by D. Vogt

Created on: July 07, 2010

When talking about the prospect of life in outer space, we are actually referring to three separate issues: the prospect of permanent human life away from Earth, the prospect of extraterrestrial life of any kind (i.e. primitive and non-intelligent species), and the prospect of intelligent alien civilizations similar to or far more advanced than our own. It is, naturally, the third of these which tends to attract the most public attention.

- The Prospect of Human Life in Outer Space -

Regardless of what other life lies in wait for us in the galaxy, it's unlikely we will find it before venturing into outer space on a more permanent basis ourselves. Today, there have been no substantive efforts to build self-supporting, permanent human settlements off the Earth. The closest we have come are a pair of space stations, the former Mir and the current International Space Station, were astronauts engage in "long-term" missions lasting for several months. These, moreover, remain wholly dependent on a regular schedule of supply ships sent from the surface, which deliver food, oxygen, and water, and offload waste products.

Still, it is generally acknowledged that a permanent and at least semi-self-supporting base could be built on the Moon. Indeed, the U.S. Army and U.S. Air Force drew up plans for just such a base around 1960, and until the Vision for Space Exploration was all but cancelled in 2010 by the Obama administration, NASA's official mission list called for the erection of a lunar base in the 2020s. From there we would move on to Mars and probably to near-Earth asteroids, although the most speculative and far-reaching studies have analyzed how we might build floating colonies on Venus and over Jupiter, colonize the moons of Saturn and Jupiter, and so on.

All such projects would rely on a technological capacity well in advance of our current one, of course, but few doubt that these missions would be possible in most respects. Some important questions do remain - in particular, about the threat posed by solar radiation. Nevertheless, the prospects for human life in outer space do still seem high, even if the most optimistic writers of the 1950s and 1960s have died with their dreams unrealized, and we will likely not see more than a further succession of orbital and lunar experiments in our lifetimes either.

- The Prospect of Life in Outer Space -

If intelligent life exists on multiple planets in the galaxy, then logically, non-intelligent life probably

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