Having been born near to the cusp of the year 2000, and assuming we live even a moderately long life, those of my age cohort and I will be here as observers (and actors) into the twilight of the 21st century——and what a century it’s shaping up to become.

Gaia Vince is presciently calling it the “Nomad Century,” in her recently published text of the same name¹. Yet the nomadism she writes of is a nomadism wrought by forced migration on the basis of climate-induced catastrophe. By some of the estimates that she cites in the text, this century could put 1.5 billion people on the move——the largely poleward move to the climate refugia bound to open up in places like the Canadian north, Patagonia, Scandinavia, Siberia, and even Antarctica. Some of our greatest expanses of still-wild terrain will, in the event we see warming of around 4° Celsius, come under the plough and pavement of displaced peoples, far from their Bangladeshi, Sub-Saharan, Southern European, Central Asian, Central American, and Oceanic homelands. Cities will be spawned upon the Arctic and Antarctic rims in places where former snowfall comes to beget rain, and corn and wheat and potatoes are sowed by dark-skinned peoples beneath a midnight sun.

This sort of forced nomadism, while pressing, and at least to some extent a certainty, is not quite the nomadism I aim to focus on today. I want to focus on the nomadism that drove this world’s people to the far corners of the map——up into remote mountain valleys, desert oases, and out into the far flung constellation of coral shores that is Polynesia. I don’t doubt that to some extent all nomadism throughout time was driven in large part by necessity, and that there may have been specific episodes of forced migration scattered throughout the general picture of things——that food shortages, water scarcity, and violent conflict have always been leading factors in the dispersal of our kind——but the romantic in me denies the fullness of this explanation as a driving factor for nomadism in general (excluding Vince’s more niche usage of the term as it pertains to impending climate migrations of this century). Rather, I suggest, and I’m being the furthest thing from novel in doing so, that a spark of curiosity must have played an integral part in this expansion. Movement driven by the need for safety, water, or more abundant game goes far in explaining our pushing out across the Earth from the Ethiopian heartland, but I don’t think that it goes as far as people did. A food or water shortage upon the island of, say, Tahiti should motivate a crew of Polynesian navigators to journey back west to the island groups from which their ancestors came, to try and secure for their people the resources they know already to be there. A shortage does not explain why they instead set out in their outriggers for the southeast, over horizons their people had never before breached, on a perilous flinging of one’s own flesh into the far reaches of the distant unknown, and set foot upon Rapa nui, some 1,150 miles of open ocean from the next nearest island. This sort of voyaging does not explain a local material shortage——it’s the stuff of epic, the cerulean epic of the most spatially expansive ethnic group this world has ever known. In my thinking, some human desire to quest forth into the unknown has to be a part of that story.

It is this more complex nomadism, the nomadism that combines necessity and desire, that I want to focus on today——both its history and its future. It seems clear that this truly will be the century of the nomad, but for reasons that include, and yet go beyond Vince’s climate refugeeism.

The usual depiction of the nomad is one in rags, with all of their worldly possessions dragged along with them, setting out over merciless terrain with only the dim hope of a better life driving their tired feet forward. This is certainly the nomad of Vince’s depiction, at least. Though nomadism is much more expansive a phenomenon than one so startling bleak. For me, the term conjures up mental images of a procession carried out far more proudly, with equal parts excitement and uncertainty fueling a given community’s collective nervous system. And for most of this world’s nomadic peoples, for the vast majority of their histories, the trekking wasn’t always, or even often, done across unknown terrain——it would be more akin to a journey along ancestral paths, that perhaps no living member of the group had visited before, but their songs would be encoded with descriptions of the landscape, as an oral history and mental map to bring the people back to old resources they’d allowed to regenerate unpeopled for awhile. Of course, the discovery by a nomadic group, after weeks on foot through less hospitable terrain, that the songs had in fact been correctly laid down all those years ago, and that a perennial stream and abundant game were indeed to be found in the particular valley to which they’d been led, would be a moment so joyous as to make perfectly understandable the phenomena of both ancestor worship and the animistic sense of the sacred place.

But of course, at unique moments in a people’s history, there arises a time to voyage——to go forward across lands and waters for which the people have no song. As I scan the total history of which I’m personally aware, certain moments of voyaging come to the fore. The 10th century plights of Erik the Red across the North Atlantic which resulted in the norse settling of Greenland, and the voyages of his son Leif that reached Newfoundland in the ensuing generation are obvious examples of a heroic embrace of the unknown. The voyaging 10,000 years earlier by the ancestors of the Greenlandic Inuit who were already present on the island when Erik arrived come to mind with similar valor. The first peoples to reach Australia some 50,000 years ago occupy a similar place in my imagination, as does every other group that quested so far beyond the known, and in their bravery allowed the world to become peopled, and our collective song to swell into every inhabitable fiber of the Earthen body.

