| | As noted on another Objectivist board,the year 2020 target seems overly ambitious. I believe that our reach exceeds our grasp in order that we achieve more in life than grabbing low hanging fruit. So, the target works for me.
It is easy to say that most Objectivists have been following this to some extent since the very beginning. It is a deeply emotional issue in psychology. If you question why the government runs a post office and parks, you have to ask why the government needs to explore outer space. It is easy to claim that NASA is a "momument builder's" idea of a State Science Institute. And yet... the entire enterprise from Mercury to Apollo through the space shuttle to the ISS was and remains an audacious example of the highest human potential.
Space colonization: an annotated bibliography
by Michael E. Marotta, Loompanics, 1979.
I have argued that if the government can print its own journals, then it must be able to operate its own presses ... and, utlimately, its own satellites, or whatever else it needs to do its job. So, putting up satellites and military test pilots could be a proper function.
In any case, we are clearly at the point where we should have been in 1950, when (in fiction), an entrepreneur pointed out that only American industrialists could do the job right. (See Heinlein's The Man Who Sold the Moon and the film, Destination Moon, which was based loosely on that.)
I look to the previous "great age of exploration" (and we have had several). We all know the 15th through 17th centuries when kings financed largely unprofitable ventures to the New World. Eventually, they gave that up - especially after the American revolutions - and private citizens colonized the continents. The multiplicity of social, cultural and legal arrangements must be appreciated. America (north and south) saw an array of utopian communities. Mostly, success came from individuals who were not tied to any dogma or group.
But, also, other times and places saw similar events unfolding. The Phoenicians were consumate explorers and traders, though not colonizers. The Greeks colonized the Mediterranean from the Crimea to Spain, from the Alps to Egypt. They explored the English coast (known even then for perhaps 1000 years as a source of tin for bronze). They explored the Red Sea. New towns were founded by cities from the common treasuries, but the explorers were on their own.
This here and now is just more of the same. But I do not mean "just" in any minimizing sense. Rather, I point out that this kind of bold achievement is expectable when people perceive within themselves the will to accomplish creative endeavors.
Space Shuttle Enterprise being taken to the Intrepid Museum in New York.
(Edited by Michael E. Marotta on 6/14, 8:42am)
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