Martin Rees

How humans may populate the universe in the billions of years ahead

[Illustration: John Broadley] 
issue 16 July 2022

I’m old enough to have viewed the grainy TV images of the first Moon landings by Apollo 11 in 1969. I can never look at the Moon without recalling Neil Armstrong’s ‘One small step for a man; one giant leap for mankind’. It seems even more heroic in retrospect, considering how they depended on primitive computing and untested equipment.

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20 July 1969 (NASA/AFP via Getty Images)

Once the race to the Moon was won, there was no motivation for continuing with the space race and the gargantuan costs involved.

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