The group I so conspicuously omitted from that previous paragraph is of course the Polynesians, and this is because they hold a special place in my worldview——this is because their story, specifically, expanded to new dimensions my mind’s capacity to be in awe of the human project. I’m not going to attempt to even scratch the surface of their culture, but I would direct the curious reader to the most comprehensive and digestible book I’ve found so far on the subject, and that is Christina Thompson’s Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia. I will give but a criminally reductive gist of the story. Those who would go on to become the Polynesian people, from an ancestral homeland in the Western Pacific Ocean, ended up settling nearly every inhabitable patch of sand and rock across the great triangle that stretches from Aotearoa (New Zealand) in the southwest to Hawai’i in the north to Rapa Nui (Easter Island) in the southeast, as well as everything in between, becoming the most spatially expansive ethnic group in human history (as mentioned above). They managed all of this in double-hulled canoes and with just the stars and the patterns of oceanic ecology and meteorology as their guides. The world spoke, and they knew how to listen. They knew how to “fish islands out of the sea,” as they would describe their reliable navigation to a tiny, low-lying atoll after weeks at sea with no landmark. And anyone that believes the Pacific Ocean abounds with islands has been deceived by whatever globe they got that idea from. Relative to its size (roughly one third of the planet) the Pacific is almost entirely devoid of land, and globes and maps must drastically overrepresent the size of most Polynesian islands in order that they be visible to the naked eye. In essence, navigating this oceanscape is like throwing a dart (that your life depends upon) and hitting a penny that is well over the hill in front of you. And they managed to do so reliably enough as to maintain an interconnected culture between these various island groups (with the notable exception of Rapa nui, which, it seems, was a single colonization event that then persisted in complete isolation for somewhere between 900 and 1200 years).

I dwell on the Polynesians here for a specific purpose: they represent the strongest historical parallel to the voyaging currently upon us——the voyaging of our kind out across the solar system. For as I said, at unique moments in every culture’s path, there arises a time to voyage. That time is upon us now, as anyone paying attention to the latest astronomical developments can attest——we sit at the dawn of a new space age.

Yes, we had this enthusiasm once before. On September 12, 1962, then-president John F. Kennedy told the world that we would put men on the moon by the end of the decade. However much this declaration excited the imaginations of the masses, it must have paled in comparison to what the sight of men walking on the lunar surface did to the 600 million (1/5th of the world’s population at the time) who were watching it live just 7 years later. But soon enough enthusiasm waned and the whole questing skyward came to appear as nothing more than an industrial power flexing its technological prowess over those with fewer resources to squander. After a handful of subsequent missions lasting until 1972, we’ve not made our way back to the moon in half a century now.

This new space age that lies before us is almost certainly different. Check out NASA’s list of “Upcoming Planetary Events and Missions” here to see for yourself what the next decade alone entails. Lacking an atmosphere to protect its surface, the moon has been relentlessly pelted by meteorites continuously for 4.5 billion years, and meteorites are among this solar system’s greatest sources of rare Earth elements. They are rare on Earth precisely because most meteorites carrying them burn up before they make it to the earth’s surface——the moon on the other hand is a near limitless supply of these elements, and therefore mining its surface for export to Earth is set to produce the next generation of industrial tycoons. Inordinate gains are at stake and international competition is going to fiercely propel this new space age forward in ways that were not yet possible in the late 60’s and early 70’s. And I don’t think the momentum is going to abate like last time. The space race of the past was exactly that——merely a race. It was a high tide that flooded new terrain but then promptly ebbed. It was a premonition, a foreshadowing. What we have before us now seems more akin to the new level of a rising sea, never again to recede.

At first the mining operations will be fully automatic, but soon enough people will be sent for instrument maintenance, science, as well as highfalutin tourism, and a colony will form, making our first step of celestial metastasis complete, with mars soon to follow. We know from history that this urge is within us——only necessary in certain pivotal moments, but always ready for whenever the conditions again arise; this time that intrinsic urge to voyage will be coupled to the limitless potential of material (and scientific²) gain.

That swirl of dust we’ve timed so well

Those sun-dance specks upon which we seek to dwell

Toss our men and our women outwards to outer orbs

To start anew, found Edens under glass

And sow the dead heavens with life at last——

But why metastasize?

That’s not a question that cancers often ask.

What do I write this all for? In short, to vaccinate the collective imagination with a fragment of what is to come. I believe that we all would do well to go out and relish the sight of the moon and mars still unsettled, acknowledging that before this century is up that may change. We are bound to lose forever their visual wilderness, and us younger ones might just see it happen. But in this dark acknowledgment I suggest we simultaneously acknowledge the beauty——the poetry——that is to accompany this voyaging, and the knowledge whilst star-gazing that our own kind lives out their lives out there, out past the atmospheric frontier. We will learn the songs that space so silently whispers, and lay down the paths that connect new home territories. It will be messy; corporations will dominate the process and the first trillionaire will be born from the lunar defacing of a mining monopoly. But it’s always messy——Polynesian settlement of the Pacific was simultaneously a massive extinction event for nearly all the ground-nesting and flightless birds that called those islands home and had no defenses against the Polynesian rat or Polynesian people (in the case of the Moa)³. And yet, even as an ecologist I can’t help being filled with a strong sense of the mythic glory of the Polynesian story despite this.

