Instead of writing poetic and insightful to lead tidily to my point, let me just get right to that point (pah, who are we kidding):
The point of all of it, everything we do, all our progress and our suffering and every part of the complete human experience is with the overall unified aim of one day leaving our planet to begin the exploration and colonization of extraterrestrial bodies and realms.
We suffer so that we can learn more thoroughly and truly what it means to suffer, so we can educate those who follow us and they can in turn learn to create and then master the tools for how to well endure suffering.
We learn so that we conquer that which would destroy us, and we love so that we know without doubt why it is we endure and push on ever harder to create the better world we imagine for those we love to enjoy.
Religion lead us when science could not. When we had to learn discipline, order, respect for the rule of justice and respect for man, we were lead by the noble aims of religion that follow this same aim, that continually reference our ascent, that guide us when all reason guided by our experience of life around us tells us to quit. When the self says give in, it is the spirit that says fight, and the aim of religious belief is to create that unquestioning, indubitable belief in the spirit of man and the stars.
Globalisation now throws us fully together, smashing our cultures in ever increasing whirls one into the other, and it opens up the pathways of information that have long been suppressed and unknown. Technology advances leaps and bounds and accelerates the pace of change to civilizations habitual dormancy. Great changes happen in bedrooms in dying boomtowns in flyover country and are uploaded to the great web of connection and made accessible to anyone with access and knowledge anywhere.
The great human neural network links up in new and profound ways, and our shared human consciousness grows and accelerates in leaps and bounds as a response. For nearly all human history preceding us now, today, the masses of individual people experienced largely one culture, one ethic, one creed of dominance. Today everything is mixed, everything is everywhere, and we can no longer tell where one culture begins and one ends until soon enough all things become appropriation to someone. We become, in time, truly one human race more and more rapidly. We become unburdened by the needless prejudices of our oppressed forebears, and can instead focus on the larger challenges facing all of us, regardless of any purely human gildings, but instead on a deeply ecological level.
We have been blessed by global warming, as it gives us a point of cause, worldwide, that will unite us if we want to not only survive, but thrive in the manner to which we have grown accustomed. Already we see unprecedented levels of global unity in response to the problem, only otherwise seen in history in the aftermaths of the great wars, and we see clear the possibility of a united species with the aims of discovering how to truly understand and then master atmospheric sciences, how to adapt to inhospitable environments, and to inhabit places that seem to be trying their hardest to tell us to set up our pissholes somewhere else.
Our efforts to combat climate change, and the new international game of trying to determine to whom the 21st century really belongs, will lead themselves perfectly to space travel. Already we see competition growing about who will lead the charge, to see if the mantle of ownership can be taken from the Americans, and the red and yellow replace Old Glory as the flag of the moon. A satellite recently finished construction in the People’s Republic double the size of the previous largest on the planet. Accordingly, if extraterrestrial life is discovered, the first language it will learn of ours is likely to be Mandarin Chinese. Focused on internal divisions, the USA abandoned the market to foregin competition and private enterprise. It’s only a matter of time before our pride will feel the need to take action. We will never give up the red planet to the reds, after all.
Yet it is important that we go through these internal struggles across the globe, for these are demons that must be conquered if we are to endure the hardships of our ascent into the stars. The challenges will be the culmination of the entirety of human effort. In our current social media infatuation, we forget that we are not really individuals, we do not matter in a vacuum, alone. We are as individuals no different than nerve endings of the great human brain. Our duty is to respond to the outside stimulus as we experience it and respond accordingly so that the whole body can react. Different individuals make up different cells in this human nervous system, yet no one is more or less essential than any others in the performance of expectations and survival.
I write to try and do my part in reminding us of this truth, or at least attempt so. Look past the noise. It can seem impossible as it seems these days utterly deafening to all else, but it’s just noise. Cover your ears if you have to, but look past the noise and see instead the real world happening behind it. Take everything in and put it all together and ask yourself through all of it: but why?
The permanent answer I keep coming back to for it all, and the one that everything always settles on, is so that man will climb out one day into the stars and create the foretold utopia which has long mystified. No other end run seems worthy of the potential of mankind, no other challenges seem capable of occupying our insatiable minds.