Destiny of Your Descendants

Destiny of Your Descendants

There are about one hundred billion planetary systems in the Milky Way Galaxy awaiting exploration. Many of them are achingly beautiful.

A few of these systems are hospitable for the Humans, and most appear hostile.

In some worlds there are many stars in the daytime sky and many moons in the heavens at night. Some moons are so close that their planet looms high in the heavens, covering half the sky. In some other worlds great particle ring systems are soaring from horizon to horizon. And some worlds look out onto a vast gaseous nebula, the remains of an ordinary star that once was and is no longer.

Pioneer Village. It is a lovely fantasy, to explore those worlds that never were. Image: © Elena

In the future, in all those skies, rich in distant and exotic constellations, the Human will always remember a faint yellow star – perhaps barely seen by the naked eye, perhaps visible only through the telescope… the home star of the fleet of interstellar transports exploring this tiny region of the great Milky Way Galaxy.

You will venture to the stars. Your first survey ships to Alpha Centauri and Barnard’s Star, Sirius and Tau Ceti will be followed by great fleets of interstellar transports. First under construction in Earth orbit – unmanned survey ships, they will develop into liners for immigrants, immense trading ships to plow the seas of space. On all these ships there will be symbols and writing of your mother planet.

Yes, you are not yet certain how many planetary systems there are in your galaxy, but let’s assure you that there is a great abundance of them (even if your immediate vicinity, there is not just one, but in a sense four systems: Jupiter, Saturn and Uranus each has a satellite system that, in the relative sizes and spacings of the moons, resembles closely the planets about the Sun).

View of our Galaxy. Photo: Elena

The themes of space and time are, as we have seen, intertwined. Worlds and stars, like people, are born, live and die. The lifetime of a human being is measured in decades; the lifetime of the Sun is a hundred million times longer. Compared to a star, we are like mayflies, fleeting ephemeral creatures who live out their whole lives in the course of a single day. From the point of view of mayfly, human beings are stolid, boring, almost entirely immovable, offering hardly a hint that that they ever do anything. From a point of view of a star, a human being is a tiny flash, one of billions of brief lives flickering tenuously on the surface of a strangely cold, anomalously solid, exotically remote sphere of silicate and iron.

In all those other worlds in space there are events in progress, occurrences that will determine their future. And on our small planet, this moment in history is a historical branch point as profound as the confrontation of the Ionian scientists with the mystics 2,500 years ago. What we do with our world in this time will propagate down through the centuries and powerfully determine the destiny of our descendants and their fate, if any, among the stars.

The destiny of our descendants and their fate, if any, lies among the stars. Image: © Megan Jorgensen (Elena)