Frontiers and Opportunity Cost

In the year 1002 or 1003, a Norse explorer by the name of Leif Ericson landed his ship on the coast of Newfoundland, long before that land was "newly found" again. A small settlement was created as a base for discovery -- salmon were taken from the streams and grapes from the woods. Leif may even have found human life on those distant shores, but after perhaps a year abandoned that settlement and went back home to Greenland, then on to Norway, never to return to the Canadian coast. The Norse knew America existed, and for some reason that was enough for them. The risks must have seemed too high against the uncertain treasures of new discovery.

It would be half a millennium before Europe would reach out again for those western continents, when the voyages of Christopher Columbus generalized knowledge that they even existed. Glory must go to the Spanish for realizing what their new technologies were capable of -- getting across the Atlantic with less risk to life or property. Glory, and then coffee, and then cocoa, and cocaine, and bananas, and tomatoes, and hardwoods, and coal, and ... well, you get the idea. The sorts of things that didn't go to the Norse, because they didn't invest enough. They didn't want enough.

The risks of exploration, of course, are substantial. Early in the 20th century a cry of interest went up for the North and South poles of the Earth, and the Powers that Were sent their finest explorers to the coldest regions of the globe, where they found ... nothing. There were no economically appealing resources in sight, and so we quietly forgot the excitement of exploration and our motivation to expand. Treaties were signed declaring Antarctica an international territory to be put to exclusively scientific use, and not much more was said.

Something scientists have since become certain of is oil deposits beneath the icy surface of Antarctica -- possibly in globally significant volumes. We've lost our drive, though, and there's just no motivation to jump through all of the necessary hoops to drill in such a little-understood part of the world.

These situations are analogous to the new frontiers outside of our own atmosphere. Will we be like Lief Ericson, who left behind a continent of potential wealth? The combination of materials from the Americas and capital from new markets in Europe during the 18th century were instrumental in sparking industrialization at the beginning of the 19th. Could it be that more interest in America when it was first discovered by the Norse could have advanced our species by 500 years?

Will we be like the international community upon the discovery of the South Pole, uncertain and unwilling to continue our trajectory toward new discovery under the ice and rock of the most southern continent? Could it be that the energy concerns of the early 21st century could have been hampered by excess oil under an uninhabited land mass?

Are we content with the Apollo missions of the 1960's, and a static understanding of our Moon and Mars and Venus -- and leaving progress as a species to our 16th generational successors?

Or will we take the initiative and endeavor to answer the risks and concerns -- and either make a permanent presence on our neighboring bodies a modern reality or, at the very, very least, come up with a good reason why we shouldn't invest in our future?