Into the Unknown

As of February 25, 2006, the world population stands at 6.5 billion. Currently, this not a problem. However, it may become a quite serious one in the near future.

In 1950, the world population stood at 2.5 billion. Since then, the world population has increased by a billion almost every decade. Experts are predicting that in a mere forty years, world population will be just above 9 billion. Clearly, the population growth rate will become a problem by the end of the century.

We have several ways to address this situation. China is already passing one of them: population restriction. Thanks to the law, nobody can have anymore than two children. Population restriction is a very sensible method of addressing our problem, for it will cut population growth rate drastically. But it won't work forever; eventually, the population would rise again.

Our next method is to finish colonizing our world. We have so much unused space! There's Antarctica, the sky, the seas! We haven't even taken advantage of more than an eighth of our world. We still have some ways to go before we can begin colonizing the sea and making cities in the sky, but it's not too far off.

The most obvious method is colonizing the stars. We send colony ships to new worlds, explore them, make them our own. Once again, there a multiple ways of going about colonizing extrasolar planets.

Our first is habitat building. We go to planets that cannot naturally sustain life and build giant enclosed spaces for us to live in. NASA has recently launched a similar project. What NASA plans to do is send a small population to the moon and establish a small base there, which will expand over time. Then they will launch a mission from the moon to Mars and start the process over. Unfortunately, this will be a very painstaking process, as NASA plans to have their lunar base started in twenty years.

Our second option is to terraform planets that cannot sustain life so it becomes more earth-like. This is a little further in the future, for it requires that we create a breathable atmosphere, which is currently outside of our reach on a planet-wide scale.

Our final option is to select planets that can sustain life and build there like we would any colony here on Earth. This method seems to have the best likelihood of succeeding, for just last year, Gliese 581 c was found. Gliese 581 c is a planet orbiting just inside its parent star's habitable zone. Gliese 581 c is the most earth-like planet ever found out of the current 333 that are cataloged. Gliese 581 c is 1.5 time larger than Earth and may have water on its surface. Gliese 581 c is also only 20.3 light years away, which is relatively close in terms of space.

Gliese 581 c, however, has an interesting aspect that may pose a problem to colonizing it: it is tidally locked. When a planet is tidally locked, it means that it is in very much the same situation to its star as the moon is to Earth: one side is always facing towards the star and the other facing away. Gravity there is also 2.3 times stronger than on Earth, and one year equals 13 Earth days.

The main problem with this last method is travel: space is so big and our lives so short. We can always create a massive city-sized ship which holds all the necessities a colony will need when they arrive and hope that the original colonists' children or other descendants have retained some knowledge on how to go about living on the surface of the planet, and even that poses problems such as bone deterioration in space. However, space holds the most promise for humanity and we would be fools not to explore it.