It seems DARPA held a workshop in Northern California on January 11-12, 2011.
They produced a whitepaper to kick this whole thing off.
Here is a quote from the paper:
Quote:
Why Explore Beyond Earth’s Atmosphere:
Workshop participants spent extensive time exploring the drivers and motivating factors for long-term exploration of space. This began with several questions, including: what are the most important drivers to support the long- term vision of interstellar travel by humans? Why should we go to the stars?
The group identified five key factors as high-level motivations for the exploration of distant space:
• Human survival: ideas related to creating a legacy for the human species, backing up the Earth’s biosphere, and enabling long-term survival in the face of catastrophic disasters on Earth.
• Contact with other life: finding answers to whether there is other life in the universe, whether “intelligent” life exists elsewhere in the galaxy, and at a basic level, whether we are alone in the universe.
• Evolution of the human species: exploration as a human imperative, expansion of human understanding and consciousness through space exploration.
• Scientific discovery: breakthroughs in scientific understanding of the natural universe, a pursuit for knowledge.
• Belief and faith: a search for God or the Divine, a need to explore beyond Earth’s atmosphere as a part of natural theology or as found through religious revelation.
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… Carl Sagan wannabes ?
Comments welcome.
Cheers