31 Oct 2000 is the most important day in human history (so far)
I have to qualify the title slightly. The most important day is obviously when we crawled out of the slime pond and shook our tiny fists to the sky proclaiming “I am human”. But we’ll never know what day that was. This story was written more for fun than for facts, so please feel free to make corrections in the comments. Let’s file this one under Engineering Avant Garde. Now, on to my story.
The 31st day of Oct 2000 is the last day that there was no human in space. Put another way, it was the last day that all humans were on Earth. Yes there were a few flying around in airplanes, but that’s still within the confines of Earth when talking about the Earth-Space boundary, also known as The Kármán line, generally accepted to be 100 kilometers (54 nautical miles; 62 miles; 330,000 feet) above Earth's mean sea level (according to Wikipedia). Stay with me here.
A number of years ago, but not in 2000, I put this day in my calendar thinking many humans would eventually be, like me, acknowledging and celebrating the importance of this day. Hasn’t happened yet. Every year I look around and see no mention of it, except in 2020 when NASA acknowledged the wrong day. They picked 2 Nov 2000 as the day that started a “continuous presence on the International Space Station”. What?
Why would they ignore the 2 days it took the crew to get there – from launching off the planet to docking? Why would the ISS milestone seem more important to them than the human milestone? Yes, it’s only 2 days, and yes the milestone could not have been reached without the ISS. But future generations are going to look back at the continuous human presence in SPACE, not the ISS. By then the ISS will be a small chapter in the human space saga, if there is one.
And why is the continuous human presence in space so important? Just like we inched our way out of the pond eons ago (on who knows what day), that last day in October of 2000 humans may have successfully started inching their way off their home planet. And I have to emphasize the words “may have”. There are plenty of things that could bring them all back down to Earth and prevent any more from going up. More on that later.
If this continuous human presence in space carries on, it will eventually see humans living permanently on space stations (as they do know for 6 month stints on the ISS) and colonizing planets and moons, and maybe some asteroids in the solar system. From this solar system, humans will move onto another. And so on. Humans will then be guaranteed a life after Earth, ‘cause let’s face it folks, the Earth ain’t gonna last forever.
That is why I celebrate, or at least acknowledge, annually on the 31st of Oct, the day that this triumphant human achievement was made in the year 2000. But is it a good thing?
Seems like a good deal for humans, right? But let’s face it, they haven’t taken such great care of their home world. Their polluting ways may actually force them off of their home world sooner rather than later. Should they be stopped and forced into extinction?
Let’s ask the dinosaurs about that.
Before the slimy pond place spit out humans, it spit out dinosaurs. Actually they were both spit out at about the same time, but the dinosaurs happened to be way better at the evolution game at that time than humans were. There was a huge dinosaur party going on all over Earth for a very long time without a single human in sight. Human? What’s that? Not evolved yet.
The dinosaurs were having such a great time on such a great planet that they never stopped to think about leaving it. They ruled, and there was no stopping this party. Or so they thought. Turns out, the only thing the non-existent humans had to do was wait for the dinosaurs to get completely wiped from the face of the Earth. And guess what? The Universe was happy to oblige. Or at least the Solar System was. One giant asteroid coming right up!
Which brings me to Star Trek. In an episode of the very good spinoff series Star Trek Voyager, the crew encounters a group of aliens whose technology is WAY more advanced than theirs. In the course of surreptitiously studying the primitive humans on Voyager, accidental first contact occurs and of course mayhem ensues. Just as the conflict is about to go very badly for the Voyager crew, they discover something very interesting about the biology of these super advanced aliens. You see, they appear to be lizard creatures. Not only that, but there are traces found deep in their biological code that matches the same stuff deep in the humans. THEY’RE RELATED! “Lizzy! Long time no see.”
Like most good sci-fi, this episode has a lot of dumb and fun action and plot twists. But the big idea here fascinated me. Some of the dinosaurs may not have been among the big and dumb ones partying all day. Well, you get the idea. And a fun idea it is. A continuous dino presence in space allowed smart dinosaurs to escape Earth prior to a mass extinction event. Will humans be so lucky?
