Space Travel is the Cure to Your Tech Gloom and Doom

Angelica Gajewski ‘26

Executive Bits and Pieces Editor

When you’re a student in the accelerating age of artificial intelligence, it can be hard to plan for the future without feeling overshadowed by what technology promises to be able to do. Young people are bombarded with infographics that tell us we’ll all be replaced, especially those of us not planning on working in STEM. Truth be told, this will be an issue, AI will cause us to rethink our futures, but I don’t think we need to believe it will be a worse one. Take the recent space mission, Artemis II, which returned to Earth on April 10, 2026. Utilizing advanced technology and AI, the endeavor still relied on human presence not just for systems operation, but for their human perception. 

Each of the four members of the Artemis II crew trained extensively in preparation for the mission, not only in physics and spacecraft systems, but also in photography. Their training included hours dedicated to artistic photography principles modified for capturing space provided by National Geographic. The reasons are simple: once they leave Earth’s orbit, there is no substitute for a human-taken, high-resolution images of Earth itself…and also NASA wanted them to livestream. The crew’s human perspective also revealed scientific detail which imaging alone struggled to capture such as subtle shifts in lunar terrain previously unknown.

Artemis II was a much needed success story for NASA, whose public image has been shaped in part by the Challenger disaster in 1986 and the Columbia disaster in 2003. There’s something culturally invigorating about sending humans farther from Earth than anyone’s ever been and bringing them back safely in 2026: a renewed trust in scientific principles and in a public agency’s ability to innovate. The Artemis era will include three more missions, concluding with Artemis V, planned for 2028. All with the goal of exploring the moon further, creating a  foundation for sending humans to Mars. Currently, 62 countries have signed the Artemis accord, which outlines principles for responsible space exploration. An unprecedented level of international cooperation all in hopes of a future in space.

The role of humans will undoubtedly change in the coming years, but evidence from advanced technological fields like space travel suggests that our value will lie less in computation and more in human perception and creative judgement. The future of technology, if guided by public interest and international cooperation, may offer a return to form as opposed to civilization’s collapse.