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Last Day of Terrestrial Humans
A reader writes: "According to Christian Science Monitor, tomorrow humans will begin their permanent lives off of earth. Starting with the Expedition 1 launch in Kazakhstan at 7:53 GMT, Oct. 31, NASA plans to always have a human on the ISS, which has a projected mission life of 10 to 25 years. So, it is quite possible, that for the rest of history, there will always be humans who are not living on earth. See this ISS Homepage for more information on the mission."
Dude, passage of laws like the DMCA indicate that there is already a measurable segment of humanity who aren't living on this planet.
-Rob
Keep them in space the full 25 years without returning until the span is over and plant video cameras everywhere to record the decaying of their skeletal and muscular structures and put them on the web and television in a Big-Brother-esque series so we can watch them slip into dementia and you've got something most intriquing.
Throw in hot space-space chicks and you can sell pay-per-view on the Spice channel... Then you've most certainly got something...
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seumas.com
Yeah, ok. Let me understand this... so, people living on MIR and spacelab don't count, right? I think I missed the memo.
So what! There have been a few days over time when we haven't had people living in space. No big deal. It's not like this whole "living in space" concept is a sort of revelation! We're pretty much used to humans living in space... it's not like I'll ever live there. So, what does tomorrow really mean to me?
--cr@ckwhore
Skiers and Riders -- http://www.snowjournal.com
This isn't terribly likely. Life in space is entirely based on life on Earth. Hence, space living, though outside the atmosphere, is subject to whatever political and financial winds are blowing.
Whether it is because of a technical failure that causes evacuation, funding crisis that leaves it unmanned for a time, or political upheaval that removes support, the odds are highly in favor of there being a time with no humans in space within the next 20 years.
What will change this is when life in space is self-sustaining. Then it will no longer be subject to terrestrial issues.
..would be humans who live their lives having never been on earth.
"Dogs and cats, living together...it's mass hysteria!"
(reprinted without permission from the mailing list. subscription and other info at bottom.)
Remember what happened to Mir and the Space Fungus?
I wonder if they will post a doctor on ISS. It would be a bummer to get a heartattack 20 miles above the closest hospital...
Who I'd like to see live off of earth.
Well, we'd probably have a permanent station on Mars in a year if Al Sharpton would volunteer to go and not come back.
Seriously, this really could be the dawn of a new era. I've always considered the most noticable thing about humanity is our pure, unadulterated wanderlust.
We were hardly up on our hind feet before we started spreading all over the globe. Long before history began we had spread to the far corners of the globe.
Think about that. Not modern man, but man three feet tall with only the tools that he could fashion with his bare hands simply wandered into nearly every corner of globe. Just when, and HOW, did man first reach Australia?
We travel. Tourism is a major activity. We build bypasses so people at point A can get to point B, and vice versa, for no real reason. We go places for no more reason than " we havn't been THERE before."
When a cat gets bored it takes a nap. When a person gets bored * it paces. * It goes for a walk, it * goes SOMEWHERE.*
UP is the only place left to go, and it's about time we got down to it. Not for science, not for population pressure relief, not to 'save the whales', not for financial gain, but because we are human, and that's what humans DO!
So far, and correct me if I'm wrong, nobody's died in space yet. Challenger hadn't left the atmosphere before it blew up, and Apollo 13 got back safely (although by the skin of their teeth).
With the number of missions needed to put the station together, and the unprecedented EVA time needed, it's just a matter of time before there's a serious accident up there.
With all the trips, the odds of breaking a seal and suffocating, or a pressurised tank exploding, or some other major system failure.
And once it's all running, there's always the chance of sudden illness popping up amongst the station's crew (despite the medical checks, there's always the one-in-a-million chance), and it becoming fatal before medical help can be reached.
I thought I'd seen an article on the risks somewhere before... Google popped this one up, which seems similar enough to what I remember. According to a study, the odds are at least one astronaut will die in the next 15 years.
"Last Day of Exclusively Terrestrial Humans"?
Or is there a big asteroid I just don't know about?
Space has been agreed to be 'international territory' under the 'Treaty on Principles Covering the Activities of States in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space, Including the Moon and Other Celestial Bodies', a United Nations treaty.
