Picture an isolated tribe living on some unknown South Pacific island in the shadow of an idly smoking volcano. Before airplanes or transoceanic voyages, this island is all they know. Generations upon generations are born and die here. They don't fear the smoking mountain because it's never overtly threatened them. Yet as old as the tribe is, they are young by the mountain's standards. They are but a single tick of its geological clock.
Some in the tribe dream of leaving that island, but the prevailing wisdom is that the timber is needed to build homes, not boats. They feel they can't indulge the yearning to venture beyond the horizon until they've sorted out how to best live on their island. Nevertheless, no matter how responsibly they farm their land or how egalitarian their values become, the tribe's fate is tethered to the imbecilic whims of that mountain. It isn't alive. It has no soul. It has no sense of justice. It is simply a bubbling cauldron of liquid rock; arbitrary and indifferent. And in the instant it explodes, nothing this tribe has done will matter.
So the tremors begin, and inevitably they grow stronger day by day as that column of smoke turns a brutal shade of black. Fear grips the islanders. But it's too late now to build boats. Even if it wasn't, they have no place to go. They've been content to allow the sea to be a menacing expanse that confines them. When the eruption strikes, everything they are and everything they wanted to be burns in a scalding avalanche of vaporized rock. The richness of their heritage; the promise of their future; it's simply snuffed out as if they never existed at all.
And it would be a shame that they'd never spread off that island, not only because their culture would have endured, but also because the memory of their homeland would have endured. The songs of their tree frogs would have endured. The colors of their flowers would have endured. It would be shame because they'd yearned to explore and had been perfectly capable of following that wanderlust. It would be a shame because the things they might have seen beyond the horizon would have stirred their soul.
This is our situation here on Earth. This is the context of manned spaceflight. Beyond all the questions of cost and ethics is a very simple concern -- If the day comes when you hear of a massive asteroid barreling down on your home planet, would you rather not be on it? Does mankind have anything you'd choose to save from that catastrophe? Is your species still growing up, or is it finished? Because we live in a capricious universe. As long as we confine ourselves to this lonely island, we could end poverty, reverse global warming, and become something deserving of survival only to be summarily obliterated by a lump of cosmic iron. I promise you, inertia will eventually destroy us, whether we deserve it or not.
We should indeed live in a way that recognizes the marvel of a world we inhabit, but we shouldn't assume that doing so fully exempts us from profound risk. On at least five separate occasions, even in the absence of smog and nuclear weapons, more than half the life on Earth has been wiped out by some random extinction event. These events may be as extravagant as a comet the size of a mountain or as tedious as a global drought. But they do happen. Life can be robust, no doubt, and it is certainly not unacquainted with the risks and sometimes disastrous perils of a single-world existence. But to the best of our knowledge, never before has evolution endowed a single species with the means and the inclination to grow beyond those risks. Never before has a species imagined itself on other worlds, or been so physiologically and intellectually capable of carrying the legacy of Earth into the cosmos, and we have no special reason to think there will ever be another.
We have been travelers for longer than we've been human, literally. The only reason we've survived long enough to set foot on the Moon is because we were never content to stay in one place. It wasn't the Almighty who exiled Adam and Eve from Eden. It was their own relentless curiosity. Because some organisms prowl and hunt. Some graze. Some drift on the wind. And some sink roots deep into the ground. But Man, he is a wandering dreamer of dreams and asker of questions, for better or worse. He is a voyager.
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