Space Development And Earth's Future

apsmith writes "In the New York Times' Sunday Book Review Dennis Overbye reviews British Astronomer Royal Martin Rees' new book: Our Final Hour - A Scientist's Warning: How Terror, Error, and Environmental Disaster Threaten Humankind's Future In This Century--On Earth and Beyond. The book paints an exceedingly grim picture of our future - Reese gives humanity only a 50-50 chance of surviving the 21st century, with all the potential for calamity we have unleashed (and that nature may have in store for us too). But the book isn't just doom and gloom - we CAN do something, and the answer lies in space. But NASA has been doing it all wrong. Interestingly enough, this coming weekend is the International Space Development Conference in San Jose, where you can find out the latest ideas on how we really should be settling space."

Comments

A solution to many problems

[BrynM]

I've long felt that getting off the planet is the solution to many of our problems. Manufacturing/refining pollutants? Thanks to being a vacuum, pollutants can be better contained or cleaned up after leakage. Overpopulation? We've run out of room on our planet, but the rest of space is out there. Defense? Stuck on Earth, we're sitting ducks for our own devastating conflicts or if some other advanced species reaches us before we reach them (improbable, but theoretically possible). Someone too dangerous to detain? I bet Georgie Boy would LOVE his own orbital prison or prison colony. Stagnant empiracal growth? There's lots of rocks out there for countries/powers to plant a flag in and claim.

Let's face it, we've just about used some natural resources on Earth up. We're making it mor un-inhabitable every passing moment. Humanity is not getting smaller. We could all be wiped out with a good size chunk of iron ore hurled into our atmosphere. The only way for humanity to survive in the very-long-term is to diversify our holdings ;)

Then again, we could just sit here and live up to the name we've given our sun: SOL.

Amen.

[maddogsparky]

The reasons you mention above are the exact reasons I'm leaving my current job and going back to school for Aerospace Engineering. It's a little scary to give up a secure, well paying job to go back to grad school, but it is even scaryer to think about what the world will be like for my 3-year old when he is my age.

It's time to take action instead of being wistful and just talking about it...

Re:Amen.

[BrynM]

My hat is off to you! I've often thought about the same thing. Get more involved. Every time I think about it though, I realize that one of the best ways to get involved in exploration is to inspire others. I think the popularity of science fiction in the past 20 years or so has done some of this, but it has too much of a "eventually we'll be here" attitude. The average person has no idea what the current technology is capable of or how to implement it to further the goal of exploration. If space exploration were a popular cause, we might not be having this discussion with such a morbit (our extinction) spin. Thus, I have been looking into animation as a means of storytelling. We can't afford to let the next couple of generations grow up with a "someone else will do it" attitude.

Re:Conflict is human in nature

[egoff]

We'll carry any conflict that does happen on Earth to where we go next, Mars, asteroids, etc. Look at how the Napoleonic wars in Europe led to the French/Indian wars in North America. The War of 1812 was also started by European politics. At the time, colonists tried to escape those issues. Any nuclear war would surely spread to the colonies.

Overpopulation is also a critical issue. But the vast majority of people involved in the population boom couldn't afford cost-prohibitive colonization. The option of forced colonization is inhumane, as was effectively argued by free blacks in opposition to the American Colonization Society in the pre-civil war United States.

The only serious concern left is an astronomical disaster, such as a meteor strike. It seems that the reasonable thing to do would be to focus resources on a defense system for that.

I'm not arguing that all off-planet development is bad by any means, but it isn't the answer to all of our problems.

Re:Just another alarmist wacko

[frenchgates]

I'm a bit surprised that the late Julian Simon, professor and "Cornucopian," didn't predict he would never die. He would have been as correct as any other of his predictions until the exact moment of his death.

The problem with this kind of convenient optimism is the following:

Let's say you are a frog who lives in a pond. One day a weed blows into the pond. This weed is very successful and doubles in size every day. As it does so it strangles the all the other life wherever it has grown in the pond. But you don't mind because as the first few days go by, most of the pond is weed free. Even when the pond is half full of weeds you've still got plenty of space. The problem comes the day after pond is half full.

While it is true that a lot of doom-and-gloom predictions have failed to materialize, most famously the "Club of Rome" report in the seventies which predicted running out of oil ludicrously soon, it is silly to ignore the clear signs of environmental and social degradation simply because we've been fine up until now.

There is no human nature

[extrasolar]

And I think the point should be that in space we will have to struggle to survive again---whereas here we've become all comfortable and self-complacent. Consider your own life: have you noticed that everything you've done that is worth something was done under pressure?

Lets go to Mars!

Re:space escapism

[BrynM]

I agree that putting all of our eggs into one basket is a BadThing(tm). Yes, environmentalism (not being liberal, but truly thinking of sustainable environment) is important to our survival, but many (scientists too) feel that we are already too far gone to save this planet or at least save it as we know it. The breadth of our ecological destruction has created ripples that will ebb and flow for centuries to come. We really don't know the extent (or lack) of what we have begun. (pseudo-proverb)Just because you are "fire proofing" a place, doesn't mean you forgo putting in a fire exit.(/pseudo-proverb)

Humanity has a lot of things to fix, so just think of space exploration as another (important) tool in the toolbox.

Control Freaks

[Baldrson]

Central governments and even centralized asset ownership is hostile to doing anything to relieve the planet of its technological civilizations.

The fundamental problem is control freaks. These are people who have a serious problem with letting people decentralize fundamentals of life. They are the guys who convinced the GI generation to give up their farms and make their boomer kids get money, whether from central government or big corporations, to have fundamentals like food from the grocery store or a place of residence from the landlord or mortgage banker.

NASA is part of this problem and it is not therefore likely to be reformed to allow decentralization of fundamental resources like land.

Nevertheless I'm sure there are lots of guys who still want to work within the system rather than figure out how to dislodge the death-grip on the planet now held by those like NASA bureaucrats or big corporate moguls.

If you guys want to support NASA, I suggest you take a few years living in poverty so you can pass some laws reforming that organization independent of the conflicts of interest arising from any industry or government funding.

I did.

It radically changed the way I view politics, people and the world.

You could, alternatively, listen to guys who actually walked the talk.

If that sounds more appealing to you than spending years in poverty to learn some very hard lessons, then in addition to the above link to my Congressional testimony, you might want to follow the following links for more information:

• National Science Trust: Money For Scientific Information
• A Net Asset Tax Based On The Net Present Value Calculation and Market Democracy
• The First of Many Awards for Ethics Given to Morton Thiokol Engineers Who Opposed the Challenger Launch
• Robert W. Bussard's Submission of My Legislation to Congress
• My Slashdot Article About Rocketry Awards
• My ultracentrifugal rocket engine (Roger Gregory co-inventor) US Patent 6,212,876
• Circa 1990 Usenet Archive on Space Commercialization
• The Nature of Money and Government

Sustainability of Human Progress

[devinjones]

John McCarthy's Sustainability of Human Progress website discusses many of the arguments about population growth, resource usage etc.

In particular, we argue that the whole world can reach and maintain American standards of living with a population of even 15 billion.

Slogan: He who refuses to do arithmetic is doomed to talk nonsense.