As you can see, the space age is far from dead. But how do any of these things help us? So a few rich people get joy-rides to space, what good does that do the rest of us? Well, their main objectives might be a little frivolous but the success of these ventures would bring benefits far beyond those objectives. Virgin Galactic may be selling tickets to the rich but the technology developed could mean planes that can exit the atmosphere, fly without air resistance slowing them down and re-enter. That means a commercial flight from London to Sydney could take as little as 4 hours, revolutionizing global transportation. The plan to mine asteroids might seem like an attempt by a group of  rich men to get even richer, but in doing so they would be helping solve the issue of resource scarcity. Unusually enough, the founders of Planetary Resources want to bring back platinum-group metals and lower the market price for them on earth. Currently, these metals cost $23,000 a pound and a reduction in their price would mean reduction in the price of medical devices and renewable energy products (among other products) that utilize them. Additionally, since the mining would require robotics technology that doesn’t yet exist, this project’s success would result in the development of that technology and consequently its use on earth in a variety of applications. And in the case of both of these companies, SpaceX’s work to make cheap, reusable rockets would complement their work and pave the way for other space-related business ideas to surface.

But all of that is just in the short term. We tend to wave away the long-term goals because they seem so far-fetched but they are goals worth striving for in their own right. A Martian colony may seem a little impractical now but imagine after we’ve got all the technology down and we take that step towards becoming an interplanetary species. A successful Martian colony would serve as an excellent backup for the human race. Granted, the earth is safe at the moment but with the climate changing, natural disasters wreaking havoc on our cities and radioactive material spilling into our oceans, there may come a time when we can’t survive here anymore and we’ll wish we had colonized Mars. But Mars is nearby and boring, what about the more interesting planets that are farther away? All the potentially habitable planets are light-years away from us but imagine if we could get to them in a few months or years? Although they’re still very far away from practical prototypes, physicists have devised plausible physical theories for building warp drives that could take us to the Gliese 667 system, where there are 3 potentially habitable planets, in as little as 2 years. It sounds implausible but NASA is already planning to have interstellar travel by 2100. Then of course there’s the holy grail of space travel: the discovery of alien life. Right now our best bet is the possibility of bacteria beneath the surface of Mars but what if we went to one of the Gliese planets and found intelligent life? Not only would it be the greatest scientific discovery in human history but just the knowledge of another intelligent species would have massive religious and philosophical implications.