The year when it all became real

2017 may be the year when it all became real. When you look at the history of SpaceX's Falcon 9 flights you see that 2017 is a landmark year: the first no-failues year.

When I Watch one of those videos of a launch and landing of a falcon 9  -


I always remember those old science fiction movies. In front of our eyes a science fiction vision is forming into reality.

That vision, thanks to visionary entrepreneur Elon Musk is much broader than just efficiently operating current (and rather un-ambitions, in science fiction terms, space programs). Musk is seriously talking about the making of humanity into a space-crossing civilization. Check out his recent update of the Mars program:


It may take a hundreds of years to actually establish truly independent, self-supporting human settlements on Mars. It might take more.

Think how long it took the American colonies to progress from that first Mayflower voyage to the Declaration of Independence (and the later historical milestones, starting with the Constitutional Convention and going through all those 19th century and 20th century stages which brought it into its current role in human civilization). We might assume that the first Mars colonies will need at least as long a time. So, the minimal scale is 300-400 years from our current time to that future when the Mars united states is a dominant and thriving independent civilization, right ? Maybe. Maybe more. Maybe less. Technology has made some serious changes to the time needed for some changes, right?
Still, It might be that we are closer to a parallel time-frame, that when the Europeans discovered America... Which might make our solar-system futuristic and pessimistic scale into a 500-600 projection.

And yet, the dream of colonizing other planets in our own solar system is just the beginning of the vision. 2017 was also a significant year in the process of discovering earth-like planets outside our own solar system:

This vision might need a 1000 years into the future to be realized. For people born into our own era it may be frustrating, thinking that planets discovered today are going to become targets for actual landing, researching and settling only in another millennia. But to paraphrase the old scientific saying, you can reach this high only if you stand on the shoulders of others. 2017 might be remembered as one of those years when human progress clicked together and created that step in the ladder, leading humanity in the right direction, to a future as a space-going civilization.

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