It is a moral imperative that we become a spacefaring species, we owe it to the universe. Humanity becoming a spacefaring species may be the most important event in the history of the universe.

The evidence suggests that life may be ubiquitous where the elements fall into the Goldilocks Zone… and hanging on in a few places that fall outside what is normally considered hospitable to life. There may be life of one form or another on nearly every star system in the universe. Keep in mind that there are hundreds of billions of galaxies each containing hundreds of billions of stars. That is an awful lot of stars- a back of the napkin calculation of something more than 10 sextillion (10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000).

But we haven’t found one iota of evidence that any of them has climbed to sentience and spread off of their planet of origin. Now absence of evidence isn’t conclusive evidence of absence- but in something as important as intelligent life in the universe, we can’t just ignore it. We may be it.

Absence intelligent life to observe it, the universe isn’t majestic, beautiful or amazing… it has no value whatsoever. That isn’t a slam on the universe, it is a clarification of definition. The concept of “value” is a property bestowed by that which values. If there is no intelligence to give value then value simply does not exist.

One day this planet will end and if it takes with it the only sentient species we are aware of it could well be the greatest catastrophe the universe could ever know.

SpaceX is a vital component with Elon Musk striving to give humanity low cost access to space- and today at 10:30 PST there will be an announcement by a new company called Planetary Resources that may mark the next step on that path.

The hints have been somewhat cryptic but the people involved point to it being a mission to mine the asteroids.

I have written about space before with ‘You Say We Can’t Leave Earth Until it is Fixed?’ where I talk about how the resources from space will make Earth a far better place from an environmental and social perspective. In ‘Why Go to Space?’, I talk more on the importance of who actually opens space. With ‘Space Inc. and the Unspillable’ I focus on space based solar power along with the television drama I am working on.

This is why I am going to sit on the Spacevidcast Live Channel hoping that their servers can handle the load.

This is important.