If it seems I’m trying to argue in favor of our settling of the solar system, I’m not. I don’t mean to glorify it, at least not in full. In fact, it strikes me as a tremendous distraction from the problems facing life on Earth. Imagine the irony of this cosmic nomadism being celebrated amidst the pain of the masses adrift on our own planet, forced from home to some arctic city of slums——people having their connection to place severed involuntarily whilst the world’s wealthiest brand their own names into martian rust. I simply mean, from a place of almost helpless passivity, to remind and forewarn that these two divergent strains of nomadism are coming soon——are already in motion——and that instead of with ignorance we might instead look to the heavens and the high-latitudes with understanding as to the pivotal point in our species’ history we currently find ourselves. Perhaps with this understanding we might find extra motivation to mitigate the horrors of forced nomadism. And maybe, in these next years, the twilight of an Earthbound era, we might gaze upon Mars and the lunar surface with a sort of time-honored nostalgia for all the millennia in which humans tracked these great orbs across the sky as gods and spirits——these ever wild, intangible worlds——and know that perhaps in our flicker of a lifespan we may well come to look up, their divinity violated, and know them to be peopled.

And yet, perhaps if we spend the next years in devotion——thanking them for the gift of the ability to dream of other worlds which they bestowed upon our early ancestors——we will be able to look upon their impending colonization as the obvious answer to the riddle they themselves gave us. And maybe, if the reader allows such anthropomorphic license, these other worlds were silently envious of the millennia of Earth-worship our planet has enjoyed, and have been encouraging us skyward because they seek life upon their crusts and hosting their own cultures of homely praise. That is about the best story we can tell ourselves, at least, as we litter the cosmos: that Olympus mons⁴ at her staggering 72,000 feet deserves revelers prostrating at her base. I suspect we will come to disappoint, as we certainly have the Earth.

To try and conclude this all, perhaps most importantly we must be ready to thank these other worlds for the perspectives they will offer us upon our own. Maybe it will take a while before we have the facilities in place to raise a generation at one of these outposts, but it does seem inevitable that some day a small generation of children will be raised beneath a lunar dome——the first of the humans to be born through ectogenesis outside the Earth’s atmospheric womb. While the rest of us Earthlings gaze skyward, minds wandering beyond this world, the first children of the moon will grow up not watching their own clouds pass overhead in idle moments, but instead watching with awe as hurricanes pirouette silently across the Earth’s opal waters, like gods looking on from above. Certainly their parents, be they telescope operators, machinists, scientists, or doctors, will have no chance at keeping their offspring at the outpost beyond their childhood. Those kids reared under domes set in grey dust will, as soon as they have the opportunity, be leaving for the swirling blue, white, green, and brown world that they’ve been fantasizing about their entire short lives. And maybe this is where animistic Earth worship will return to its rightful world——aboard the first spaceship of those born off this great planet making their desperate plunge back to it——to swim naked in cool ocean waters and breath freely from the open sky. Imagine passing one of these lunarlings upon the trail you’ve grown so numb to, as he or she experiences her first forest, their tears of ecstasy falling for everything we’ve all taken so wildly for granted. Yes the gravity will feel oppressive, but they will have the intellect of an adult with the revelatory sensory experience of a toddler, and their poetry would be of air, water, birds, breath, grass——probably too elemental for any of us numb ones to find any beauty in. I don’t look forward to the new space age, but I do look forward to this handful of earnest pagans that our striving space-ward is bound to reseed upon the Earth.

¹Vince, Gaia, 2022. Nomad Century: How Climate Migration Will Reshape Our World.

²The scientific potentials that colonizing the moon offers are pretty sweet. Land-based telescopes can be so much larger than the biggest telescope we can put into orbit. On Earth, however, our atmosphere drastically impairs the capacity for visually probing deep space. A land-based telescope built on the moon’s far side will combine both of these benefits (no atmosphere and the capacity to be giant) as well as being shielded from all of Earth’s radiowave interference. We will get deep space images that put even the James Webb Telescope to shame, and be able to peer back into deep time. Additionally, the moon will serve as a sort of port to the outer solar system——lacking an atmosphere and having a lower gravitational coefficient, it requires far less fuel for rockets to achieve escape velocity.

³Steadman, David. “The prehistoric extinction of south pacific birds: catastrophy versus attrition.” https://horizon.documentation.ird.fr/exl-doc/pleins_textes/pleins_textes_7/divers2/010020760.pdf

⁴Olympus mons is the tallest planetary mountain in the solar system, rising almost 14 miles above the surrounding Martian surface. That’s about 2.5 times as tall as Mount Everest.