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Ray Bradbury's Reasons to Go to Mars
An anonymous reader writes "Ray Bradbury's testimony to the Presidential blue-ribbon Commission, 'Moon to Mars and Beyond', covers a range of rather optimistic space-related topics, including why three Italians should be the first on Mars. But at age 83, Bradbury's next book, entitled 'Too Soon From the Cave, Too Far From the Stars' seems to set an overall vision that this is an in-between generation caught between the brutal and primitive and the advanced."
Sooner or latter we have too expand our knowledge and return to the moon or journey to Mars. Nothing will stop man from seeking adventures and knowledge.
For all the Martian Chronicles related jokes....too bad I couldn't think of any.
Why go to Mars, except maybe to have someone ON SITE to push the "RESET" button??
= Grow a brain...
This is the same Ray Bradbury who was afraid to fly in airplanes until recently. Could we get him on a spaceship?
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
Mind you, he didn't go anywhere interesting did he!
And if you thought that was boring you obviously havn't read my Journal ;-)
Yes you are
Well, if we do send someone on a deep space exploration mission, let's make sure it's a poet this time.
... why would you even bother reading this banal junk? Just check out the rest of their site. Most of it's garbage!
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
'Too Soon From the Cave, Too Far From the Stars'
Yeah, much too soon. One minute you're an ape triumphantly hurtling a bone into the air under the theme of 'Also Sprach Zarathustra', and next thing you know, the bone turns into an orbiting satellite in the year 2001. Also, you've become human and there's this weird monolith on the moon.
Talk about culture shock ...
I hear there's rumors on the Slashdots
"The missing link between apes and man . . . is us."
I still live in a cave, you insensitive clod!
Halitosis - (n.) Halle Berry's Camel Toe.
I think getting there before the Chinese first do is reason enough. Right now, the USA still has the most advanced space program of any nation. But the Chinese are making a push, and I wouldn't be surprised to see these wily, scientifically advanced people landed on the Moon in the near future. I, for one do not want to see this fascist, totalitarian state score a propoganda win by landing humans on Mars first. Going to Mars would give NASA a real purpose. The ISS is a joke, the shuttles are obsolete and unsafe. This would inject some needed life to NASA and revive technological advances that hasn't been seen in 40 years.
Slashdot Moderation: From positive to terrible in 2 "insightful" posts.
I really dont see what the big fuss from some politicians about going to Mars. 500 years ago sailors went to the New World (risking their lives) with really no garunteed return on investments.
It ended up working out ok for some countries but not for 50-75 years after the initial voyages. There wasnt really a need or reason to go, but some naval officers and private sailors convinced the people with cash otherwise.
Although these "discoveries" didnt work out to well for Indians I suppose.
You have to start somewhere. We will do it eventually, why not now?
Are you intolerant of intolerant people?
That's why.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
Other reasons to go:
Sir, there is a dragon outside with an armful of armor. He's inquiring if we offer free refills.
"If we can find any living relatives of Columbus, and Caboto, and Verrazzano - wouldn't that be remarkable if we could send them on the first manned rocket to Mars."
Descendants of Columbus?! Oh sure, so we're going to send out another white man to treat the native Martians as slaves. Great idea!
Don't get me wrong, I love the guys writing, but what, exactly, qualifies a fiction writer to be giving advice to the gummit on this subject?
Is it a rule that moderators do their job while drunk?
If he thinks those three Italians were, regardless of what we're taught in Kindergarten, at all significant in the history of global exploration, he needs to do a lot more reading.
When you were the first to perform a voyage of discovery like that, thats significant. Of course they weren't... the Chinese, Vikings and others of course were doing it long before.
When you set out as a representative of your country to explore, well thats significant I guess to your country. But we all know the history around Columbus and who was supporting him, right? Being the first of your people to get somewhere when it was an accident of timing isn't all that significant either.
And all of that is completely ignoring the (hotly contested, but significant enough to be interesting) evidence that Columbus set sail knowing exactly what he was going to find, with charts of the Carribean and Gulf of Mexico drawn by people who had already been there.
I think if you were going to honor the nationality of the people who really were the first to do global exploration in an organized manner by having them land on Mars first, it would be the Chinese, not the Italians.
And, the way China is moving with their space program, that might just happen.
It's an odd document. You can imagine the commission members looking at each other and asking: "what's Ray on?" He sells the Outreach as a romantic, almost religious experience. But I have trouble imagining how romance in and of itself is enough to power man to Mars.
The parallels with American colonization do not stand up. Once America had been discovered and the seas charted, it was a matter of affordable logistics and courage, not technology, to get people to the US. But the logistics of a Mars mission require the exchequer of a major nation state and the technology is far from perfected. Courage is not enough. And unlike America the lure, the promise of a commercial harvest is so much slimmer. This is not 1482 any more. Those rules no longer apply.
