What if it were your job to get humans to another planet?
Lifelong Learners GTX is exploring this very question with a course called Travel to an Exoplanet. The course centers around a competition that was held, in which teams competed to create the best means of accomplishing this audacious goal. I won’t go into more details about that, but it’s interesting.
An exoplanet is one that is orbiting a different star from ours. Here’s the hitch: Based on what we know today, at any conceivable speed by today’s standards it would take 400 years to get to the nearest one with any chance of supporting human life.
So this class is science fiction. Mostly imaginary. But… it’s led by Henry Haliasz, who is one of our leading presenters on space travel and has written several books about it. So even though it’s fiction, it raises real questions.
Technological questions are of utmost importance, but that’s not what interests me; the engineers will have to handle that part. I’m trying to wrap my head around the human questions. Like what?
- How do you pick the five hundred people who will enter the spacecraft, and why? Are there cultures that would be most conducive to long-term survival of humanity in a spaceship for 20 generations and then somewhere else “forever”? Are there better and worse genetic components? Would it be best to start off with an even mix of men and women, or more of one or the other? What would I select for?
- During the 400-year voyage, how should the participants govern themselves? Since conflicts and differences of opinion seem inevitable, someone or something has to choose among alternatives. Who or what does that? How do you keep the management of a closed society from devolving into all of the destructive tendencies we have witnessed on earth?
- How do you support and/or restrain evolving beliefs or ideologies? 400 years is a very long time, and we have witnessed colossal changes in our own societies over far less time than that. Even if you choose the initial people carefully for compatibility, who is to say they will still be compatible in 50 years, much less 400? Will the spaceship ultimately arrive full of cadavers?
- How should education be handled? What needs to be taught? Does history of events on earth matter? Does philosophy? Or should students be given the opportunity to create their own? What is the importance in another world of things we know in this world?
- Are human beings designed to succeed closed off from the outside world? I cannot fathom this, no matter how great the accommodations. Everything we know about ourselves tells us that we thrive outside. Covid seemed to wreak havoc as much from the isolation as from the disease, although admittedly that’s in the world as we know it. Maybe there are other ways to look at it if we are properly acculturated.
My questions probably say more about me than the experiment itself, and that’s part of what I like about the course. It stretches my brain right outside the box. Then again, pretty much every course we offer stretches my brain and if you let them, they’ll stretch yours too.
See you Monday afternoon at the library?