Space: the final frontier. These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise. Its continuing mission: to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no one has gone before.

In these ever lasting words that Patrick Stewart says during the theme to Star Trek: The Next Generation, we find ourselves in similar shoes as we continue to embark on our joy into space and beyond.

Recently I started to watch the series When We Left Earth: The NASA Missions and I have to admit, the progress that we’ve made and the steps that we have taken have been nothing short of a miracle. How we started a little less than half a century ago with a dream to go into space and the Moon, to today where we are sending probes into deep space, cataloging distant worlds and testing the limits of our engineering and imagination with new methods of survival and exploration to planets such as Mars within our own solar system.

When we look at today’s generation and our perspective on space, I don’t think that we see the same type of hands on drive that we saw in previous generations. Previous generations were more inclined to try something in the real world and observe and adjust; whereas in today’s generation the safer route is to computer model the simulation and extrapolate possible outcomes or the likely outcome. There’s something lost there that I think has degraded our overall experience when it comes to space travel and exploration.

The reasons why we leave earth I don’t think have changed. Humans by their very nature are curious beings, and while we certainly don’t pretend to know everything about our physical world, the magical pull that is inside each and every one of us to look up at the stars and wonder, Are we alone in this universe?, and if not, who and where are others that are like us?

If the Drake equation is even remotely accurate, the likelihood of life in the universe is not just probable but a certainty. Stephen Hawking’s recently commented that he has concerns on how encounters with extraterrestrial life would go and that almost certainly the Earth would become a victim–similar to how we have fantasized it happening in such movies as War of the Worlds. While our initial attempts at communicating with extraterrestrials have promoted peace and openness, it begs the question whether or not we are being naive in assuming that creatures from beyond the stars are peaceful and curious and eager to learn as we are. And in fact if we take our own human behavior into account, we are savage creatures who wage war on each other, plan the destruction of the human race through weapons of mass destruction, and are otherwise suspicious of each others actions and motives. Why should we assume that while the best parts of humanity should be what we present as our good foot forward, that other species of life out there in the universe will be any more noble and without the deeper seeded maliciousness that exists in each and every one of us today?

The big news today was the Hayabusa’s return to earth after its mission to collect samples from the asteroid: Itokawa and provide us with a clearer picture of the primordial stuff that makes up our universe and what elements and compositions of materials exist elsewhere in our universe. Clearly humans are still moving forward with our desire to go beyond the stars, but I question whether or not we are making enough dramatic steps forward as our forefathers had done to pave the path into space many decades ago.

It is up to the future generations to continue the progress and the determination to go beyond our atmosphere and to be curious about the universe as a whole. Even intellectually we have become so mathematical and theoretical that we are borderline on the philosophical instead of anything that remotely appears to be applied physics. The hows and whys of the natural world are becoming more and more unclear and in many ways seem to be hindering our ability to develop the new technology and methods that are needed to aid in our journey to the stars. Our limits in terms of our understanding of the universe prevent us from conceiving of speed in terms faster than light. We use the term impossible with such certainty, and yet even if we look at our past and the things we would assert similar certainty on, it would seem that certainty is no longer certain but rather just a temporary hold on our understanding waiting to be unlocked by that breakthrough that changes or transforms our understanding. Centuries ago everyone was certain that the world was flat (baring the current argument amongst the current Flat Earth Society folks) and yet our understanding changed and we now (for the most part) can agree that the earth is spherical. Centuries ago, the idea of a person flying seemed so completely far from the realm of possibilities that such talk would make others look on you with confusion and contempt. How dare you think that humans can fly! And yet today flight is as common place and walking and all it took was a principle on lift and technology to take advantage of it. Today the idea of space travel where the distance between two points is covered in a very short period of time seems to be an impossible feat. Theories such as the Theory of Relativity that deals with the amount of energy it would take to go the speed of light and other Constants further plague our abilities to take the next leap forward from the speed of a rocket to the speed of a photon. We’ve assumed that there is nothing faster in this universe than light, and perhaps with today’s level of understanding and technology that is true, but just as it was thought to be impossible to go faster than the speed of sound, human courage and our desire to go beyond slowly pushed through that barrier and now we see that as a non-issue. Will faster than light travel be done in the same way?

As I’m sure is the case with the majority of folks out there, I hope that within my lifetime I can see the day when humanity embarks on a truly remarkable journey into the stars and we can experience the universe in a way that we could only have dreamed about. What new things lie out there for us to find and discover? What new challenges and species will we meet? How will our experiences forever change the world that we live in today–the one we call Earth and Home? While there are many questions that leave more questions than answers, there is one thing that remains a certainty–we will never stop looking up at the stars and wondering what is up there.