A Wilderness of Ideas

A favorable review of my book, Emigrating Beyond Earth: Human Adaptation and Space Colonization is now online. The reviewer? Tina Sjogren, half of the husband-and-wife team currently assembling a private expedition to Mars, slated to begin in 2018. I am thrilled to have their support and understanding.

Contrary to the 1960's space race, the trend in space exploration now is in decentralization; there are no single Titans, such as the Americans' von Braun, or the Soviet's Korolyev; rather the effort is distributed, with many players each a part of a large, unruly patchwork. This approach is less focused, and will result in both multiple failures and multiple successes. The main advantage is that without having to satisfy taxpayers or--shudder--politicians, these programs are now free to move ahead in whatever way they please. There is no single, short-term goal, there are dozens of dreams, a wilderness of ideas, and some of them are going to pan out.