“You want to wake up in the morning and think the future is going to be great – and that’s what being a spacefaring civilization is all about. It’s about believing in the future and thinking that the future will be better than the past. And I can’t think of anything more exciting than going out there and being among the stars.”  — ELON MUSK, SPACEX

When I read this quote and tried to think of something I find more exciting than the idea of the human species conquering the galaxy, I absolutely could not. I mean, imagine flying past Saturn’s rings to spend a weekend in the Kuiper Belt, going away to college on Mars, or more realistically, seeing the full beauty of Earth from the surface of the moon! That’s why for my source-based essay I’d like to write about near future space exploration and colonization.

The first movie I can remember seeing in a movie theater was Star Wars Episode III Revenge of the Sith. I loved everything about it, the space battle in the first seen to the newly apprenticed Darth Vader overlooking the Death Star’s construction. Since then I’ve always dreamed about going to space, seeing other planets, and feeling weightless in 0g. Those dreams haven’t wavered at all despite me getting older and realizing the impossibilities of them, in fact they’ve only grown stronger. My interest in extraterrestrial exploration even led me to do something I absolutely would never have done otherwise, read books, and even enjoy them, notably “The Martian” and “The Expanse” series.

I’ve always liked exploring. Whether it was just walking around my neighborhood when I was a small child, exploring the “jungles” and “forests” behind parks as an elementary/middle schooler, or driving around aimlessly for hours at a time as a teenager, I have always felt the need to increase my knowledge of my own surroundings. I think if I was born in the 1500’s I would’ve been like Christopher Columbus without all the god and genocide. Unfortunately, almost everything on Earth has already been discovered, the google cars did all the exploring for me.

Which leads me to a quote (kind of a meme) that’s all over the internet, “You were born too late. You will never explore Earth. You were also born too early. You will never explore the stars.” (the meme usually ends with something like, “but you were born the perfect time to see the #president s&!tpost on twitter”). And while the second (and optional third) part of that quote initially makes me sad, it’s the first part that makes me believe the second half can not be true, and that because we as humans naturally explore, that the people much smarter than me, but with the same dream, will make it possible to reach the stars. Or if not, to at least be able to reach around our own.

Anytime I think about the future, I seem to completely forget that I’m still in the present. That I cannot just fly to the moon for a weekend and bounce around from crater to crater, or that no one has ever even completely left the orbit of Earth. But I still can’t think of anything else I’d rather do.