My heart agrees with Bradbury. But my head... it says no.
Perhaps for humans to spread across the galaxy like a bunch of rats or cockroaches would allow us to avoid facing our problems: we could keep breeding with impunity and consume resources. If we found "natives" on other worlds, we'd conquer them, enslave them, and exterminate them. And when we have used up one planet, we would just move on to the next.
I'm glad that it looks like we are forced to figure out how to solve our problems here for now: we need to figure out how to keep us from killing each other on earth, how to reduce our population, how to take full advantage of our human resources by making sure everybody gets basic educational and health services, and how to live sustainably.
If we ever get manned interstellar space travel (and that's a big if), maybe we'll have figured out how to behave sensibly and responsibly towards ourselves and other species we may encounter. On the other hand, if we kill ourselves before then, that's just as well--leave the stars to some other species that's smarter than us.
would this be modded up as insightful.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
"Please leave your Einstien and Ben Franklin *quotes* at home.....you act like they never said anything stupid in their lives."
I'm sure they both said stupid things, but only the reasonably smart-sounding quotes get recorded. Of course we could always just make up some quotes.
Huh-huh-huh... He said 'rod'.
--Ben Franklin
Seriously, I enjoy Bradbury's books as much as the next guy, but he's not exactly a scientist. His testimony is more of the same philosophy expressed in The Martian Chronicles, that Mars is no different from the New World. Unfortunately, it IS very different, because whereas the Americas are perfectly habitable, Mars is quite hostile, to say nothing of the unbelievable expense of getting even a single person out of Earth's gravity well. His only real argument is "if we want to do it, we can." He's right of course, but he fails to give a convincing explanation for why we should want to. For us here on Slashdot, he's preaching to the choir, but he's going to have to do a lot better than that if he wants to convince the population at large.
"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than that of whether a submarine can swim" -EWD
Tell me, hak1du, has there ever been a time in history when we didn't have problems? No. That didn't stop us from constantly heading towards the horizons and exploring just for the sheer joy of exploring and, in many cases, it was the act of exploring that led us to new discoveries that improved the world as a whole.
You know, if you think humanity is so completely pathetic and stupid, why don't you just give up your computer and electricity and antibiotics and go live in the cave you deserve?
Oh, I see - all the OTHER people (but not YOU, of course) are the pathetic ones.
I really dont see what the big fuss from some politicians about going to Mars.
No big fuss, other than that it is hugely expensive. Is Bush going to raise taxes for it in order to pay for it? Are scientists willing to sacrifice the potential scientific results from 200 robotic probes in order to pay for a couple of people getting to Mars? It just makes no sense: not economic, not scientific.
500 years ago sailors went to the New World (risking their lives) with really no garunteed return on investments.
They thought they were going to find a route to India. It was a high-risk investment, but would have been hugely profitable if they had succeeded. So, it wasn't some shot in the dark, it was a business plan that could have made people fabulously rich.
What they actually found was even more valuable: a sparsely populated, fertile continent with incredible natural and biological resources. That didn't help the original investors much, but it helped Europe as a whole in the centuries to come.
With Mars, we already know what we are going to get, since we have studied it extensively: there is nothing there of economic value to us. Establishing a colony there would be hugely expensive and it would be centuries before anything could become self-sustaining, if it ever could. The only value Mars seems to have is scientific, and that value is largely destroyed by putting people on it.
I'm amused at how Fahrenheit 451 is described as "a neo-Orwellian tale." NEO-Orwellian?!? It was published 4 years after 1984! I guess this is why people don't read Playboy for the articles.
"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than that of whether a submarine can swim" -EWD
No guarantee of return on investment in New World voyages? Maybe, technically. Every voyage had clear economic hopes, from returning with raw materials, artifacts and exotic animals, to establishing trade, to discovering new trade routes. In fact, those economic hopes were the basis for attracting funding from royalty, wealthy investors, etc. What's the economic incentive in traveling to Mars? If this is a worthy project, why aren't the Bill Gates' of the world pouring money into NASA? The difference is NASA does it for science, military applications and the spirit of exploration. NASA will always be a money hole until it finds a clear way to benefit corporations.
If one of them's Monica Bellucci, I'm all for it!
If he thinks those three Italians were, regardless of what we're taught in Kindergarten, at all significant in the history of global exploration, he needs to do a lot more reading.
Let's get one thing straight. Since you claim to be talking about what is significant in history, the point is not who discovered a place or when it was discovered.
Columbus's voyage was incredibly significant because it was followed by an immense wave of European exploration and conquest. Whereas, previous expeditions led only to small and temporary colonies.
I'm a romantic who is caught up in the notion of the Outleap to space, but Bradbury's Pollyannish predictions are difficult to swallow. Space travel as a catalyst for political epiphany? Mars as the place where democracy is finally perfected and poverty solved?
