Would you wager a bet — your life’s savings — to support a project that produced ten results, only one of which was successful, a 10% success rate?

The ROI for your wager is your name and your family’s names on a plaque.

The plaque is attached to a landing craft.

The adult travelers inside the craft all die.

The eggs and embryos survive, grow and carve out a niche in the new landscape, the mini-ecosystem of the landing craft, unable to decipher, let alone pronounce the names on the plaque.

But former inhabitants of Earth have found a way to live on another celestial sphere.

That, alone, was the accomplishment of this current millennial-long civilisation we propagate and perpetuate.

More than any other civilisation before ours.

More than any other species or ecosystem.

The sole goal of life, to reproduce itself in whatever form the environment will tolerate in the eat-and-be-eaten cycle of life.

What if we sent that one-out-of-ten-success craft in a few decades from now, achieving the goal by slowing down global consumption of raw materials for a short period — several years, a couple of decades — until we jumped back into our fast dash for the latest gizmos, gadgets, family gatherings and after-hours parties?

Sure, pretty much most of us will keep supporting the rise and fall of family fortunes, business empires and geopolitical zones (a/k/a governments), because only a few lucky souls will qualify for climbing aboard the ten launch vehicles and only one craft will carry our species’ passengers all the way to another planetary body, acting as couriers.

The survivors of the craft will exist as if they live in a parallel universe, unaware of our continued great accomplishments on Earth:

• Our medical breakthroughs, such as the extension of a healthy person’s life into a third century of high-quality daily activities.
• Our flying cars, floating cities and other dreams of days gone by fully realised.
• Totally-connected thought patterns via new technology, letting those who want no privacy or have no secrets to hide to join the Hive and move our species forward/backward/sideways as one.

Our civilisation will go on for countless decades, business cycles and climate changes, prospering in the ebb and flow of new ideas that counter prevailing ideas.

Optimists and pessimists will support or deny the direction we take, without fail.

In the interim, our celestial cousins are recreating the paradise of Earth elsewhere.

You and I will never know with certainty whether our actions contribute most to the growth of life off this planet or life on this planet, regardless of the perceived benefit/detriment of our actions in the moment.

We are who we are, doing what we do to enhance our survival within the social net we’ve spread over Earth, extending tiny threads outward into space, just in case this net eventually collapses.

We can be plumbers, fashion designers, mechanics, midlevel managers, lab techs, airplane pilots, business angels or primary school students.

We create futures we see and futures we cannot imagine possible.

We may solve mathematical conundrums at age 15 or not be able to balance a checkbook, or both.

But we will find a way to move Earth-based lifeforms, including synthetic beings designed for harsh conditions on other worlds, into and out of our solar system.

The Voyager spacecraft series is one example.

The Beagle 2 is another.

So, too, Venera 9.

Is one of those or a new craft the single container that harbours beings which will adjust to their new environment and thrive?

Would a recent university graduate with a mathematics major be the one who makes a difference in which craft is the one that represents our achievements up to a point in time on Earth but for millions of years later on a different planet?

There’s only one way to find out — live in the moment with an eye on the future, using the collective wisdom of your [sub]culture as a guide, trusting your instincts to know which elders are the ones with you, your subculture, and the future of your species in their best interests.

Don’t forget to have fun.  Wear a giant foam bow tie to a corporate board meeting, your wedding or your child’s secondary school graduation ceremony.