I am Troy Judd and I am the founder of The Colony Foundation. I have been thinking about these ideas my entire adult life. My goal was to build up a business successful enough that I could provide a significant amount of the financing our of my personal resources. I was actually making some significant progress in that direction and than a few years back, due to economic forces way bigger than my business, the industry I was working in crashed and everything I had built fell apart. I also turned 50. I realized I could spend my entire life trying to get prepared to do what I thought was important or I could just start doing it. And really, is it a bad thing that this will have to be a widespread effort, not just the vision of one man.
Interestingly, that same dynamic is what drives our current vision. Instead of trying to save up for the big push to Mars or the Moon, let’s start doing what we can right now. People learn best through doing. Starting with colonies here in challenging locations will also help us build momentum, and test and prove or disprove concepts and technologies before we ship it off planet. It also builds up a trained group of people with proven experience who have shown they can live in that kind of environment. If you are going to run a Marathon, you start by running what you can and build up to something more challenging and finally work your way up to the marathon. If you start with the marathon, it isn’t going to be pretty.
I suppose it is fair to share a bit about me. I grew up blue collar in Texas. My father was a carpenter and as I was older bought and managed rental properties. I was the first person in my extended family to graduate from college. My undergraduate degree, from the University of Texas at Arlington, that being the closest major public university, is in Interdisciplinary Studies. I had a large concentration in the sciences, across the board, with smaller concentrations in mathematics and sociology. I wanted to learn everything about how the world worked, but wasn’t sure what I wanted to do. After college, I worked for a while as a programmer at a small software company, spent a very brief period as school teacher and then worked in my family’s business for several years. I went through a divorce and then was blessed to marry my wonderful wife Karen, who encouraged me to expand my horizons. I wound up going to law school, and after a few years started my own firm, which grew rapidly and was very successful for most of a decade, which brings us up to where we started.
It might seem weird for an attorney to be the founder of this type of an organization, as most would probably expect an astronaut, and engineer or scientist. With my background, I can understand and talk to any of these experts, but my background is also useful. I have been fascinated for years with how social structures and economics will work as we expand into space. I have studied economics, even taking some graduate level econometrics and math for economics classes to expand my skills in that area. Understanding of the law is also useful. My focus is going to be the social and economic structures. How do we live together in these new environments. Right now, though, my goal is to help bring together all of the experts, and at least as important, people who want to go start working towards these goals. If you fall into either category, please contact me.