Listen up, Earthlings: If dinosaurs had a space program, they’d still be alive. Get it? | Opinion

Osepok Tarov, the commander of a spaceship on a multi-generational mission to colonize another galaxy in Buzz Aldrin and John Barnes’s epic science fiction tale, “Encounter with Tiber,” explains the purpose of the voyage to her crew this way: “There’s not a place in the universe that’s safe forever; the universe is telling us, ‘Spread out, or wait around and die.’ ”

Astronomers and other habitual sky watchers generally agree with that, knowing as they do that every solid body in this solar system is covered with impact craters made by collisions with rocks — asteroids — that are often large and travel at very high speed. Our home planet has had its share of impacts, at least one of them so devastating that it shrouded Earth with soil, rocks and other debris, blocking out the sun and causing so long a night that it brought widespread death to vegetation and all creatures, including the Brontosaurus, Tyranosaurus Rex, the Pterodactyls and other life forms, which went extinct.

Therefore, an international planetary defense program and the colonization of other worlds — spreading out — are imperative and ultimately will be absolutely necessary for our survival. If the dinosaurs had had a space program, the obsessive sky watchers, professional and amateur, proclaim incessantly, they would still be here. That became blatantly obvious to me when I researched “The Asteroid Threat: Defending Our Planet from Deadly Near-Earth Objects” (aka “Watch Your Asteroid”).

But what I saw while researching the book, which confirmed what I learned covering the international space program as a journalist, was that the vast majority of Earthlings think that all things relating to “outer” space are abstract and inconsequential relative to the myriad requirements of sheer survival and politics, domestic and international.

The history of the manned space program is a towering example of such ultimate indifference. When President John F. Kennedy announced in 1961 that the United States was going to land some of its citizens on the moon within that decade, the nation excitedly and wholeheartedly accepted the challenge and undertook that monumental voyage with three astronauts in Apollo 11 in July 1969.

Americans and the rest of the West were jubilant, staging celebrations that the historic feat deserved. Nine more missions were planned, but only five made it to the lunar surface. The Apollo 13 mission was aborted after an oxygen tank exploded on the way to the moon, and Apollos 18, 19 and 20 were scrubbed because the voyages no longer interested the public or the news media enough to warrant their expense. (Apollo 11 cost $355 million; Apollo 17, the last mission, cost $450 million.)

More to the point, the United States had overcome the embarrassment of Sputnik and Yuri Gagarin’s first manned flight and clearly triumphed in the manned space race (apparently dramatically demonstrating capitalism’s enduring strength and importance over Marxist-Leninist communism’s lack of incentives to excel economically). It can therefore concentrate on other space activities, primarily focusing on planetary defense and colonizing other worlds.

Planetary defense — protecting Earth from killer rocks and comets — must necessarily start with a comprehensive planetary observation system that will spot an intruder so far out that there is time to send a robot out to nudge it off course. Failing that, the last-ditch defense would use explosives or lasers to kill it far enough away so that no debris hits life’s incubator and sustainer.

The colonizing strategy was first popularized in modern times with the publication of Jules Verne’s “From The EarthTo The Moon” in 1865. Barbicane, Ardan and Nicholl were shot out of a giant cannon called The Columbiad by The Gun Club of Baltimore and reached the Moon — the Queen of the Night — in 97 hours, 13 minutes and 20 seconds. (That was faster than Apollo 11, which made the journey in 1969 in 102 hours and 45 minutes.)

But today’s manned space program is now in limbo, with successive international crews effectively killing time in the Space Station and no plans by NASA or apparently Roscosmos, the Russian space agency, for a return of emissaries from Earth to the moon — let alone Mars — in the foreseeable future.

That is dangerous.

Osepok Tarov would be shaking her head in despair and perhaps thinking of Alexis de Tocqueville’s dire warning in 1835 in “Democracy in America:” “The citizens of a democracy have the right to commit suicide.”

William E. Burrows, a veteran journalist, is the author of “The New Ocean,” “The Asteroid Threat” and “The Survival Imperative,” among other titles.