As a long-time lover of science fiction, I’m very familiar with the old trope of a galaxy-spanning human civilization, thousands or even millions of planets strong. Watching Star Trek, Star Wars and Stargate made such a dizzying future seem almost inevitable. Humans are destined for the stars—right?
We’ve certainly made our first steps in that direction, having already sent robotic probes all across and even out of our solar system. But getting people into space has been trickier. We’re gooey globs of meat that need a lot of TLC to survive beyond Mother Earth. Still, we’ve managed to get to the moon (and a wee bit farther), which is amazing all in itself.
But space is vast and deep, and there’s a very, very long way to go to visit even the other planets orbiting our sun, let alone those around other stars.
Still, some consider humanity’s future in space to be so bright that they’ll bet the bank on it. China and the U.S. are both proceeding with separate plans for moon bases, and U.S. billionaires are trying very hard to provide the hardware for NASA’s lunar push. Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin is in the running to develop a lunar lander, as is Elon Musk’s SpaceX, with an approach using its Starship rocket—though both still have a long way to go.
Musk seems confident. Of course he does: with SpaceX, he’s truly revolutionized rocketry—and become the world’s wealthiest person. History shows, however, that his predictions for when his companies’ breakthroughs will occur tend to be several years off the mark—if the breakthroughs happen at all. But outside of quibbles over timing, there’s something more fundamentally questionable in his vision: he has said on multiple occasions that he wants humans to become (at least) a Kardashev Type II civilization—and the concept has caught on, becoming trendy among “tech bros.”
The Kardashev scale may have been relevant back in 1964 when he proposed it. But things have changed considerably since then. Big leaps can happen unexpectedly.
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