This is quite some form of cosmic transferrence. We have failed here on Earth so somehow a new world will be better? The cynic in me is stamping all over my romantic side with large boots.
I recall an Arthur Clarke's novel where he predicts that cheap international telephone calls will bringing down many of the world's political barriers because of the improvement in communication. Well, we've seen a version of this come true with the internet and the jury is still out as to whether improved global comms has made mankind unite as one, or ever will. Humanity, if anything, seems more polarized and divided into tiny like-minded niche communities than ever, and if anything the internet has facilitated that. If the internet can't bring man together, why should I believe a trip across the inky black would do it?
We are, it must be said, well into Bill Hicks territory here. He finished his gigs with a wish that mankind would climb spaceships into the void and somehow the world's insanity would be cured. Life in infinite space would drain us of all our hatred and rottenness. I loved Bill's comedy but I always felt this was a cop-out. Maybe the REAL romantic solution would be to forget Mars and think about spaceship Earth. Get this little baby fixed first. Because going somewhere else certainly ain't going to cure it.
Yes, but while that might happen tomorrow, statistically, we have a long time before that will happen. We can pretty safely put off manned space travel for a hundred thousand years or even a million years. If it hits us before then, that's just bad luck. But, frankly, if we get out into the galaxy the way we are behaving right now, that would be really bad luck for the galaxy.
And I quote from Bradbury's testimony: "would found a nation of 300 million people that would become the center of civilization, the center of a new thing called democracy".
Excuse me, but wasn't democracy invented in ancient Greece? Granted, with a somewhat different connotation, but definitely *not* a new thing.
Patriotism is fine, but when it deliberately ignores facts it becomes more like an ideology. It is an unfortunate trend, to put it mildly.
I will blow a nice string of +5 posts on this, but here it goes since it is important....
/totalitarain state. It may be trendy or cool to hate the Bush admin or US bash, but at the end of the day, it is a democracy, people do have a free voice, and by any rational measure, it is not totalitarian or facist. If you don't agree, then please go to China, become a citizen, and post anti-Chinese statements everywhere you can. When you are finished, please write back and tell about real totalinarism from the comfort of prison cell, if you are still alive. Disagree? Ask someone who practices falun gong about voicing different opinions. Or, is it easier to behave like a child? Rational people can disagree with out hyperbole.
As much as it may pain some to admit it, China really is a facist
We should cooperate with when we can, and especially with the other great free counties, such as those found in Europe.. But when dictors become greater than you, it is not a happy day for civilization.
-My two cents, -Iowa
"He who laughs last, didn't get the joke."-Cap
come on, everyone knows the Vikings traveled to the americas and back to their homeland way before Columbus.
Then again the native americans made it here (America) way before any of them, but i guess they don't get the glory since they actually stayed and established successful civilizations living off the land. bah.
There are were Ray Bradbury opinion Mars are - we are gonna kill all the Martians, and moreover, all creatures of Myth that exist in our imagination who have moved there.
:-)
Someone must have brainwashed him into saying it is a good idea to go there.
Seriously - the early chronicles about Mars from Ray Bradbury made me cry several times while reading them.
-><- no
I am afraid that we may end up exploring later than sooner. I sad trend I have noticed is that in the engineering classes that I teach, students are showing increasing disinterest in space travel. In general, they feel it is a waste of time, non-interesting, and too dangerous. At some point, the younger generation (god, am I that old?) has made the transition from a Can Do to Can't Do nation. To me, what makes this more sad is that I am in the department of Chemical Engineering, for which the fences really are closing in on the fronteir. Really, almost all is known about fluid flow through pipes and how to make polyethelyne. I try to impress upon students that Chem. E. in space adds quite a bit of room for real, novel engineering. Afterall, current plans call for chemical plants on the moon. How does one do that? But when I survey, non-plan to work for NASA or other organizations. Sad, really.
My two cents
-Iowa
"He who laughs last, didn't get the joke."-Cap
Didn't anyone see the capricorn one? It was on AMC this weekend?
"Is it worth it? Should we just pull back, forget the whole thing as a bad idea and take care of our own problems at home?"
.. and all of this .. all of this was for nothing unless we go to the stars."
"No. We have to stay here and there's a simple reason why. Ask ten different scientists about the environment, population control, genetics and you'll get ten different answers, but there's one thing every scientist on the planet agrees on. Whether it happens in a hundred years or a thousand years or a million years, eventually our Sun will grow cold and go out. When that happens, it won't just take us. It'll take Marilyn Monroe and Lao-Tzu and Einstein and Morobuto and Buddy Holly and Aristophenes
Technoli
Think government regulations would be stupid if some incompetent idiot tried an X Prize launch too close to a populated area, and crashed it on your house?
