Does that seem a little pretentious? Perhaps it does but I ask you to indulge me for a 900 words or so and we’ll see where all of this is going.

The new X Prize was announced by the X Prize Foundation and the folks over at Google. On the line is up to 25 Million dollars in cold hard cash for the first team to put a robotic extension of our eyes and ears on the Moon. Whoever gets a rover up there that can travel 300 or so meters and beam back a Gigabyte of information in the form of video and still shots wins. If the rover performs above and beyond expectations, there is another $5 million in the pot.

It seems like a tough goal to achieve, in just 5 short years. If it’s not done by 2012, the pot drops down to 15 million dollars and then expires a bit later. Then, the original X Prize seemed like quite the challenge as well and a few very interesting teams emerged to compete for and one to ultimate win the 10 million dollar prize.

This is an act and a journey that I can honestly stand right up and applaud. I’m standing in my train right now, clapping and drawing strange looks. It’s just this kind of things that nudges us out of our ho-hum let’s make a new weapon attitude towards science and exploration and gets the old blood pumping.

Urging a private company, staffed by civilians and not wholly funded by any government anywhere to leave the confines of our planet, pop out of our gravity well and sail off to another world – well that’s the stuff of dreams. To do it will prove again that spaceflight is not just the realm of big governments but is a viable goal that can be attained by folks like you and me. We’re already seeing companies based on the idea of space and near-space tourism taking off, Virgin Galactic with Scaled Composites being the most prominent, with Bigelow Aerospace and their inflatable near Earth orbit hotels being the two most prominent.

These are smart people, backed by real finances and real investors taking a bet that ventures into space will be profitable, purely from the tourist trade – imagine what will happen when these corporations or new entities take on the vast stores of natural resources available beyond our planet.

Profit is a driving factor. Money to be made backed by money already made by relatively young people with dreams is a winning combination. We will only benefit from such exploration. Think of what can be gained. Knowledge, new technology that inevitably ends up in the public’s hands (but this time without having to be passed through as many government channels first) a sense of pride in exploration and – most importantly – a chance to get some representatives of our race off of our planet.

I’m a huge proponent of not keeping all of our eggs in one basket. The Earth is and always will be our first home, our starting point, the place where the only sentient beings we know came to be but it’s time to take a few tentative steps away from home and strike out on our own. Leaving every shred of our existence as a race in one location is just not a smart survival strategy.

I often find myself having discussions and occasional arguments with folks who feel that exploration of our solar system is a worthless endeavor. Why spend the money, the argument goes, on the exploration of space when we have so many problems here at home? War, famine, poverty, education, strife, terrorism and the list goes on.

My argument for space exploration is two-fold. First, I’ve got a one word solution to all of the above problems. Comet. Don’t like that one? How about Asteroid. In either case, if a big enough rock or ball of ice slams into our planet, all of those previously mentioned problems will vanish. Bang! Poof. Without some vestige of our race outside of this planet, our chances of surviving a cataclysmic encounter with some wandering body are slim to none. And what are our chances of getting hit by such a thing? Well, no one really knows but there are plenty of folks out there noting that it’s happened before and could very well happen again.

Second, my feeling is that whether we explore space or pump the relatively minscule amount of money we currently spend on space exploration direclty into the above problems, they’re not going to go away. Can you think of a single year in the existence of our race (or at least in recorded history) where those problems have not existed? Strife, opinion, difference, these are all things built into our race, like it or not. A few billion dollars diverted into fighting them are not going to make them go away, while the benefits we could gain from new technology, new resources and the ability to survive as a race are huge. Astronomically huge!

We’ve got to get off of our planet and start taking stock of the vast new frontier that’s open in front of us all. We have the technology today to do so, to take those first steps in a permanent off world presensce, and the X Prize can only encourage private industry towards this goal. This is where exploration will truly stem from, not our governments but civilian efforts to explore driven by profits and the urge towards exploration itself. Two more aspects of our race that won’t be changed readily – the urge to be first and the urge to turn a profit.