Academician Yefim Malitikov —
Chairman of the Interstate Committee
on dissemination of knowledge and adult education,
President of the International Association «Znanie»
Dear colleagues, Academicians of the International Academy of Astronautics,
I, one of you, have the opportunity to address you with my own, perhaps unexpected, vision of our future, to look differently at the mission of the Academy and its majestic half-century journey «Per aspera ad Astra» for the use of space for the preservation of life on Earth and its sustainable development.
Time is changing the road signs, so it is no longer possible to move along it at the fundamental reliable mainstream speed accepted in the last century.
Academic ethics has developed a leisurely classical diplomatic formula, the style and gait of the statutory activities of the International Academy of Astronautics.
Covering nearly 90 nations of the world, we are approaching the «limits of growth» formulated by the Club of Rome decades ago.
The diversified multi-component nature of our activities requires new approaches, additional leadership infusions, perhaps even a reformatting of management and structuring processes, with the unconditional dominance of the wisdom of elders and professional partnerships based on primary objectives.
Nature and human activity on Earth are in a state of inconsistency, for which humanity pays the price in natural and man-made disasters, threatening not only the fragmented world economies and local internecine mentalities of states and governments, but also the sustainable development of life on Earth.
As a result, instead of international cooperation, we engage in an irrational and fussy «race to the top» and policies that create a monopoly and a unipolar world.
As we seize resources, we try in vain to declare a dictatorship of the power of the individual state. And yet nature does not divide us by our border posts and earthquakes, nor does it care about our borders and customs unions.
Such frivolity often leaves us decades behind our neighbors, whom nature has bypassed with her wrath.
Only the synergy of cooperation can give people a chance to stay on the planet. The combined capacity, knowledge, and statistics of centuries of nature observation and relentless monitoring of near-Earth space can meet this challenge. One possibility for such cooperation is the MAXM project.
An integral part of this project are educational and outreach activities and the World Knowledge Exchange based on space telecommunications, capable of effectively counteracting the destructive processes that no single economy in the world can cope with.
We have no one to pass the buck or to find an understudy in the struggle against the disruption of sustainable development and the preservation of the Earth’s biodiversity. The instinct to preserve the species, a Tertiary tool, lags behind the Earth’s destructive processes, just as the classroom-lesson system of education, with knowledge changing every 30 years of the last century, does not satisfy the laws of global governance productivity.
That is why Poverty and Poverty are marching over the planet, opening the borders to chaotic migration, epidemics and the transformation of once immutable values.
Ensuring the continuity of the application of the New Knowledge with a 20% annual practical renewal is also a challenge for the Academy. Complicating it is the 15 million, i.e., 26%, shortage of teaching staff. The digital gap of illiterate humanity has crossed the one billion mark and can bury the efforts of the creative part of humanity.
There have been 1,679 earthquakes in the last 7 days, which is about 240 earthquakes a day. They are not uniform. There are regions and countries with a constant level of risk and unpredictable consequences. The intensity of earthquakes has been increasing over the years, and even the economies of developed countries are suffering from it.
That is why almost 50 states are involved in space programs today, having overcome bureaucratic hurdles and having already created their own space agencies, without having space launching sites and their own space industry.
At the same time mankind has at its disposal accumulated experience, measuring and forecasting equipment which allows with joint political will of the states and their leaders to minimize human casualties and loss of material assets.
Not all of the projects discussed in the academy are destined to be realized, but science does not develop otherwise. It is only through contradictions and mistakes that progress is made.
The achievements of our academy can be devalued if new methods of work that meet the challenges of our time are not mastered.
States want to cooperate in this field, and only thirty countries are left out of the IAA’s development vector.
The local, selfish and ambitious comprador psychology of the major space powers must be defeated by international cooperation.
The space industry in the world has severely declined. The main space stations are obsolete not only morally, but also physically, the succession of generations working in the space industry is broken for demographic reasons.
What will we leave to the children?
After all, the formula of unsustainable development of life on Earth directly points to eating up the resources for life of the previous generation for the next one.
In preparation for the next Summit, we must create the prerequisites and motivation to create structures and projects that can change the world and prevent humanity from disappearing from the face of the Earth.