Yes and then the colonies can send Gundams to Earth to over-throw the evil political powers. Woohoo! We're on our way!
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Wooden armaments to battle your imaginary foes!
World Population:
Earth: 6,106,142,623
Space: 3
If I spend a year on the ISS...do I have to pay taxes for my income that year?
A nice touch would be if we did to our lawyers what Douglas Adams reccomends to do with them.
Burn Hollywood Burn
Aside from the obvious and redundant cracks about various political figures (and I'm surprised no one has mentioned Gates yet), there seems to be one overriding theme to the responses... So what?
NASA should take some pride in this response. Those astronauts are undertaking a voyage as deadly as any in history, but the unmitigated success of the US Space Program has reduced public reaction to little more than a yawn.
This will probably be the prevailing opinion for a long time. "We are living on the Moon? So what? We got there a long time ago. We are living on Mars? Great, we should send George W. Bush III out there! But seriously, so what? We are already living on the moon!"
It certainly is fun to be a cynic, deriding everyone else's achievements and laughing at how witty and smart we are. Just try and remember the date when you grandchildren ask when people first started to live in space...
B
"Fifty million Americans can't be wrong," said Rep. Billy Tauzin. Gore - 50,999,897 Bush - 50,456,002
There has been speculation that the russians have left some of their guys out there by accident in the early stages of their manned space program, but haven't seen fit to tell the world. Maybe we'll start finding some meatsicles in the near future. -17028
I'm afraid so -- the crew of Soyuz 11 were kil led when their craft decompressed after a valve came open after un-docking from the Salyut 1 station in 1971.
/.
/. If the government wants us to respect the law, it should set a better example.
Um, my copy of the article said "workmanlike," not "womanlike." Perhaps you should be less preoccupied with conspiricy and take time to realize how cool this all is!
Here is a related but pessimistic prediction: before I die, there will be no living person who has walked on the moon. This seems incredibly sad to me.
Quattuor res in hoc mundo sanctae sunt: libri, liberi, libertas et liberalitas.
I believe that it will still be quite soem time before we can say that a human or a group of humans will actually LIVE (not just take up residence) in space.
What I am referring to in this is that until we have a good way to create artificial gravity, it is NOT in ANY human's best interest to attempt to live in space for any long periods of time.
The reason? The human structure adapts -- if a human stays a prolonged amount of time in 0G then their system will adapt to 0G as the norm: possibly making it impossible for them to return to Earth. While this is quasi-true for adults living in space for a prolonged time, I wonder what would happen for a child who was born and raised in 0G. One would think that it would be impossible and deadly to attempt to return to the high gravity of Earth.
Now that thats out of the way, who wants to volunteer to build an artificial gravity machine?
Not with the muscular distrophy problems and deformed embryos, etc.
Those are effects of lack of g, not of lack of planet Earth. For those who haven't taken high school physics, g is a constant acceleration of 9.8 m/s^2 or thereabouts, which is felt by the human body as "down." It's easily to simulate g in space; simply rotate a cylindrical structure (ringworld, ds9, etc). This takes away most of the MD and [birth difference] problems.
Will I retire or break 10K?
I may be mistaken, but I remember hearing that the U.S. never actually signed some (all?) of those treaties.
This space for rent. All reasonable inquiries will be entertained at proprietors discretion.
Well, I give you a congratulations for showing us just how gullible they are. Venn sysnopsis and psudo sychronisity fallout are very professional sounding. Just between you and me, do these moderators know who you are, and what your goal is, or are they just really dumb?
It may look like I'm doing nothing, but I'm actively waiting for my problems to go away.
--Scott Adams
Just read the article last week about what humans going to Mars are going to have to do to survive, and you get a pretty quick impression that life in space isn't going to be that yummy.
Seriously, though. I understand the fascination with space and the "final frontier" but there is NO WAY you're ever going to see those massive sci-fi dreams realized. First off, humans don't colonize worthless tracts of land. There are places in the world today almost as hospitable as Mars - deserts/Ice caps/South Pole/ that are barren of people. Why? No reason to go, and no resources to exploit when they do arrive. Why did men go to Nevada? Silver - Why did they leave - Silver is gone. They had to start casinos and tourism, otherwise the whole state would be a ghost town.
