Guide to Motivations for IGT

"Since, in the long run, every planetary civilization will be endangered by impacts from space, every surviving civilization is obliged to become spacefaring--not because of exploratory or romantic zeal, but for the most practical reason imaginable: staying alive... If our long-term survival is at stake, we have a basic responsibility to our species to venture to other worlds."

-- Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot, 1994

"The question to ask is whether the risk of traveling to space is worth the benefit. The answer is an unequivocal yes, but not only for the reasons that are usually touted by the space community: the need to explore, the scientific return, and the possibility of commercial profit. The most compelling reason, a very long-term one, is the necessity of using space to protect Earth and guarantee the survival of humanity."

-- William E. Burrows, The Wall Street Journal, 2003

"There are three reasons why, quite apart from scientific considerations, mankind needs to travel in space. The first reason is garbage disposal; we need to transfer industrial processes into space so that the earth may remain a green and pleasant place for our grandchildren to live in. The second reason is to escape material impoverishment: the resources of this planet are finite, and we shall not forego forever the abundance of solar energy and minerals and living space that are spread out all around us. The third reason is our spiritual need for an open frontier."

-- Freeman Dyson, Disturbing the Universe, 1979

"Don't tell me that man doesn't belong out there. Man belongs wherever he wants to go - and he'll do plenty well when he gets there."
- Dr. Wernher von Braun, in 'Time' magazine, 17 February 1958

"When you look at the stars and the galaxy, you feel you are not just from any particular piece of land, but from the solar system."
- Laurel Clark

"Let me end with an explanation of why I believe the move into space to be a human imperative. It seems to me obvious in too many ways to need listing that we cannot much longer depend upon our planet's relatively fragile ecosystem to handle the realities of the human tomorrow. Unless we turn human growth and energy toward the challenges and promises of space, our only other choice may be the awful risk, currently demonstrable, of stumbling into a cycle of fratricide and regression which could end all chances of our evolving further or of even surviving."

-- Gene Roddenberry, Planetary Report Vol. 1, 1981

"I grew up with the notion that the frontier had shaped our characters and that there was no frontier any more.... What we had to have were frontiers in literature, scientific research, human welfare. That was a beautiful figure of speech. I used it for years, but the first time somebody really talked to me about space colonization and what it might be like to really put a colony out there that could do as it liked, I discovered that a little real new space in which you could put a new society was much more exciting than pushing back those figurative new frontiers.... Space means greater well-being for our children and adventure, an outlet for all the things we thought there wasn't any outlet for, and a belief that the frontier isn't closed, that there are endless possibilities and we don't need to be discouraged by the population explosion, and we don't need to feel that life is going to get duller and duller so it isn't worth living."
-- Anthropologist Margaret Mead,
"Does it Matter What Women Think About Space," Space Digest, 1960

"Many people are shrinking from the future and from participation in the movement toward a new, expanded reality. And, like homesick travelers abroad, they are focusing their anxieties on home. The reasons are not far to seek. We are at a turning point in human history... We could turn our attention to the problems that going to the moon certainly will not solve ... But I think this would be fatal to our future... A society that no longer moves forward does not merely stagnate; it begins to die."
-- Anthropologist Margaret Mead,
"Man on the Moon," Redbook Magazine, 1969

"Clearly our first task is to use the material wealth of space to solve the urgent problems we now face on Earth: to bring the poverty-stricken segments of the world up to a decent living standard, without recourse to war or punitive action against those already in material comfort; to provide for a maturing civilization the basic energy vital to its survival."

-- Gerard K. O'Neill, The High Frontier, 1976

"If the Third Industrial Revolution is not a realistic forecast, perhaps it is the fate of all intelligent, self-aware species in the universe to blaze like a supernova for one brief instant of climactic glory before sinking into a final nuclear dark age. But I don't think so. I prefer to believe that there is more to the human race than that. We have come far. There are those among us who will not be daunted or denied a better future or an ultimate destiny among the stars. Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote in Politics, 'We think our civilization near the meridian, but we are yet only at the cock-crowing and the morning star.'"

-- G. Harry Stine, The Third Industrial Revolution, 1975

I'm not big into westerns but the expression: "There's the quick and the dead" means you move or you die.

Earth can waste time on wars and not reversing global warming or it can be ready when the universe comes knocking with an alien invasion, or the sun throwing a coronal mass ejection our way, or some other surprise. We won't get another wakeup call. Our species will simply get hammered. How soon we forget.

Without warning, a mystery object struck Jupiter on July 19, 2009, leaving a dark bruise the size of the Pacific Ocean. The spot first caught the eye of an amateur astronomer in Australia, and soon, observatories around the world, including NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, were zeroing in on the unexpected blemish.
Astronomers had witnessed this kind of cosmic event before. Similar scars had been left behind during the course of a week in July 1994, when more than 20 pieces of Comet P/Shoemaker-Levy 9 (SL9) plunged into Jupiter's atmosphere. The 2009 impact occurred during the same week, 15 years later.

If this had happened to Earth, you would not be reading this and I would not have written it because we'd be dead. Fine for you "oh well, what can you do" types. Not fine for us people who are not fatalists.

variant spelling is Tsiolkovskii

"The Earth is the cradle of humankind, but one cannot live in the cradle forever."
Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, 1895