“SPACE 4 ALL, SPACE 4 PEACE, A SPACE 18^TH SDG FOR THE 2030 U.N. AGENDA”

Our civilization is besieged by many global crises, such as pandemics, climate changes, and economic crises, just to name the main ones. Instead of uniting our efforts to go over, the primitive practice of war – the state’s legal murdering – is expanding to the whole planet Earth. Humanity is not driven by the best practices but by the worst ones. Governments complain about the lack of financial resources, but they spend 2 $trillion/year on military expenditure, and that will get worse, considering the continuous rise of new wars. Old imperialist strategies – already and many times condemned by history – are raising their backward head once again over the sacrosanct right of all peoples to self-determine their future and how they want to govern themselves. In 2015, the United Nations delivered an Agenda of Sustainable Development Goals, 17 SDGs to be achieved within 2030. The agenda includes social, environmental, and methodology goals. Achieving such goals would resolve many global issues, eliminate the reasons for conflicts and wars on Earth, and restart the growth and development of civilization. Yet, should our development restart inside the boundaries of Earth’s atmosphere, industrial growth would conflict with the environmental goals. Furthermore, any tentative to restart growing within the limits of Earth immediately drives to conflicts – now dramatically heading to a global war – to grab the scarce resources, remaining on our mother planet. Space development is a strong factor of peace and a true alternative to war, maybe the only one, nowadays. From an anthropologic point of view, collaboration among scientists from different Countries on the ISS, even during hard confrontations on Earth’s surface, represents a clear example of enhanced more evolved human relationships. As Frank White pointed out, the Overview Effect experimented by many astronauts while observing our planet from orbit shows us that there are no physical borders among countries. Borders are nothing more than conventions, which may be overcome, in a more advanced and broader vision of the world, in a Solar System Society. Only by expanding the domain of life into space can we fulfill the 17 SDGs, and a free peaceful development in the long term. Since 2015, reusable rockets have dramatically decreased the cost of transportation from Earth to orbit. Such a process is paving the path toward civilian space development. 2015 can be identified as a “turning point” in history, signifying a change of paradigm, from “traditional” aerospace to a “new space” age. The U.N. 2030 Agenda needs to be updated. Therefore, the Space Renaissance International and the National Space Society, in partnership with 90 space organizations, have kicked off a worldwide campaign, working with UN COPUOS State Parties to develop and introduce a resolution for a Space 18th Sustainable Development Goal (SDG), calling for the expansion of communities into space, to achieve universal and sustainable development for the whole humanity, and all the other living species, on Earth and Beyond. This paper describes the rationales supporting the Space 18^th SDG, the expected outcomes, with a particular focus on peace, and the practice used by the promoting Coalition, to outreach large public opinion and to get the necessary consensus, appreciation, and mobilization for success.