Here's some Social Benefits
The Social Benefits of Space Exploration
by Tom Harris
Why do we dream about traveling in space and exploring alien worlds? Is the human expansion into the cosmos important to our future, or is it simply a technological extravagance of the developed world?
Space advocates usually answer these questions by citing the well-known, short-term benefits of the program, such things as technological spin-offs, job and wealth creation and scientific discoveries.
However, astronauts like Julie Payette do not risk their lives to contribute to the GNP or create jobs in the aerospace sector. We, and our explorer proxies, are driven by factors best understood by social scientists.
Human beings act out processes long before they understand them", says Carleton University anthropologist, Charles Laughlin. "Even when they presume to understand them, very often that understanding is simply a rationalization."
Laughlin explains that the standard justifications for space flight are an example of such rationalizing. He believes that we would be expanding off-world even if these benefits did not exist. The real reasons for space flight, he says, have more to do with human nature and the way in which humanity will continue to change as we move into this new frontier.
At first glance, social science might not seem to have much relevance to a highly technical and futuristic enterprise like space flight. Indeed, the space community has always been
reluctant to associate with those in the "soft" sciences.
However, things are changing. Led by the innovative thinking of several forward-looking social scientists and a minority of space professionals, a healing between these fields is occurring which has the potential to radically alter our view of the program.
Anthropologists are leading the way. They explain how their discipline, embracing both the biological and cultural evolution of humankind, provides an important perspective, helping us understand the human implications of leaving our home planet. Ben Finney, a University of Hawaii anthropologist, maintains that "the space revolution is leading humanity into an entirely new and uncharted social realm." He says that the act of settling space "will change humankind utterly and irreversibly."
These changes will eventually become so pronounced that Cabrillo College anthropologist James Funaro says, "the first aliens we encounter in space will be ourselves."
Laughlin and space psychologist Philip Harris explain that space travel has already changed the way we view humanity and our world. It is no coincidence that, within two years of our first views of Earthrise over the Moon, we saw the formation of Environment Canada, the US Environmental Protection Agency, Greenpeace and the world's first Earth Day.
Finney shows how this sort of transformation is analogous to that experienced by successive generations of Polynesians as a result of exploring and settling islands across the Pacific Ocean. He labels humans "the exploring animal" and concludes that a withdrawal from the exploration and development of space would put the brakes on our civilization's cultural and intellectual advancement.
Space-generated changes to humanity were predicted at the dawn of the space age when philosopher Hannah Arendt warned in her 1958 book, The Human Condition, "The most radical change in the human condition we can imagine would be the emigration of men from Earth to some other planet."
Arendt feared this expansion. Today's anthropologists welcome it as a necessary catalyst, accelerating the modifications to our society and our consciousness we need to survive.
Historian Stephen Pyne of Arizona State University West shows how the history of western civilization since the Renaissance demonstrates a strong correlation between geographic exploration and general cultural vitality. He sees important similarities between what space exploration offers our civilization and what the exploration of the world contributed to Europe after the Middle Ages.
"It has a cultural context", says Pyne. "Exploration is not simply driven by technology."
Pyne asserts, "Choosing to explore the solar system will not, by itself, assure us continued status as a world civilization. But choosing not to explore will ensure that we will not retain that stature."
Political science professor Michael Fulda of the Virginia-based Institute for the Social Science Study of Space summarizes the space/social science connection well when he says simply, "Space exploration is a social activity".
Ultimately, we may find that forces above culture or biology are driving us into space. Laughlin says that relations were established in the Big Bang that made the evolution of intelligent life inevitable. From this point of view we may simply be the universe's way of coming to know itself -- cosmic exploration may be humankind's central purpose.
Science fiction writer, Ray Bradbury, gives us a glimpse of the direction in which Ms. Payette and her fellow space travelers may be leading us when he writes:
What I to apeman
And what then he to me?
I, an apeman, one day will seem to be
To those who, after us, look back from Mars
And they, in turn, mere beasts will seem
To those who reach the stars.