Exploration of our world has been the cornerstone of human history. It began as the search for food and resources when they were scarce, which led to the migration of humans out of Africa, into Europe and Asia, across the Bering Strait, and down through the Americas. Later, travelers like Magellan, Columbus, and Lewis and Clark were sent on expeditions intended to see what else was out there, partly for curiosity, partly for resources, and all the gold in South America was a plus.
Now, we know the world. We have found essentially all the land there is to find and in most cases we've inhabited it. We can browse the lay of the land of the entire planet with Google Earth without so much as a look out the window. So my question is: What's next? It appears to be in the human spirit to explore, and the only place left is space.
Sure, man has been to space. Men and woman from various nations have walked in zero gravity, lived on the International Space Station, even set foot on Luna. What I'm talking about is putting significant time, effort, and lots and lots of money into programs like NASA. We need to be doing all we can to expand out knowledge of the universe. I'm talking about colonizing the Moon, Futurama-style: take a vacation to the moon, get in your space suit and be free to run, jump, flip, and do all the things a kid dreams of going to the moon for.
However, this is not all just for fun and games. If the meaning of biological life is survival, we need to colonize other planets: in about a billion years, all the water on Earth will evaporate due to the dying of the Sun, and our planet will be uninhabitable to life as we know it, and eventually, when the Sun dies, the Earth will be gone completely. A billion years seems ridiculously far away, but we might as well start now, considering the problems we have to overcome to escape this death orb. First, we have to find hospitable planets, and then we have to figure out a way to get to them, and send large amounts of people and probably supplies there. This would essentially require traveling at light-speed, which is impossible according to Einstein. To achieve the impossible, we'd better start early.
