Long Voyage Home

Long Voyage Home

The space voyages of exploration and discovery are the latest in a long series that have characterized and distinguished human history. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries you could travel from Spain to the Azores in a few days, the same time it takes us now to cross the channel from the Earth to the Moon. It took then a few months to traverse the Atlantic Ocean and reach what was called the New World, the Americas. Today it takes a few months to cross the ocean of the inner solar system and make planet-fall on Mars or Venus, which are truly and literally new worlds awaiting us.

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries you could travel from Holland to China in a year or two, the time it has taken Voyager to travel from Earth to Jupiter. The annual costs were, relatively, more then than now, but in both cases less than 1 percent of the appropriate Gross National Product. Our present spaceships, with their robot crews, are the harbingers, the vanguards of future human expeditions to the planets. We have traveled this way before…

Stunning view of the Earth. A trip to Mars takes no longer than a trip to a bakery. If a deadly gang hides anywere on the half way between your home and the bakery, obviously. Megan Jorgensen. Image: © Megan Jorgensen (ElenaB).

Anyway, the fifteenth through seventeenth centuries represent a major turning point in our history. It then became clear that we could venture to all parts of the Earth. Indeed, plucky sailing vessels from half a dozen European nations dispersed to every ocean.

There were many motivations for these journeys: ambition, greed, national pride, prison pardons, religious fanaticism, scientific curiosity, the thirst for adventure and the unavailability of suitable employment in Estremadura. But the net result has been to bind the Earth together, to decrease provincialism, to unify human species and to advance powerfully our knowledge of our planet and ourselves.