Without a resource to exploit in space, and a MASSIVE energy source capable of reproducing some of life's amenities and making interplanetary travel a bit more liveable, there's no point, no profit, and no way mankind is going to spread to Mars or space stations or any other place. The one thing they might have going for them is Zero G manufacturing, and we'll have to wait and see on that.
And god help us if we ever find a planet with anything resembling a life form. Historically, Humans react VERY BADLY to foreign organisms they've never been exposed to before. (ask the Amazonian tribes, Native Americans, Europeans ) - it'll be the Andromeda strain all over again.
Not a pessimist, just a realist. People don't colonize inhospitable environments cause they want to, they plan to get something out of it. Find a valuable mineral or resource on Mars or in space, and I promise you, private corporations will beat NASA there - but without incentives, it's almost a waste of time. Go to the Sahara or the South Pole if you want to explore.
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ah honey, we're all resplendent - Bill Mallonee
Finally, the human race will have an off-site backup facility.
So until we develope a working form of artificial gravity (and a more advanced diaper) there will be no children in space (hey, maybe space really does have potential as a 'vacation destination' !)
NightHawk
Tyranny =Gov. choosing how much power to give the People.
Space Fungus!
"Ah! 30 CCs of Tolnaftate."
-- Give him Head? Be a Beacon?
-- Give him Head? Be a Beacon? :P)
(If you can't figure out how to E-Mail me, Don't.
There's already a First Bank of Space waiting for you to open your account.
--
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
The point of the article is that while Mir may have been occupied for most of its life, there are times (such as right now) where it's not occupied.
As long as we can get a second station in space (orbiting, on moon/mars/other) before the ISS tanks, the point of the article is that from now on, there'll always be 1 or more human off earth.
This is a good thing. Space is vast, unoccupied, and there's nothing out there that'll care if we strip mine the asteroid belts, or dump some toxic waste into a lunar crater or the sun. Plus, it gets us out of this "all our eggs in one basket," err, in one planet, problem. It'd still be a tragedy to see global thermonuclear war, but if enough humanity is living elsewhere, life can go on.
Nathan Mates
Yes, God knows I certainly didn't leave my home town until I had explored every inch of it.
Mod down posts with a "Free Mac Mini/iPod" sig, they're spam!
The U.S. political will to build ISS is tenuous at best. Each year there are battles and skirmishes in Washington to keep its funding on track. Once the thing is fully built it will be hard to shut it down considering the investment.
However, it's not realistic to think there will *always* now be one or more humans in orbit (or elsewhere in outer space). Maybe for the life of ISS (which may be 100 years with upgrades, etc.) but there is just no clear mandate from the public to explore space. I think it is a good thing and there are many valid reasons for doing so. I have noticed there are a *lot* of people who do not share my enthusiasm for space exploration.
If we are able to develop inexpensive launch capability to orbit before ISS' days are over then there might be some hope that man's presence in space is now permanent. Before the first flight of Columbia there was a 6-year period where no Americans had been in orbit. I know the USSR had people going up all the time, but their political situation has changed a bit since then and the resources they are able to devote to space exploration aren't what they used to be. During that 6 year drought the only people who even thought it mattered were those working on the upcoming Space Shuttle program, NASA employees or space enthusiasts. There weren't many.
lol there is no source that has more credibility than the CSM. Get a clue because you are looking really foolish now
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Humans do a lot of things they shouldn't necessarily do. No, space exploration is not something comparable to war and bigotry, but we have to consider the implications of space exploration, and what its benefits and drawbacks are. We are evolved enough not to use the general behaviour of our species as an excuse.
In my mind, space exploration would serve little practical benefit. There are still so many issues we have to resolve here on earth--starvation, disease, overpopulation, pollution, war, oppression, hatred, etc--that space exploration is negative, not just because of the money and effort that could be spent elsewhere but because many people view it as a way to "escape" our problems. Leaving earth is not a way to escape our problems; they will only come back to haunt us later.
As a software engineer, I have a natural drive to want to refine systems and make them clean and efficient. So I think the idea of an Earth with a constant population of, say, 4 billion, very little disease, very little violence, no pollution, and running on 100% sustainable resources, is very compelling. It's more compelling to me to perfect what we do here on earth than to spread our very problematic and messy behaviours elsewhere.
