Human exploration.

Humans just can’t help it, we love to explore. If we stumble on a cave, we just have to find out what’s in it. A mountain… well, we just have to climb it. There might be something at the top , and we won’t know unless we climb it. Early European explorers like Marco Polo just had to explore Asia and find out what was there. Portuguese explorers had to explore Africa and another way round it to get to the East to find spices, and in the process found the Cape of Good Hope, which led to South Africa, and then the Dutch settlers of the Cape had to explore inland, which led to founding of Transvaal, Natal, the whole of South Africa, which led to findinding the fierce Zulu tribe, and diamonds, and gold, which led to the British exploring the entire Southern African sub continent and founding Northern and Southern Rhodesia, Victoria Falls, it just goes on and on. All the Indian Ocean islands were discovered by the European maritime explorers. And then, those explorers decided to try and find a quicker, shorter way to the eastern Spice Islands and India and sailed west, and instead found the new world, North, Central and South America. And that opened up a whole lot of new discoveries and possibilities. New lands, new cultures, riches, escape from persecution. Of course, just finding a new continent wasn’t enough, then we had to explore that continent by going west. The frontier attracted almost every young man with dreams of finding gold, or their own land, or just the excitement of finding something new. Just sailing west wasn’t enough, explorers had to find a quicker, shorter way west, and so the Panama Canal was built. To build it took many explorations along the coast, hikes through dense forests, clashes with hostile tribes. All the excitement that exploring brings. Like I said, it’s in our blood.

But it doesn’t happen overnight, generations go by, stories get told, children grow up, and then that burning desire to explore gets to you, and off you go. There is many reasons for that, sometimes burning curiosity, burning excitement, sometimes National dominance over adversaries to prove their superiority. Like the 1960s space race between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union could not be allowed to get to the moon first, it had to be us, after all, they went into space first, orbited Earth first, they were winning, so the race was on, and we won. American astronauts walked on the moon first, and actually the only humans to do so. So once that goal was reached, and there was nothing there, we never went back. Until China showed an interest to go to the moon and build a permanent presence on the moon. Now we have an incentive to go exploring again, and this time we have a reason. To beat China, and to build a permanent moon village, for prestige, and for military objectives. Which it has always come down to, military needs. If it wasn’t for war, most of our inventions wouldn’t have been invented. The space race was due to the Cold War, and even now the new space race is because of the new Cold War with China. This time it is not for prestige, but for strategic military reasons, to ensure China does not gain military superiority over us. But it is not just that, now we have private companies like Space X and Blue Horizon investing in space exploration, moon village colonization, even further into space with missions to Mars and Biulding a Mars colony. Internationally, India is planning on going to Mars. And that is just the beginning. The Star Trek generation has grown up and wants to make it more than a sci fi movie. They want to explore the entire solar system, even our galaxy, the Milky Way. Who knows where it will go and what we will find. It’s in our blood and in our DNA. To boldly go where no man has gone before, to quote Gene Roddenberry.