Your complimentary articles

You’ve read all of your complimentary articles for this month. To have complete access to the thousands of philosophy articles on this site, please

SUBSCRIBE NOW

If you are a subscriber please sign in to your account.

To buy or renew a subscription please visit the Shop.

If you are a print subscriber you can contact us to create an online account.

Human Futures

Space Exploration: Humanity’s Single Most Important Moral Imperative

Dr E. R. Klein says we should reconsider the value of space exploration and start getting ready to leave the nest.

Everyone is familiar with the giant stone heads of Easter Island, a tiny and remote island in the South Eastern Pacific, about 1800 miles off the coast of Chile. Nearly a thousand of these huge statues, probably made for religious purposes, stand like sentries guarding a small patch of land that was not discovered by Europeans until 1722. Easter Island’s first inhabitants probably arrived around 400 AD, and linguistic and genetic evidence suggested they most likely came from East Polynesia. It is estimated that the original landing party contained only about 100 people.

What makes Easter Island important to us, however, has nothing to do with how or why people migrated to this isolated spot, nor how they lived.

…