Hasta La Ideas

This post is part of our year-long series, Apocalypse 2012, where our favorite futurists, resiliency and disaster experts examine the role of design to help you prepare for…the end?

If you asked me what the two most important design tasks at hand for humanity is right now it would be:

1. Preserving human habitat
2. Creating new habitats for humans

The response I often get to these mandates is that the two are mutually exclusive; that if we preserve our habitat, planet Earth, we don’t need to find a new planet. Some might argue that searching for new planets advances unsustainable technologies while simultaneously promoting fatalism with regards to our environment. In other words, the first proposal is proper tree-hugging and the second is dirty, quasi-steampunk.

I believe nothing could be further from the truth. It is an astronomical fact that planet Earth, in the long run, is doomed regardless of how well we handle the present greenhouse effect and related environmental challenges. Secondly, finding alternative habitats will not be feasible if we don’t overcome present environmental challenges. Thirdly, the knowledge needed to terraform planets and to geo-engineer earth is the same.

I do think that we need to take our environment in general—our water and energy supply and global warming specifically—far more seriously than we do. I also don’t think that spacefaring plans should diminish our current obligations to the Earth’s environment. Within design and innovation we are already exploring the next frontier: innovation that breaks away from resource-dependence, where growth is uncoupled from consumption and product life cycles are prolonged.

Spacefaring is tougher to deal with because it seems remote; both physically and in terms of relevance and time. So the stickiest criticism is: “Why invest is space migration now?”

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