction. If the likes of Russia, China, Japan and their neighbours did the same then sanctuaries in their region of the world could begin construction, too.

After a century of construction and expansion, the main chamber of a vast underground sanctuary, deep beneath mountains in Europe, is home to a thriving city of a million people. Powered by geothermal energy, the sanctuary is a self-sufficient haven for humans, one of several spread around the Earth. Even the impact of a large asteroid, such as the one that resulted in the extinction of the dinosaurs and many other species, would not lead to human extinction if such facilities exist.

Each sanctuary would need to be hundreds of metres underground, with locations beneath mountains the most preferable. As well as hundreds of kilometres of tunnels and smaller chambers there would need to be huge areas for agriculture, and even larger caverns to create the feeling of space and distance we have evolved to need, if only to maintain the sanity of individuals. Power could be generated using geothermal technology.  Energy generation using geothermal power stations currently provides 30 percent of the electricity requirements of Iceland, with the Philippines not far behind that. It is a relatively clean and renewable source of energy and would be ideal for subterranean habitats. New power generation technology, such as nuclear fusion, will hopefully be perfected over the next decades, which could provide almost unlimited power capabilities.

One of the many farming chambers that surrounds the main city of each of the underground sanctuaries. Agricultural facilities such as this, powered by geothermal energy, or even fusion energy, provide food for millions for thousands of years in the event of a catastrophic incident up on the Earth's surface.

Once created the sanctuaries would need to be permanently occupied to a high capacity: at least 50 percent. This is necessary to ensure that the sanctuaries are fully functional and under constant maintenance. They should be regularly assessed to identify areas of improvement. They would need to be totally self-sufficient if the need for them arises. There would hopefully be many months, if not years, of notice before a large impact would occur, giving plenty of time for people to migrate into the sanctuaries.

There are ethical and moral issues with regards to who would be selected to migrate into the sanctuaries should an extinction level impact be confirmed. The choice of certain sections of the population is obvious: there needs to be specialists in all areas of science and technology (engineering, medical, computing, utilities, agriculture etc) and also educators; it will be essential that education levels are maintained for the generations that will live in the sanctuaries, so schools and universities would be required.  The majority of inhabitants, however, will be ordinary citizens with ordinary levels of education and skills. Whatever method is used to choose which of those individuals and families are chosen - a lottery, or genetics (to maintain the diversity of the gene pool) - there would be objections, protests and even wars fought no matter who is chosen (there would be nations of the world without any access to sanctuaries of their own). Great care would need to be taken to ensure that the security of the sanctuaries is maintained and the chance of sabotage is kept to a minimum.

The selection of who is to migrate to the sanctuaries, and how to prevent attacks on them as they travel there, will perhaps be a more troubled process than the construction of the actual sanctuaries themselves.

Of course, it would be best if a cataclysmic asteroid collision was prevented altogether. There are numerous proposals to deflect or destroy asteroids that are identified to be on an eventual collision course with Earth. None of them has yet been tried, and all of them required many years, or even decades, of warning. Research into such methods should be intensified and an effective asteroid defence system should be implemented as soon as possible. The underground sanctuaries would allow a small percentage of our human population to survive the aftermath, but they should be considered a last resort. The need for then should ideally never arise.

Developing the ability to deflect or destroy asteroids on a collision course with Earth is essential to prevent the extinction of our species. A joint NASA and ESA mission in 2020-2021 will perform the first test of such technology.

If we construct several underground sanctuaries around the world, and deploy a system capable of destroying or deflecting asteroids, we stand an excellent chance of surviving as a species even if an object many tens of kilometres wide collides with our planet, and of eventually repopulating the surface once its ecosystem has recovered.

But, before the creation of the underground sanctuaries can happen we need to cultivate a will to change our thinking and work together for the greater good and the very preservation of our species and the wider ecosystem on which we depend. If we fail to do so we will fail all of humanity, and our extinction will be assured.

The Ice Billionaires

One day, when the human population away from Earth reaches a certain level, new economies will emerge, ones that are almost completely independent of our home planet. And not long after that the new economies' first Earth-independent billionaires will emerge. But what service or product will generate such wealth?

