Nasa

We are shifting from the early era of space exploration to a more serious phase extending ever further from Earth’s orbit, focused on key opportunities such as mining and manufacturing as well as military purposes. This newly expanded playing field will determine not only who rules in space, but who ends up dominating Earth. The protagonists include some familiar faces — the US, Russia and the European Union — but much competition will come from emerging powers, notably India and China, both of which look upon the “final frontier” as critical to their economic and military futures. Yet the rise of non-state space entrepreneurs, notably SpaceX, has introduced a fresh and potentially decisive factor to the new space race.

Dr. Jonathan Jiang dreams of beaming an easy-to-read message into space before civilization collapses. He’s run the simulations to test humanity’s self-destruction rate. According to his computers, there’s a 0.1 percent chance that humanity destroys itself in the not-so-distant future. He’s even more pessimistic than Stephen Hawking, who bowed out of public life saying, “I don’t think we will survive another 1,000 years without escaping beyond our fragile planet.” Jiang, who works for NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, co-authored the 2022 paper “A Beacon in the Galaxy,” which argues for the importance of streamlining the communications we send into space hoping they might be intercepted by an interplanetary species.

The recent spate of articles about attempts by different countries to land vehicles on the Moon make it clear that a new space race is on. Just last month, Russia launched its first mission there in forty-seven years. And although the automated Luna-25 spacecraft spun out of control and crashed at the last minute, India’s heavily-instrumented Chandrayaan-3 landed successfully just four days later. NASA itself aims to return humans to the lunar surface in 2025 with its Artemis program. Remarkably, more than eighty countries, including Israel and the United Arab Emirates, have thus far established some kind of presence in space.

For many, the upcoming launch of NASA’s Artemis 1 (after a botched attempt earlier this week) undoubtedly seems the start of a new and exciting era in space exploration. Not only is the US finally planning to return to the Moon — this time to build a permanent outpost on the lunar surface — but in just a few months Elon Musk’s SpaceX will be sending its gigantic Starship, theoretically capable of carrying 100 astronauts, into Earth orbit. “Space is sexy again,” as astrophysicist Paul M. Sutter recently put it. “After the excitement of the initial Apollo missions dwindled into a subject only discussed by ultra-nerds, and the cool factor of the Space Shuttle gave way to the realization that it didn’t really do much, people generally lost interest in space.

The way I see it, there are two options for the future: a transplanetary society or a transhuman one. What got me thinking about this was right-wing billionaire Peter Thiel’s recent interview with Mary Harrington, which she wrote up in UnHerd. As Harrington puts it, Thiel’s diagnosis of modern social ills is not that “progress is inevitably self-destructive,” but that we’ve been making the wrong kind of progress. "We’ve had continued progress in the world of computers, bits, internet, mobile internet, but it’s a narrow zone of progress. And it’s been more interior, atomizing and inward-focused,” Thiel said. Meanwhile, “there’s been limited progress in the world of atoms.” So far, so good. But then the interview took a strange turn.

The American businessman and astronomer Percival Lowell first popularized the notion of life on Mars in 1906 when he described vast canals observed on the planet, some spanning the equivalent distance of Boston to San Francisco. He believed an intelligent Martian civilization was in peril, their world drying out and dying, and they had constructed as a planet-wide irrigation system to move water from Mars’s polar ice caps to the rest of the planet.American folklore has it that the idea of Martian intelligent life was so pervasive that a 1938 radio drama of H.G. Wells’s War of the Worlds, about a Martian invasion, ignited mass panic when millions of people believed it was a real newscast.