Book Review: Why Space? The Purpose of People
Manuscripts Press, 2025
By Rick N. Tumlinson
Reviewed by Casey Dorman
This is an amazing, inspirational, visionary, but humble book, which I hope millions of people read and feel as touched as I was by it. It’s a grand plan and a noble one, and the author display’s his earnest belief in everything he says. I loved it.
I wasn’t sure about this book when i was approached by the author’s publicist to take a look at it and even talk with the author if I wanted to. I’d never heard of the author, and when I looked him up, I found he was a space visionary and entrepreneur, who favored private enterprise leading our effort to explore and inhabit space. I’m generally a skeptic regarding the motivation of private enterprise doing anything useful for mankind, but having just read Lee Billing’s Five Billion Years of Solitude, a story of our society’s effort to find habitable exoplanets, I had developed an equally jaded view of what our government is able to accomplish, so I was willing to listen.
Tumlinson’s message is partly about having private enterprise lead our voyage into space. He focuses on Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos and acknowledges their downsides, but insists that their motivation for going into space is for the good of humanity. I can suspend my judgment for now, but that’s not the main message of the book, anyway. The real message is about finding purpose for one’s life, and how the author has made leaving earth and inhabiting space—whether on another planet or a man-made space station—his own purpose. His motivation is real and well-informed, backed up by history and science and his own genuine, and touching, love for humanity. As he explained his reasons for choosing his purpose, I became aware how much of his reasoning and even feelings I shared, and have even written about. Just on its own, our planet will become uninhabitable someday. Our future as residents of earth is limited, although we’ll only each that limit in hundreds of millions of years. But our own activities may shorten that timeframe, dramatically. Climate change is warming our planet at a rate that will make it inhospitable to human life in the near future. We continue to harbor enough nuclear weapons, both in our country and in Russia and China, as well as in a few other countries, to wipe out humanity or at least our modern human civilization. Either of these factors is dangerous to humanity in its own right, but Tumlinson sees that they both are symptoms of a short-sighted, competitive, greedy side of human nature that has driven much of our history and must be shed for us to move to the next level of society, which is moving off of our planet into space. He is hopeful, and he sees that embracing the purpose of extending the reach of our species into space will help us move away from these behaviors of the past.
Tumlinson’s views are base upon an inclusive, respectful, attitude of love for ourselves and our planet. Movement off-planet is not possible without dedicating ourselves to restoring what we have destroyed here on earth. He gives homage to the concept of Gaia. I was pleased to see that he also recognizes that some of our advancement into space, especially if it involves reaching exoplanets orbiting other stars, may require machines and AI as much as humans. He is open to working alongside AI, which he sees as the “children” we are creating and raising to take our place, in some instances. He’s even open to the merging of humans and AI by uploading our minds into machines. That’s a favorite topic of mine, and one I also see as a step toward our reaching distant stars and their habitable planets. It raises deep questions about the relationship of humans to what someday may be conscious AIs, which is something I’m thinking about now, since the speed of AI development makes that point in the future come closer and closer to the present.
Why Space? is an inspirational book, because the author’s inspiration is presented so convincingly it makes it contagious. It’s a book that both up and coming scientists and the decision makers who decide how to use our science and where we should spend our money need to read. Both of them should pursue their work with a sense of purpose that inspires them to lead humanity forward, beyond the everyday, often petty concerns that often dictate our behavior. The ideas and attitudes in this book represent the best of humanity. I hope it gets widespread attention. Why Space? The Purpose of People is available on Amazon, here.
Interested in scif-fi about AIs solving moral dilemmas in a future that has them exploring our galaxy? Read Casey Dorman’s Voyages of the Delphinovels: Ezekiel’s Brain and Prime Directive. Available on Amazon. Click Here!
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