Providing construction material will be one way. Finding enough suitable material to construct human settlements, whether in space or on the surface of a moon or planet, is a difficult and awkward task. It would not be long before businesses are created that specialise in mining and distributing such material. The most successful will enjoy an ever-increasing demand for their materials as colonies expand and new colonies are started.

Another profitable service would be transportation. There will be a constant need to transport people and cargo of all kinds around the Solar-System. Businesses will be set up to provide reliable and regular transport services. Eventually huge spacecraft with the capability to move millions of tonnes of cargo, and hundreds of passengers, will be making journeys between the mining facilities and the colonies and outposts. Leaving Earth to work at one of the colonies for a few years, and then returning home or moving on to a different colony will become a relatively routine, if still lengthy, process. The large interplanetary ships will at least provide a high level of comfort and simulated gravity, which will be much healthier and safer than what we could provide travellers at the moment.

A typical mid-sized cargo ship. As well as cargo carrying ability, this ship has a large crew and passenger section which rotates to provide artificial gravity. Eventually there would be thousands of such spacecraft, some much larger, providing cargo and passenger transport between the colonies and mining facilities, and of course Earth.

But there is one product that will create the most riches for the people that set up businesses to mine and deliver it. That product is ice, and especially water ice.

There is a relative abundance of water ice in the Solar-System. Even Mercury, the closest planet to the sun, has water ice preserved in craters that are in permanent shadow.  There are many ice moons around Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune, and Saturn's rings are 90 percent water ice. And then there are the Kuiper Belt objects beyond Neptune, which are mainly composed of ices, including water ice. And beyond that in the far reaches of the Solar-System, on the border with interstellar space, there is the Oort Cloud which is the source of many of the comets that periodically make their way into the inner Solar-System. It's likely to contain enough ice equivalent to several times the mass of Earth.

I expect the ice industry will be split into two: with one part specialising in ice mined on a planet or moon's surface and with it's customer base restricted to the body on which it was mined (due to the cost of transporting it out of the local gravity well), and the other part dealing with ice mined on asteroids, comets and other small bodies. Such ice will be easily transported to space-born colonies and orbital facilities, and to the small rocky worlds such as the inner Solar-System asteroids, and the moons of Mars: Phobos and Deimos. Those bodies will certainly have human activity on them as materials for construction are mined. Their demand for water ice will be high.

Surface-Bound Ice Mining

In the higher latitudes of Mars, close to the planet's north polar ice cap, lies the Korolev Crater: an almost 82 kilometre-wide impact crater filled with water ice. The base of the crater is more than two kilometres below the rim, creating a cold air trap that's allowed the crater to fill up with the ice to a depth of 1.8 kilometres.

Korolev Crater: An ideal location for a large human colony due to the vast amount of water ice contained within its rim. The first ice mining business is likely to be set up here. It will be the start of what will become a global corporation supplying essential ice to the entire planet.

The crater's location close to the polar ice cap, and just south of the expansive dune-filled region known as Olympia Undae, and it's abundance of water ice, makes it an ideal location for a large human colony, and the best example of a massive and conveniently located source of water. The area surrounding the crater will be relatively easy to traverse, making the construction of roads towards the north pole, and south towards the equatorial regions, straightforward. It is the most likely location for the first of the planet-bound ice mining businesses to be set up.

The person who will become the very first ice billionaire may well be living on the rim of the Korolev crater in several decades time just as material self-sufficiency from Earth is achieved. His or her vision and drive will enable the rapid expansion of the colonies on Mars, and become the inspiration for others elsewhere on the planet and far beyond.

The crater could well become the site of several sizeable towns, even cities, whose inhabitants are specialised in mining water ice. The towns would be located on the rim of the crater. Access in to the crater will be easy as the slopes are gentle and natural routes for roads would be easy to find.

A close-up of part of the Korolev crater's rim, which is typical of where most of the human settlements will be located. Roads will be built down into the crater to provide easy access to the ice mining facilities. Roads will also be needed that head out of the crater to allow exploration of the areas beyond, and for transporting the ice south to the settlements in the equatorial regions.

