Life, the universe and everything.

There are several schools of thought that are concerned with the idea of life in the universe and whether we may someday find that we are indeed alone or find that we are competittors for space in a crowded universe.

Frank Drake's now famous equation has been seen, for many years, as a possibility but recent developments in the study of the statistical possibilities of the incidence of life suggest that a much more conservative figure should be expected. Several ideas recently postulated, say that the possibility of life on a potentially suitable planet is only about 0.01 percent. If we take the best case, saying that liveable planets exist in every solar system then we could expect about a hundred million planets should exist in our galaxy with some sort of rudimentary life, some of which would grow to harbour intelligent life.
If we take a very dim view that only one in a hundred solar systems has anything like a Goldilocks zone, perhaps we could imagine a million life bearing planets in the galaxy.

Whatever the outcome, there is still only one possibility. That is that mankind must go out to space, not just as occasional visitors, but en-masse to struggle and probably to die out there but certainly to colonise the universe as much as we can.

In our four million year or so existence we have conquered just about all there is to conquer, at least in a physical sense, upon the earth. In all that time we have also shown that we do our best work when faced with adversity and a frontier to challenge. Having no frontiers remaining on earth will cause humankind to expand to completely fill the boundaries that we have and then to perish in decay.

So many people these days are concerned with the environment and with the destruction we are wreaking on the planet as we grow our technologies. We moan and whine about global warming or carbon footprints but few people see that this planet is nothing more than a stepping stone for the species and that, as the very top of the top of the food-chain, we own the darn planet and we can do with it as we please. If we need to make so much mess on the planet that we have to escape it at all costs then this will do no more than save the human race from the other, more awful possibility that we will one day be wiped out in our complacence and laziness in our own little Zen garden, unable to prevent the sun from evaporating our oceans or an asteroid from erasing us as the Dinosaurs were snuffed out from history.

I love Tigers and Rhinoceroses and frogs and Pandas but really, I don't give a monkeys, if you'll pardon the pun, for any of them if preserving them means that we must endanger our own future. DNA is nothing but software that runs on amino-acids. We can disassemble it at the moment but in a few years we will have an assembler for the stuff too. We can only hope that the democratisation of the gene assembler is used to make things as benign as a new Panda or to raise the Mammoth or the Tyrannosaurus from the dead. You can be sure that before Jurassic park is a reality, a world blighted by pathogens released by religious fanatics will be more likely.

Mankind must have a frontier, men must die to cross it and, as a race, we will never survive if we do not make the supreme effort. Screw the oceans, the fish, the trees and the dammnable Pandas! Grind them all under the wheels of the rocket launchers! Let's get out of here!