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Each month our very own Voyager Science Queen* will bring you interesting, quirky and downright bizarre tasty morsels from the world of science. And its all completely, totally, 100% true!

Science Page August 2011

Human Movement

Will we ever become a space-faring species? And how does this relate to what happened to the Neanderthals?

Let’s start with early human history: As the most plausible of current theories explains it, the migration of humankind over the face of the planet happened slowly over generations. A family or tribe would move into a new area with plenty of resources. As the children of each family group or tribe grew up, the availability of resources would become limited. Naturally, some would move away to discover new hunting grounds or farmland with untouched resources. So, every generation or so, the region inhabited by human beings would expand. It was a slow process, like a glacier flowing; but like a glacier there was little that could halt this progress.

There is still some debate as to whether Neanderthal species was an ancestor of mankind or a separate primate altogether from humanity’s line. Either way, outcompeted or evolving, the territory covered by the Neanderthals were overtaken the people who are certainly our ancestors. There need not have been any pitched battles for territory. The gentle expansion was not a concerted effort to gain territory or an exploration to discover new lands. Instead, it just meant the children were living in the next valley, the grandchildren were in the valley beyond that and the great grandchildren lived in the valley three over …

The Neanderthals need not have died from anything other than a lack of resources. Now … why have I brought this up in relation to humanity and the possibility of the expansion into space?

As a zoologist, I know that many species of animals go through a ‘boom or bust’ cycle. A fast breeding, fecund species will go through a rapid population expansion. However, there will a point when resources are used up, or possibly the population of predators has expanded with their prey, or crowded living conditions mean that a virulent strain of a disease will spread through the entire population – or all three factors might be happening. The result is a sudden, dramatic die off of the population.

Human beings are slow growing and, until recently, had a high rate of infant mortality combined with relatively low numbers of offspring. This meant that our population grew slowly. However, thanks to modern medicine and better food-growing technologies, our numbers have reached the point of exponential growth were our population can now double with a single century. And we consume resources as if we lived an infinite Earth, when even now we can’t really feed the population of mankind in existence at this point in time.

So what do we do when out fragile environment and burdened economies finally buckle under the weight of seven or eight or none billion human beings? There will be wars and diseases and famine to knock back our numbers. Climate change might make the planet uninhabitable for us. It will be ugly. Humanity might not survive the bust.

In the last month, we saw the last flight of the space shuttle program. I don’t just think this is a shame … I see this is as a tragedy.

I believe with all my heart that, if humanity is going to survive as a species, we have to expand out into space. We have to find new territory and new resources. However, to quote Douglas Adams, space is BIG and faster-than-light spaceships are unlikely to be built any time in the foreseeable future.

But our expansion into space doesn’t have to be fast.

It took mankind a geological age to inhabit the Earth. Why should we expect the exploration of space to be any faster? If we send anyone out into the depths of space beyond our solar system, they will have to go in generational ships with their own carefully-tended ecosystems. Just as each tribe or family, as it left their valley to seek new resources over the next ridge, there is a risk that there will be nothing to find … a desert, a sea, an icy wasteland. However, this didn’t stop our ancestors. They crossed those deserts and seas and wastelands. Sometimes they learnt how to exploit them!

But with America deciding that space is no longer a frontier … well, let’s hope the other space-going nations still want to go exploring. Or maybe modern man will go the way of the Neanderthal.

*The Voyager Science Queen is also known as Lynne Lumsden Green

So, who is this woman who attempts to entertain us with Science?

Lynne Lumsden Green lives on the Sunshine Coast of Queensland, and attends the University of the Sunshine Coast. Ever the perpetual student, she is adding a B.A. in Creative Writing to her B.SC. in Zoology (Jennifer Fallon is her role model). As one of the founding members of Scriber Space, the site for USC creative writers, she hopes to create a writing community as lively and as close as the Voyager writing community. She spends her non-study hours volunteering for writing-related events, writing, reading, and – oh yes – looking after her family. She is still passionately interested in anything and everything, and enjoys the opportunity to share this passion via the Science Page. Terry Pratchett, Isaac Asimov, Neil Gaiman, and all the Voyager authors are her favourite people on the planet...and one of her goals is to meet all of those authors, well, at least those authors still in the land of the living. Recently, her own writing efforts have been meeting with better success. She is putting this down to her excellent lecturers and persistence, and to the fact that you can eat chocolate while typing.

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Looking for more scientific oddities? Have you checked out Dr Steven Juan's website? He is, quite literally, the wizard of odds!