The ice mining business's first contracts will be with Earth governments as they hand over the extraction of the ice to a private venture, but within decades, as the colonies themselves separate from direct Earth control and become truly independent, the contracts will be with Mars governments, and with other business sectors that have developed on the planet. By that time ice mining will have expanded to the north and south poles. It will be an efficient global industry that will allow millions of humans to live and thrive on the planet.

The same is likely to happen on other worlds that are suitable for human colonisation, with Saturn's moon Titan a prime example. There will be differences, of course. Mining anywhere on Titan, and the other ice moons will result in plenty of water ice being found. Many more smaller competing businesses are likely, which will ultimately merge to become a handful of large corporations.

Interplanetary Ice Mining

Space-bound colonies, either in orbit around planets, moons or the sun, will become a significant presence in the Solar-System once human colonisation away from Earth becomes established. They will be constructed from material mined from asteroids and most likely constructed in the asteroid belt (or from the Trojan asteroids that share Jupiter's orbit) and transported to their ultimate destination once complete. Such structures, each built to house thousands of people and to be as independent and self-sufficient as possible, will still need regular deliveries of water ice (and other volatiles). There will be no shortage of people ready to exploit that need, and the earning potential it represents.

Transporting water up from the surface of planets and the larger moons will be difficult and very expensive, due mainly to the effort and energy required to get millions of tonnes of ice out of such deep gravity wells. Such efforts would be foolish to attempt, and could never be considered as a viable business plan.

For such space-bound colonies the efficient solution is to mine the ice from small objects with a negligible gravity well, such as Kuiper Belt and Oort Cloud objects.

An artist's impression of the dwarf planet Eris, that resides in the Kuiper Belt. Eris is currently the most massive known Kuiper Belt object. Despite its size (over 2,300 kilometres in diameter) its low gravity of 0.083g would probably be low enough to make the export of ice volatiles viable. Eris could end up being one of the most active and profitable ice mining locations in the outer Solar-System. Image by S M Pritchard.

The objects in the Kuiper Belt, which lies just beyond the orbit of Neptune (and includes dwarf planets such as Pluto, Orcus and Eris), is the most conveniently located of the two. Once there is a human presence in that region mining operations with transport infrastructures will be set up to exploit the abundant ice riches that are available. There will be a regular fleet of cargo ships, largely crew-less, making their way inwards to the large space-bound colonies that are likely to exist around the major planets and moons. Their trajectories will be slow, but very efficient, and their regularity will ensure a constant supply of ice volatiles to a hungry and highly populated inner Solar-System.

A cargo ship prepares to dock with a massive space-bound colony in the inner Solar-System. Such a facility would need a regular supply of ice volatiles, including water ice. Supplies mined from objects in the Kuiper Belt or beyond would arrive at least annually to fulfil the needs of the thousands of colonists. Image by Bryan Versteeg.

Very large space-bound colonies have a distinct advantage over planet-bound colonies: those living there can live with Earth-level gravity, due to the ability to rotate the colony. With a large enough diameter any unpleasant coriolis effects can be eliminated (as the rotations per minute can be kept very low - less than one per minute if the colony's rotating section is 1,000 metres or more in diameter). It is likely that the ice billionaires would chose to live in such facilities due to the obvious space and luxury they could provide.

The interior of a space-bound habitat. With a diameter of hundreds of metres it would be able to rotate at a quite leisurely pace and still create enough artificial gravity to match that of Earth. The interior would be very spacious and would be the preferred home of the future ice billionaires. Image by Bryan Versteeg.

The motivation of the ice billionaires (and those in other industries) to expand their businesses further to increase their own wealth will be an important factor in the speed at which human colonisation spreads further and further away from Earth. Such activity needs to be encouraged. It is one of the ways to ensure that our species will endure if a catastrophe - either natural or of our own making - occurs on our home planet.

This kind of insurance against our extinction is essential. Governments on Earth are too slow, fickle and bureaucratic to provide that insurance any time soon. We need to embrace the commercialisation of space colonisation.

The future entrepreneurs that can exploit the business opportunities in the Solar-System are quite possibly alive as children today. They will one day leave Earth and create the most far-reaching corporations in human history. They will be motivated by profit, but inspired by the innate desire in all of us to survive as individuals and as a species.