Yes, space travel is intriguing, because we do all have an instinct to explore and expand. But many people also have instincts to kill, maim, and rape--just because they are instincts doesn't mean they are good.
Let's see here, the IIS has a projected lifespan to 10 to 25 years.
That's just what Microsoft wants you to think.
NO CARRIER
Yeah, but think of the really neato sports games that could be done inside a spinning cylnder habitat. Imagine trying to toss a ball back and forth with curvy coriolis-induced arcs. It could make for a wicked game of Ping Pong or racketball.
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
Considering the source, they're just hedging their bets on the Rapture occuring in the next decade.
The traditional way of carving up territory is, of course, war.
I doubt space will be any different in the long run.
many people also have instincts to kill, maim, and rape--just because they are instincts doesn't mean they are good.
That they are instincts means precisely that they are good, as tested by the evolutionary process.
We have those instincts because we are the descendants of the most brutally successful killers and rapists. In hard times, they are often the difference between the end or continuation of a bloodline.
So I think the idea of an Earth with a constant population of, say, 4 billion, very little disease, very little violence, no pollution, and running on 100% sustainable resources, is very compelling.
The thought disgusts me. No disease, no pollution, I can live with. Those are realistic, and basically inevitable with continual technological development. But driving down the population while dramatically reducing violence could only be achieved by central mind-control, oppression beyond imagining.
You recommend a state of total stagnation, living death. You advocate turning away from growth and freedom in favour of comfort, like a child refusing to leave the nursery. Many would agree with you, and I couldn't be more appalled.
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if YOU were starving in Africa, about to die, I think you'd rather have money spent on feeding you than on internet access for some guy who calls himself karzan. Or on his computer, or his car, or any of his luxuries, or for that matter, his necessities.
Do you weigh every spending decision based on how many lives your dollars could save? Remember, you're killing someone every time you buy a snack. You're wiping out a village when you get a new car. So fucking what?
Do you think the poor starving guy in Africa would give a rat's ass about you if the situation was reversed? Sure, he might give lip service to the idea, like you do, but he wouldn't actually weigh your life as meaningful against his comforts or his dreams.
Don't ask what we can do for the starving people. Ask what they can do for us. If we were exploiting them, making profit from their labor, we would have a vested interest in their well-being, and they would have some leverage to make us send them the food they need. Your pity won't save them, but your greed could.
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The fastest way for them to acheive a moderately comfortable lifestyle (by our standards) is for us to take over their lives, but that's basically what we did to (er, ehm, I mean "for", right?) the natives of North America and Australia, and I don't hear them thanking us.
In the long run, they're better off if we just leave them alone. But we won't do that, because if they develop into powerful nations that stand on their own feet, they might offer a military challenge. Manipulators such as the CIA have been knocking the little guys back on their asses for ages.
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Sorry but the post is a bit ingenuous. Soviet Union started the permanent expeditions with Salyut 7. And Mir was only unnocupied for some monthes when people started procedures to down it. For nearly ten years there were humans always on space. One cosmonaut took even one year on Mir. It was the first timetraveller on Earth... It left when Soviet existed and returned into Russia :)
:) ), see Internet Holywood 24h/d from Redmond... and think if some jerks did really landed on the Moon in 1969. Proabably it was another Holywood blockbuster.
Yes probably it is a point to say that ISS may be "more permanent" than Salyut & Mir. Maybe this time humans will never ever leave Cosmos. But it is a point of ingenuity to consider that the "big construction kit" will be a guarantee of permanence.
People say it will live for 10-15 years. I will risk 25-40 from what we saw with Mir and all these MirII, station Freedom & Co. In the next 10 years politicians will try to forget about Cosmos and get into a more mundane world. So this will well push he living span of the station.
However there is a problem. Time will go and politicians may forget Cosmos AT ALL. Like Moon exploration... Where are the Moon stations, expeditions to Mars? So it is probable that this permanent presence may last only 50 years. By then we will be all on Earth, eat BigMacs, drink Coke, speak bad english (worser than mine
When Mir was launched, the Russians said space
would be permenantly inhabited. Was for many
years.