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Note from the Conference
Senior Advisors
Introduction
We seek here the vision and perspective of young people, you who will lead in an era when benefits from space are intended to reach all peoples of the world.
No one can now say when and how that era will begin, driven by what incentives and using what future capacities. However, we can identify some problems and possible solutions involving space systems. To do that is the purpose of this essay.
Let us agree to consider only developments that are truly world-changing, having large and lasting impacts on the human conditions worldwide. Improvement is the goal but cannot be guaranteed, and in any event outcomes will be debated even when improvement is manifest. Past examples of such changes are the discovery that we are not the center of the universe, the abolition of slavery, and the spread of contraception accompanied by new ideas about gender.
Space solar power
Our first subject is energy. As people everywhere seek the benefits of higher energy use they are destroying irreplaceable resources, creating pollution, and damaging the beauty and livability of our world. One response has been to seek reduced energy use with greater efficiency.
Those are good goals but they do not meet the near-term needs of the developing world. Inexhaustible, clean solar energy from space is a technical possibility long studied and advocated as the key to an open future where humans, residing both on and off Earth, would come to share a rational belief in a limitless future. The space generation can be the cohort of humanity that fulfills this promise.
Education
Next let us turn to education. A host of persistent problems can be traced to inadequate thinking skills. Some populations appear to be helpless in the presence of despotic, corrupt governments, tribal warfare, failing food supplies, uncontrolled population growth and rampant disease. Research in cognitive development shows that improving thinking must start at an early age. Reaching children with space-based education is promising because it needs not to wait for prior worldwide teacher training. (Of course it does depend on a distributed ground array of terminals and people who know how to turn them on; the lessons are then for both teachers and students.)
Just drumming knowledge into teachers and children is not enough. Indeed it may be counterproductive. The space generation has an opportunity to get education right, to recognize the central importance of thinking skills and to design and create spaceborne education systems to advance citizenship in the developing world. The UN already has momentum in this direction, and SGF at Unispace III can accelerate that progress.
Extraterrestrial resources
No great spaceflight advances, such as human settlement off Earth, appear feasible as long as all mass needs to be hauled up from here. Assaying, developing and using extraterrestrial material and energy resources will be essential. The space generation, building on what is already known about near-Earth asteroids and the Moon, may be the first humans to achieve this breakout from our home planet. Unispace III can provide impetus by showing how the first, relatively inexpensive prospecting and demonstration stages can be achieved, perhaps by some international combination of public and private initiatives.
Robotics and artificial life
Achieving the expected promise of robots and non-living, replicating systems have proved to be vastly more difficult than people thought they would be. Still, the potential exists for world-changing developments in this field, especially if replication can be combined with in-space manufacturing using extraterrestrial materials, so as to bring about exponential growth of industries off Earth. The space generation may be the first to make this development happen, and at the same time to grapple with its social implications.
Searching for extraterrestrial intelligence
Depending on its unknown outcome, SETI may lead either to interesting fundamental science or to revolutionary social change. The space generation may advance the pace of the search by developing new strategies and using new spaceborne techniques. Unispace III provides a vehicle for recruiting more international capabilities for the search.
Biology
It is easy to forecast exploding applications of new biology during the working lifetime of the space generation, but hard to imagine every way in which spaceflight will be affected. Just one bizarre example may stimulate thinking on the subject. Assume the goal of limiting the costs of sending plants to the Moon. Obviously seeds would be preferred. But why even send seeds? Maybe just their DNA would be enough. But why even DNA? Why not just radio to the lunar base a digital representation of the plant's genome? Impossible now but conceivable - an example of the amazing future in which the people of the space generation will exercise their creativity.
A lunar archive
Storing copies in a safe place is an elementary concept to computer users. This could now be done with civilizations treasures of knowledge, wisdom and the arts. To begin installing a great archive on the Moon is technically not demanding, but decisions as what to send and in what priority will test our basic values. The space generation has a chance to offer the world that test.