Chinese Offworld Master Plan Ad astra per terram

Mining & Minerals - Evaluations / Off-World Exploration, Mining, & Technology

Date posted: 07/21/17

The China Space Program management reports that diversifying their presence throughout the solar system and beyond is a viable risk mitigation strategy to ensure the long-term survival of life and our civilization. Investing in a life insurance policy does not free us from the responsibility to do everything we can to mitigate against existential risks on our home planet, whether they are natural or human-made. However, should we fail, a self-sustaining human settlement on Mars and elsewhere could carry the torch of our civilization. Some terrestrial needs are best served by going to space. Today, global communications and positioning are enabled by Earth-orbiting satellites. Tomorrow, we could manufacture new products that could only be made in microgravity, build space solar power stations made of lunar and asteroidal resources to supply billions of people on Earth with uninterrupted solar power. One day, once we figure out how to create closed-loop biological systems on Moon and Mars, we could import them to Earth to help solve the environmental challenges we have created on our home planet. Throughout our history, pushing back on a frontier, whether it were a mountain range, an ocean or phenomena we could not explain, energized and challenged generations of explorers and pioneers. Space is the final frontier that continues to capture the imagination of generations of stargazers but so far fewer than 600 people, mostly government-trained astronauts, have had the opportunity to briefly venture outside the Earth atmosphere. We believe that a future cohort of pioneers who travel out to stay could energize and challenge how we humans think of ourselves and our place in the universe. We see a new generation of industrial robots as the key enabler of human expansion beyond our home planet. Starting from scratch in a new place is hard. The first European settlements in North America were built on hard, life-shortening labor of volunteer or forced settlers.