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Es gibt ihn noch - mit Vorbehalt. Lesehinweis auf eine aktuelle Buchrezension von Freeman Dyson in der New York Review of Books vom 13. Oktober 2016:

The Green Universe: A Vision

Zitat von NYRB
The three books under review describe space activities belonging to the Big Space and Little Space cultures that are now competing for money and public attention. Each book gives a partial view of a small piece of history. Each tells a story within the narrow setting of present-day economics and politics. None of them looks at space as a transforming force in the destiny of our species.
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All three books look at the future of space as a problem of engineering. That is why their vision of the future is unexciting. They see the future as a continuation of the present-day space cultures. In their view, unmanned missions will continue to explore the universe with orbiters and landers, and manned missions will continue to be sporting events with transient public support. Neither the unmanned nor the manned missions are seen as changing the course of history in any fundamental way.

Genau dies war ja immer der Elefant im Zimmer, der in den Diskussionen über Sinn & Ziel der bemannten Raumfahrt nicht erwähnt wurde, seit Anfang der fünfziger Jahre, als sich abzeichnete, daß Raketen & Satelliten demnächst im Realen Leben figurieren würden: was folgt auf die erste Inaugenscheinnahme, sei es nun durch die bildgebenden Verfahren von Robotern oder durch Stippvisiten von Probensammlern, die um eine Flagge herumhüpfen & den Beweis erbringen, daß man auch auf dem Mars Kaffee kochen kann, wenn man 100 Mrd. $$ investiert?

Die Vision, die Dyson dem technologischen Pessimismus entgegensetzt, ist nicht neu: entwickelt hat er sie in seiner "intellektuellen Autobiographie" Disturbing the Universe von 1979; sie fußt auf den Spekulationen von J.D.Bernal (The Wold, the Flesh, and the Devil, 1929), Konstantin Ziolkowski und Olaf Stapledon.

Zitat
With Tsiolkovsky, we leave behind the parochial concerns of the twenty-first century and jump ahead to a longer future. In the long run, the technology driving activities in space will be biological. From this point on, everything I say is pure speculation, a sketch of a possible future suggested by Tsiolkovsky’s ideas.
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When life has reached the small objects, it will have achieved mobility. It is easy then for life to hop from one small world to another and spread all over the universe. Life can survive anywhere in the universe where there is starlight as a source of energy and a solid surface with ice and minerals as a source of food. Planets and moons are the worst places for life from the point of view of mobility. Because Earth’s gravity is strong, it is almost impossible for life to escape from Earth without our help. Life has been stuck here, waiting for our arrival, for three billion years, immobile in its planetary cage.

When humans begin populating the universe with Noah’s Ark seeds, our destiny changes. We are no longer an ordinary group of short-lived individuals struggling to preserve life on a single planet. We are then the midwives who bring life to birth on millions of worlds. We are stewards of life on a grander scale, and our destiny is to be creators of a living universe. We may or may not be sharing this destiny with other midwife species in other parts of the universe. The universe is big enough to find room for all of us. One writer who grasped the universal scale of human destiny was Olaf Stapledon, a professional philosopher who dabbled in science fiction. His books Last and First Men and Star Maker, written in the 1930s, remain as enduring monuments to his insight. Stapledon gave us a larger view of space, teeming with life and action, as the stage of a cosmic human drama.