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Butcher, Baker, History Maker

© Larry Winn

Frontier theory predicts that some of us, very likely you, will have to work harder for less this year. It predicts that your chances of being murdered in your home or on the street are greater this year than last, and will be still greater the year after that. It predicts that you will soon lose another increment of freedom to the necessity of regulation, that a new or newly virulent disease will threaten your health. It predicts that the air you breathe and the water you drink will be more toxic than they have ever been. Frontier theory predicts that, however bad you think you have it, your children will have it worse.

But frontier theory also teaches that the worst outcomes are not only avoidable, but that a sort of paradise can rise from sweat and moon dust. Last month's article, First, Buy Time offers suggestions for extending the narrow window of opportunity which we are about to miss.

That opportunity is the chance to build a frontier in space. It's not a simple thing. You can't just throw your junk in a wagon and head west. You can't just convince some ditsy queen to lend you a couple of boats for a trip across the Ocean Sea. (Not that exploration is ever easy, or that financing it is ever less than an act of courage and vision.) To make a start on the colonization of space will require a broad consensus, a couple of decades and an expenditure on the scale of a major war. Even if we have the will, it is not at all clear that we have enough time.

Academics and science fiction writers (who tend to be academics) speculate that civilizations, of which there may have been many in this galaxy alone, live or die depending on whether they destroy themselves before they can deploy their populations into space. According to this theory, there is a moment in the history of a culture when it has the technology to do either. Miss the moment, and enclosure (see First Principles) automatically and irrevocably brings down the hammer on the side of death. We are traversing that moment.

I have a favorite video, a made-for-TV, late-night movie called Plymouth in which a teenage citizen of a lunar colony tells his friend, who wants to leave, "I love it up here. What I got back on earth? A lousy job, four walls, a TV. Forget that! Here you make history every time an airlock opens. That's what I call living."