Climate Change - The Point of No Return

We are on the verge of rendering our planet uninhabitable, unless drastic action is taken.

Scientists have recently announced, quite alarmingly, that climate change on our planet could soon reach its tipping point. We are only decades away from that moment. It will happen within a generation.

Lowering our carbon dioxide emissions is no longer enough. Carbon dioxide needs to be extracted from the atmosphere. And we need to start doing that now on a large scale. Otherwise, global warming will enter an unstoppable feedback stage, where warming triggers more warming, which triggers even more warming. Such feedbacks include the release of methane due to the thawing of permafrost, loss of snow cover, the melting of Arctic ice, warming seas, and the loss of forests. All of those will reduce our planet's ability to reflect heat and absorb carbon. The number and intensity of forest fires will increase dramatically, releasing huge amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. This will only magnify the feedback effect even more.

Global warming will result in an increase in the frequency and ferocity of forest fires. Such fires add vast amounts of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere.

The end result of such warming is not clear, but at best it will significantly limit the areas of the Earth where humans can comfortably survive. At worst it will render the whole planet uninhabitable, water will boil away, and the Earth will suffer the same fate as Venus,

Even the 'best case' scenario will cause massive migrations, and subsequently major wars over dwindling food, water and energy resources. Such wars will only add to the warming feedback. As the desperation of governments increases those with nuclear weapons at their dosposal will eventually use them. Countries such as Israel, India, Pakistan and Iran - all nuclear powers and all located in what will become some of the worst affected regions - will feel compelled to use such weapons as countries to their north attempt to stop the migration of their populations. This will cause tremendous damage to the environment, and render even more areas uninhabitable. And there would be a very high chance that a limited nuclear war would escalate rapidly into a global nuclear conflict.

At that point our current technological civilisation will end, and with it humanity's chances of spreading beyond the Earth to become an interplanetary, and then an interstellar, civilisation. Our ability to preserve our species will have slipped away.

If he climate change wars turn into nuclear conficts they will bring to an end our current technological civilisation. Humans may have a change to develop another advanced civilisation one day, but it is likely to take centuries or even millenia to get back to anything like that which we have achieved today. Without forewarning such a civisation is almost certainly doomed to suffer the same fate as the one before it.

Such a dramatic warming of the atmosphere will cause a rapid rise in sea level, raising it to well over a hundred metres higher than it is at present. In addition to the billions who had already perished in the wars of the previous decades, hundreds of millions more will die. Survivors, who will eventually number just a few tens of million at best, will struggle to live in the few remaining higher altitude lands. Their existence will be basic and medieval. It will be a return to the dark ages. Thousands of years of progress and knowledge will have been lost.

Only then, with the destructive output of our current civilisation at an end, can the climate of Earth have a chance to stabilise. The ice caps will reform and the sea level will reduce. After many centuries flora and fauna will start to recover. Only at that point, humans, if they are not extinct, will have another chance at building a technologically advanced civilisation.

It's unlikely that we can prevent a climate change disaster on our planet, but we can improve on the 'best case' scenario if we start doing three things right now:

1. Preserve Knowledge of our Discoveries and Inventions

We must help survivors in the post-climate change world avoid repeating our calamitous mistakes, and allow them to 'fast-track' through what has taken our current civilisation thousands of years to learn, discover and invent.

A comprehensive record of our achievements (and of our destructive actions, so that mistakes are not repeated), must be preserved in a way that they can understand, and in a way that will last for thousands, even millions, of years. We must investigate how we can provide such knowledge to our distant descendants, and then store it in multiple safe yet easily accessible locations, including locations elsewhere in the Solar-System.

DNA could be the ideal solution to extremely long term information storage

Using paper or digital media to preserve knowledge will only be suitable for a few hundred years or so, but such means should be used initially, as our descendants will be able to understand and use these forms of storage.

But a more radical solution is needed for complex and advanced knowledge that will be useful once any new civilisation progresses to a certain level. Storing information in DNA is one such solution. It's been shown that if the DNA can be kept at sub-zero temperatures the information will maintain its integrity almost indefinitely. DNA information stores would be best located away from Earth, perhaps on the Moon in the permanent darkness of one of the polar craters, and deep within some of the planetary bodies of the outer Solar-System.

