Flow Chart Explains How Humans Can Conquer, Exploit Space

Perhaps the reason that there is not yet a human space colony hurtling through the cosmos is that nobody has paid close enough attention to the most complicated flow chart ever constructed. Now, MAKE magazine’s Sean Regan has tracked it down — it’s the once-prominent manufacturing company Rockwell International’s uber-detailed plan for realizing a golden era of capitalism-fueled space civilization. It’s called the (Preliminary) INTEGRATED SPACE PLAN, and it is built like an over-busy Power Point slide (full size here):

This instantly reminded me of the Pentagon’s infamously overwrought Integrated Defense Acquisition, Technology, and Logistics Life Cycle Management System that circulated round the webs, too—apparently seeding space transit and equipping the troops are similarly thorny operations.

According to the chart, which runs chronologically from top to bottom (follow the arrows!), by 1998, this should have happened: SPACE STATION ENABLES IN-SPACE COMMERCIAL ACTIVITY. Moon mining and asteroid harvesting were to be well under way. Alas, we were barely there, and by 2008, the BIPLANETARY CIVILIZATION (‘earth-moon’) was nowhere to be found, and we were sadly unable to EVOLVE TO EXPLOIT EXTRATERRESTRIAL RESOURCES.

And it looks unlikely that HUMAN EXPANSION INTO INNER SOLAR SYSTEM will begin in 2014, as was planned. And we might cross our fingers, but EMERGENCE OF SPACEFARING CIVILIZATION seems unlikely by the beginning of next decade. Which is a little bit sad, because by the end of the 2020s, we were supposed to see:

HUMANITY BEGINS TRANSITION FROM A TERRESTRIAL SPECIES TO A SOLAR SPECIES

The transition would have been completed by 2045, paving the way first for our victory lap (Human Outer Solar System Grand Tour, Uranus/Pluto) and then Interstellar Travel by the dawn of the next century with ‘Interstellar Traversing World Ships,’ leading to the Emergence of the Homo Sapien as an Intergalactic Species. Obviously, Mars would by fully colonized with Large-Scale Human Habitation.

Various folks around the web have marveled at this artifact, remarking upon its detail, its delusions of grandeur, its now-humorous terminology. But I’d like to note how heavily skewed towards profiteering and resource extraction this thing is in mission—the whole plan seems to be propelled by a quest for commodities; resources we might extract for profit along the way. Which makes sense, since Rockwell was an industrial manufacturing firm, but it still makes for a rather grim platform to predicate interstellar travel upon. Yet this isn’t exceptional for thinking at the time—even NASA had assumed we’d be mining asteroids by now too:

But still; it’s disconcerting to see such elaborate schemes turning humankind into the sort of space-scouring resource-hungry marauders that populate the villains’ roles in our own sci-fi mythologies.

It’s like Stephen Hawking says "We only have to look at ourselves to see how intelligent life might develop into something we wouldn’t want to meet. I imagine they might exist in massive ships … having used up all the resources from their home planet. Such advanced aliens would perhaps become nomads, looking to conquer and colonize whatever planets they can reach.”

If this is how HUMAN EXPANSION INTO THE COSMOS BEGINS, count me out.