Certainly not a shiny starship!
I could predict a rock causing loss of life and a second space age launched to detect, intercept, and deflect asteroid and comet impact threats. Or weather events that cannot be interpreted as anything other than climate change and space solar power as the only solution. Perhaps it will be the realization we are at risk of extinction from a short list of causes including an impact, an engineered pathogen, or volcanic eruptions. Unfortunately, the “odds” of an impact are trivialized, filthy lucre makes climate change a non-issue, and because we are “ephemorons” we just don’t care if our species is doomed.
The problem is we don’t believe we can defeat death. If we could freeze people without damage and revive them decades (or centuries) later then the world would change overnight. Humankind would suddenly realize they better start working on reversing aging and curing diseases. The movie Vanilla Sky, a remake of Abre Los Ojos, depicted a commercial featuring a dog frozen and revived symbolizing a new age. I remember as a boy watching a movie, “Frozen Alive” which was more a muddled moral lesson than a futuristic science fiction tale. The plot centered around an accidental handgun death but the poster on the Wikipedia page reads, “SUSPENDED ANIMATION OR DEATH!” and “TIMELY AS TODAY’S HEADLINES.” It seems as I age our species is not getting any smarter. We only care about our personal drama instead of what we all need to do if we are to survive.
I buy a lottery tickets once in a while and fantasize about sinking those millions into paying for some research on cryopreservation and making suspended animation a reality. Saving the world. Have not won of course. What would happen if some dog or monkey did get thawed out and revived successfully proving the viability of a new technique? Would the world actually change as I imagine? Would the great rescue begin? Questions with no answers. This blog is about the ice on the Moon as the critical enabling resource for expanding humankind into the solar system. This expansion would likely lead to star travel perhaps by way of the black hole starship if sleeper ships never happen. If neither sleeper ships or black hole ships are practical there is always the world ship concept.
Ice on the Moon 