2. Work to Avoid or Delay the Climate Change Tipping Point

Even to just delay the tipping point we need to start work now.  The small steps some of us are currently taking are utterly inadequate.

Our civilisation needs to fast track the very widespread use of electric vehicles by banning petrol and diesel engines within a decade. All developed countries need to push this idea hard, and give incentives to developing countries to do the same. And governments need to increase vastly the funding for research into clean energy, and get nuclear fusion working. The generation of electricity by burning coal and oil has to stop on a worldwide scale without delay. Countries like China appear to be increasing the use of fossil fuels for energy generation, which is going to be catastrophic if it is not prevented.

But that alone will not be enough. We need to start undoing the damage we've already done.

Various climate engineering projects should be started immediately. These are possible with current technology. To help reduce global warming solar radiation management needs to be implemented to reduce the sunlight absorbed by the atmosphere. Relatively simple things can be done such as seeding clouds with sea water to brighten them (and therefore reflect more sunlight), and using pale roof colourings and promoting the expansion of polar ice.

Removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere using facilities such as this is possible. It can be stored in hard pellets which can be buried deep underground.

We need to start removing some of the excess greenhouse gases that our activities have pumped into the atmosphere. This can be done directly using machinery that would then store the extracted carbon dioxide deep underground, and indirectly by promoting natural processes, such as extensive tree planting to reverse deforestation, and ocean fertilisation to add nutrients to the upper oceans to increase carbon dioxide absorption.

And the growth of our human population needs to be controlled, especially in developing countries. We can no longer support such large increases, which are generally located in regions that can least support it. It should be stabilised as soon as possible, and allowed to reduce naturally to a more sustainable level.

Doing all of the above is the best chance the Earth has of remaining a viable place for humans to live. But it is likely to only buy us some time - nothing more. We need to establish our civilisation elsewhere to properly secure our future.

3. Secure the Survival of Our Civilisation Independent of Earth

There's a significant possibility that the feedback warming will not stop, and if that is the case the Earth could indeed end up in a state similar to that of Venus.

The only way to ensure the continuation of our species beyond that event is to make sure that there are self-sustaining human colonies beyond Earth, on planetary bodies such as the Moon, Mars, and especially on what is looking like the best location: Titan, the largest moon of Saturn.

As well as colonies on planetary bodies there should be very large space habitats constructed throughout the Solar-System that would house tens of thousands. The resources to build such massive facilities can be found in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.

We will have to mine asteroids on a large scale to construct the off-world facilities humans will need to live independently from Earth

Extracting those resources would be relatively easy due to the very low gravity wells of the asteroids. The establishment of mining operations there must be an immediate priority. The space habitats could be constructed in the asteroid belt and then maneuvered into their final positions, either into planetary orbits, or into their own independent orbits around the sun.

In parallel to the development of colonies around the Solar-System there needs to be development of interstellar missions with the goal of establishing human colonies around other stars. More and more exo-planets with the potential for colonisation are being discovered all the time, with one, Proxima Centauri B, only 4.3 light years away.

The planet Proxima B, which orbits Proxima Centauri 4.3 light-years from Earth. It's the closest known Earth-like exo-planet, and has huge potential as a suitable destination for our first interstellar colonisation mission.

It would be a mammoth undertaking, and there are incredible engineering challenges to overcome, but investment in the rapid development of the methods and technology required is essential to build such habitats in time. As well as providing immediate funding, it should be the priority of governments to ensure that education systems are geared to maintain a constant supply of highly capable scientists and engineers to make it a success. The long term survival of our species depends on it.

If all three of the above steps - preservation of our knowledge, delaying or avoiding the tipping point, and establishing large self-sustaining human colonies elsewhere in the Solar-System and beyond - are pursued with the resilience, determination and creativity that our species has in abundance, then we will survive.

But we must start now.

Right now.

Space Planes - Where Are They?

Space planes are hypersonic craft that can launch from a runway and reach and operate in space, and then return to land as a normal aircraft would. Such vehicles were first proposed many decades ago, and by now we should have a regular service in place, providing people and cargo with a rapid, economic, frequent and convenient method of getting into space. It should be a service that is considered normal, ordinary, and quite routine, just like the intercontinental flights that we take for granted right now.

