According to the Associated Press, Garriott paid about $30 million for a 12-day trip into space. On Tuesday, he will dock with the ISS, where he will perform a number of experiments for sponsors helping to defray his trip’s costs. As part of his own “Operation Immortality,” Garriott also carries a hard drive containing the digitized DNA sequences of academics and celebrities, including physicist Stephen Hawking and late-night TV satirist Stephen Colbert. (Several dozen Tabula Rasa contest winners also had their DNA included.) The drive will be stored on board the ISS after Garriott’s October 24 departure so that if the Earth’s population is wiped out in some sort of catastrophe, its leading citizens might someday be genetically reconstituted.

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Garriott also now holds the distinction of being the first American to follow a parent into space. His father, 77-year-old Owen Garriott, spent 60 days aboard Skylab in 1973 and 10 days aboard the space shuttle Columbia in 1983.

We humans are land-dwellers on Earth in the later high-oxygen period; conditions on earth even one billion years ago would have been rapidly fatal for an unprotected human, and even today, survival on 90% of our planet’s surface area is contingent on the availability of cultural artefacts like boats (80% is water) or clothing (for protection in hostile climates). So the real question isn’t, “can intelligent life colonize other star systems?” so much as “can intelligent life propagate itself, and its supporting biosphere and technosphere to run in alien environments? Which is a very different question. Call it the Ark Problem; if your name is Noah and you’re going on a one-way trip to another world, how big an Ark do you need (and how many specimens per speciality, be they biological or technological)?