A Historical Repeat on a Galactic Scale | Part 3: Hope

The technologies that have been created directly or derived from space programs are mind-boggling. My favorite example of a derivative product is the powder breakfast drink – Tang. Tang was only the early commercialization of products derived from the NASA Space program. NASA has a build dedicated to nothing more than storing the hundreds of thousands of patents they own as a result of the “Race to the Moon”. We’ve combined the latest economic practices, with new materials and new manufacturing techniques to radically change NASA’s old production model.  The resulting change is an approximate 2/3s cost reduction to position a satellite in space. The outcome of the combination of these new applications of manufacturing, economics, and material makes space travel, space exploration and colonization, affordable to most countries and entrepreneurs. 

Controlling the economics of rocket production is great but the downside means we have created the single-use plastic bag equivalent of space travel “disposable rockets”. Our habits of discarding our trash are unbelievable.  Just see what we have done to Earth’s oceans and Mt. Everest.  It’s unthinkable to see what humankind has done to its home.  I mean it’s like dumping your kitchen trash bin all over your living room floor and not cleaning it up and then dumping another load the next night! 

I mentioned in my last blog about the Kessler Syndrome.  It is the continuous colliding of space objects resulting in the creation of hundreds of millions of bits and pieces of space debris that eventually covers all paths in and out of Earth. The end result of this is the complete elimination of the human race. If we seek to reuse, reconfigure, reformat our space waste, we will have the opportunity to buy into this new land grab in a big way. 

This habitual polluting of our home planet and outer space is now more dangerous than polluting oceans.  Space is one of the most hostile environments known to humankind.  There’s a great Hollywood movie saying, “In Space, no one can hear you scream!”  It sends chills up and down your spine, but the sad thing is it is true. This is one of the points we wanted Rise Up! to illustrate. The spent booster idea is real.  The scientists at NASA found one of their old boosters was orbiting the earth and its orbit kept getting more and more elongated until it eventually developed an orbit into the territory known as “deep space”. This booster was originally launched in the mid-sixties and its presence resurfaced again 20 years later when it floated around the earth and went back into deep space.  We followed up on this story as it’s a great example to highlight one of the dangers we are aiming to expose in Rise Up!.  When will we choose to reconfigure, refit, and reform spent boosters, equipment, satellites and command modules instead of polluting our only path to the new world? These pieces of equipment are traveling at 17,900 mph and when they collide with another body, both are shredded beyond recognition, leaving millions of bits and pieces capable of colliding with other spacecraft.  This ability to shred spacecraft increases the risk of an already high risk environment by a factor of 1,000,000.

Space junk is only one of the risks facing Space Colonisation. The greatest issue we have to solve is not “how we will get to Planet X” or “how we will mine an asteroid or how we will work with aliens now”. Our biggest problem is learning “how to live with each other”. How we respect each other’s right to own property, create wealth, and learn to eliminate the shadows of pestilence, hate, and anger.  This begs the questions: What is Russia doing on the doorstep of one of its neighbors with over 100,000 troops set ready to invade? What is China doing rattling its saber in the south pacific and doing a bit of the old “group think” on its people? What is lil Kimmy Jun in North Korea doing with hypersonic stealth missiles?  Better yet, why is the United States, once the beacon of democracy, threatened with annihilation from a lying, grifting, narcissist and his followers? Sounds a bit like Owell’s book, 1984!  I think I’ll stop here and save going down that rabbit hole until a later time. I use these questions to demonstrate and highlight the state of mind of the world and the leaders of these countries.

The true and real rocket propellant powering this new “Race for Space” is coming from the entrepreneurs. With their vision, hope and the desire to push and shove the human race forward, kicking and screaming, to create new worlds with the best ideas from the spiritual, political, legal worlds, and the human conditions, tied together with imagination, thought, and strength of will. The human race will Rise Up! and create new societies, taking only the best the human race has to offer and blending it with alien races to create civilizations that thrive and drive generational expansion and exploration of the galaxies. Space is the only place where we can rewrite the book and redirect humanity to create instead of destroy, to love instead of hate, to embrace our best and forgive our worst. This is the destiny of humankind. This is the message of Rise Up! 

We will Rise Up! to take on the challenge and build a civilization Azimov wrote about in his Foundation series. We will Rise Up! and move beyond our past and will join with indigenous beings to create better worlds. We will Rise Up! to embrace our differences and use those differences to build better worlds. 

This is our game, RiseUp!.