Our Future Off-Earth

With the leaps and bounds being made by private spaceflight companies like Blue Origin and SpaceX, the image of ordinary people traveling beyond the Earth’s atmosphere is quickly turning from science fiction into reality. It’s exciting. But with high risk and little oversight, will the industry embrace its utopian prospects or become just another haven for bad actors and extractive capitalism? Whatever the case, one thing’s for sure: It’s only a matter of time before the first baby is born off-Earth.

Chris Impey is a University Distinguished Professor of Astronomy at the University of Arizona. He has over 450 publications on education, observational cosmology, galaxies, and quasars, and his research has been supported by $20 million in NASA and NSF grants. He has won eleven teaching awards and has taught four online classes with over 420,000 enrolled and 8 million minutes of video lectures watched. Chris Impey is a past Vice President of the American Astronomical Society, and he has won its career Education Prize. He’s also been NSF Distinguished Teaching Scholar, Carnegie Council’s Arizona Professor of the Year, and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Professor. He has written 120 popular articles on cosmology, astrobiology and education, two textbooks, a novel called Shadow World, and eleven popular science books