Star-Raker: An early NASA/Rockwell space plane concept from the 1970s

But we are still decades away from such a service. Why is that?

The incredible lack of government support is the primary reason. Without the financial backing that only those organisations can provide, such immense projects have little hope of coming to fruition. It seems that, apart from a few small subsidies, private enterprise is left to fund such things. And they do remarkably well, all things considered.

Skylon, a British space plane concept, in flight

The most promising space plane right now is Skylon, in development by the British company, Reaction Engines. If funding is maintained, a full size version of the unique engine for the plane could be tested as soon as 2019, and actual unmanned test flights could begin in 2025. Although designed primarily as a means to deliver cargo to various orbits, Skylon can crucially be configured to carry a passenger module for 30 people. It would revolutionise how we get people off the planet, and it would be a major step forward in our ability to set up colonies away from Earth. This video shows how Skylon would operate.

Skylon docked to an orbiting station

Regular shuttle services serving the Moon, Mars and beyond could be set up with a station in Earth orbit, and Skylon space planes, based at many locations around the world, could be a very efficient means of getting equipment and personnel up to the station. Within a couple of decades we could have hundreds of people in space, travelling too and from working colonies on at least two other bodies in the Solar-System.

Such a scenario is highly achievable, and with just a little more support from governments. For example, for Skylon to be developed into a fully functioning system it would cost just over 7 billion British pounds. That is a small amount for a government, and the potential economic benefits would far exceed that.

The UK government has committed to renewing its Trident missile submarine nuclear deterrent, which would cost well over 100 billion pounds over its 40 year lifespan. It's incredible that such funds can be found for a system (as necessary as it may be) that is designed to threaten and cause immense mass destruction, but something that would cost a fraction of that, and something that would be a huge benefit economically and for the future of our species, is considered for nothing more that a paltry handout.

A Dreadnought Class submarine, which will replace the UK's Vanguard Class submarines to become the country's new nuclear deterrent. Unfortunately such a system seems to be a necessity. But what if the vast cost of such a system could be put into a space plane service instead?

Of course, a space plane service to Earth orbit, while incredibly beneficial, should only be the start. A true space plane service would allow passengers to leave Earth and travel to another planet's surface in the same vehicle, with nothing more than a refueling stop on the way.  Such a space plane would need to be configured for interplanetary voyages that would take many months or years to complete. Only a few passengers could be on board, and they would need accommodation and supplies to sustain them. It is likely that at first only the richest or most important passengers would be able to use such a service. It would be the equivalent to luxury yachts we see today. This is no bad thing. Encouraging the very wealthiest individuals and organisations to pay for such a service is a good way to get the funds to continue development and expansion, which will ultimately result in the service (albeit a much less oppulent version of it) becoming available to the general population.

A luxury space plane about to dock with an Earth-orbiting station to prepare for its onward journey to the Moon. Artwork by Alex Brady.

For the interplanetary phase of a journey the space plane could dock with an interplanetary propulsion system that would take it to orbit around its destination. The propulsion system would then remain in orbit and be serviced and refueled ready for another journey. With many such propulsion systems in orbit around key destinations a truely comprehensive interplanetary travel service could be offered, for both passengers and cargo. Colonisation of the Solar-System could then proceed with relative ease.

Such a service would require massive investment by governments and private organisations, but it would still be a small fraction of the amount spent on defence and weaponry. Humans need to fight against their primal instincts that seem to lead us down such negative paths and see the extinction that we face as a species if we do not colonise the Solar-System and beyond.

We need to stop funding our own destruction and

fund expansion and survival beyond Earth instead

A passenger space plane capable of carry over a hundred people docks with an orbiting station. Such a space plane service is required if humans are to create significant colonies elsewhere in the Solar-System. Concept by Alex Brady.

An extensive space plane service to Earth orbit, and to the Moon, should be the first priority of major governments to kickstart the development of permanent human colonies away from Earth. There are people with the right vision, drive and skills alive right now that could build it. And it could be achieved within two decades with the right motivation and funding.

As a species we would be foolish indeed not to develop such a capability as soon as we have the means to do so.