As I write this, humans would seem to have less to fear from a giant asteroid and more to fear from their own excessive partying. Humans have partied so hard for so long that there is now, just as with the dinosaurs, a new geologic era being named in honor of this unprecedented global partying. It's called the Anthropocene. So volcanoes and earthquakes do your worst! You can no longer keep up with the amount of planet alteration that is being done by humans.
Where will humans go if they end up making Earth unlivable? As mentioned above, it’s space stations or existing bodies of rocks, the closer to Earth the better. If it’s a space station, you don’t want it too close. The ISS is in low Earth orbit and has to be boosted higher from time to time to prevent it from crashing back down (which it will eventually do by design around 2031). Building space stations for millions to live on means they’ll have to be way up there. Sounds expensive don’t you think?
The next option appears to be the moon. Bleak. No atmosphere. Probably has some water. Perhaps large domed cities could work. Hard to imagine the millions of inhabitants not going insane, but maybe that’s just me. Some people like bleak.
And then there’s Mars. Not quite so bleak, but still bleak. A bit of an atmosphere, but don’t try to breathe it. Probably has some water. There have been some excellent tv shows in the last few years depicting what it might be like to colonize Mars. They make it look possible, but it’s no party. And if you don’t want to live your entire life in domed structures and space suits it will require humans to do one thing. ALTER THE FUCKING PLANET!
This time, the alterations will be by design. Do you think humans learned something when they fucked up Earth that they can now apply to Mars to make it more like Earth? Maybe. If terraforming Mars actually works then why not terraform Earth back to being Earth? If the Earth climate crisis spirals out of control , humans will be forced to try drastic measures to save themselves. It doesn’t get more drastic than terraforming.
A planetary disaster, be it human made or natural, isn’t the only thing that might end the current streak of continuous human presence in space. Ironically, and it has to be ironic because we ARE talking about humans after all, the very success of their space activities, many of which are required to put and keep humans in space, could also end up locking them onto their home world, if not forever, then for a very long time.
Success in space has meant putting things in orbit, and there are a lot of things orbiting the Earth right now. So many things, that if a collision were to occur, either with each other or with a meteor that just happens to be passing through, it could trigger a chain reaction of destruction that could make large swaths of the sky impossible to launch rockets through. Those large swaths will eventually become the entire sky. No more rockets into space. If you want to see a fantastic simulation of what one of these chain reactions looks like, I highly recommend the 2013 film Gravity.
The efforts being undertaken to prevent collisions is truly mind boggling. What started off as a branch of the US government tracking all satellites since the early days of launches has become a business with private companies offering services to satellite operators. If you want to know more about space debris and what’s being done about it, take a look at this one hour video posted by The Long Now Foundation (co-founded by Stewart Brand with Brian Eno as board member):
On this 22nd anniversary of a continuous human presence in space, I found one article on Nov 2nd celebrating the ISS milestone. It did contain a nice quote from NASA 22 years ago about “the last day on which there were no human beings in space”...
… a Russian Soyuz rocket launched Bill Shepherd, Sergei Krikalev, and Yuri Gidzenko to orbit on October 31, a NASA press release said that October 30, 2000, would be “the last day on which there were no human beings in space.”
I will continue to celebrate on Oct 31. Perhaps next year you will join me.
I already raised a glass to celebrate. But then again, I do that every night so maybe it doesn't count. Anyway...anyway...back to the future...I actually recall you noting the event of the ISS AT THE TIME and saying how this was the day that begins a continuous human presence in space! Yes, I do remember that. (Along with things you probably DON'T want to remember - like your hair..but I digress...) For your information, there ARE other people that celebrate - ar at least recognize - this day. A FB / dive friend posted something on his page about 31 Oct - exactly the phrase you said - and at first I thought he was mad - then I parsed the statement more carefully and realized what was going on! So there ARE other people on this! As far as terraforming Mars .. NFW.
Should I cry ? Or should I cry ?