I won't defend what government regulations have become, but I can understand how they got to where they are.
Example: Guys at work were griping about septic systems, and how it takes an engineer to "certify" that the thing is correctly done. Yet the septic system isn't really "designed", but rather taken from some tables out of a book. X type of soil, household for Y people, therefore use Z sized tank and W feet of leach line.
But the regulation, engineer, and inspector most likely (IMHO) have their roots in an unscrupulous builder who put in an undersized tank, then ran the output into an arbitrarily-sized pit filled with some gravel - no leach lines at all. After selling houses in the neighborhood, the contracting company reorganized, or otherwise became 'unavailable' by the few years afterward when the homeowner discovered he didn't even really have a septic system, but a fake.
There will always be people trying to sleaze others. Sometimes they can be caught through the Law, but (IMHO) as often as not those sleazy people know how to sleaze the Law, too. Hence new regulations.
Sometimes you can substitute incompetent or thoughtless for sleazy. From what I've read of the X-Prize contestents, non of them are any of the above. But remember that they ARE playing with high explosives.
Finding the comfortable middleground for regulations is difficult, perhaps impossible, considering the way the sleazes try to game the system. Again, I realize that the sleazes are not currently a factor in the X-Prize, but just wait until the concept is proven, and space tourism becomes a growth industry. Then you'll seem them crawling out of the woodwork.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
- Provide potable drinking water to everyone on the planet
- ?????
- Profit!
Disappointing though it may be, Earth is in the hands of capitalists and the profit motive reigns supreme. And all the artifical political boundaries just help support the whole profiteering initiative. We go to war so General Dynamics can pay a dividend next quarter. We go to Mars so Lockheed-Martin can build the equipment for the mission. And so on, and so on...Depressing, ain't it?
Mail? Put "slashdot" in the subject to pass the spam filters.
Space travel will not allievate overcrowding on earth.
I don't think anyone believes that we'll be ferrying billions of people off the planet anytime soon, but that's not the only way to control population. Citizens of first world countries have much lower birthrates, including some, like Italy, which essentially have negative birthrates. When human beings live in a rich environment with the resources to pursue their own happiness, most people delay having children or don't have them at all.
So providing a first world standard of living for third world countries isn't just a moral imperative but the most practical way of controlling population growth.
The problem is that bringing the entire planet up to first world standards of living requires more energy and natural resources than we have available on Earth.
Orbital or lunar solar power is one way we could provide the energy this sort of economy would need. Farther out, robotic mining of asteroids would be another way of bringing needed resources home. But we're going to have to look beyond our planet if we want to meet the challenge of bringing prosperity to everyone, and not just an elite group of nations. Population reduction is just an added benefit.
> Have you any idea what kind of resources are in space?
Yes I do. But nobody seems to be rushing to grab them. If we truly had the technology and the pickings were out there, why aren't Exxon or some other commercial conglomerates up there now, strip-mining asteroids and cracking fuel on the Martian surface?
We know that the resources are there, but the investment required to exploit them is beyond the means of the world's biggest corporations. If it was affordable and achievable they'd be there. The fact that they are not indicates a number of things:
(a) The cost is unaffordable.
(b) The technology has not been perfected.
(c) The commercial risk is too high.
The spirit of Columbus was powered by the prospect of commerce and riches. If that impulse has not yet got us to Mars, then you have to ask what will? Bradbury couches it in terms of epihanies and romance. But romance does not pay a multi-trillion bill for the 80-20 chance of getting a handful of technicians to the Martian surface.
I'm afraid Mr. Bradbury is out of his gourd! The whole 'three Italians' idea is a little too much symbolism for me. The only good reason to send some Italians to Mars first is so that there will be pizza ready by the time the rest of us get there. :)
Of course, when there are two you use "between", such as when you are talking about being between "the brutal and primitive" and "the advanced".
I also agree that 'fixing' Earth may be unachievable and I don't profess to have all the answers.
However, Bradbury talks about new lands and new opportunities and promises much for them. However, I still don't see how we will not export many of our problems with us. After all, what is now the United States was ruled by a British monarch for a good chunk of its history following the initial colonisation. If a few battles had gone differently, the experiment with American democracy might have become a footnote in the history books. It is not a given that the American experiment would have succeeded.
Who is to say that a Martian colony might fail to slough off its past and remained chained to Earth as a slave vassal? Or what if it creates something new and dangerous? What if the harsh frontier of Mars did not produce new democrats but a fascist oligarchy instead?
This is not to say such a thing would happen, but to question the notion that the drive into space automatically results in social progress, which is what Bradbury claims. There are lots of 'ifs', 'ands' and 'buts' here. The optimist will say 'well, that's no reason NOT to try the experiment', and they'd be right. However, it's not unreasonable to approach the prospect of space colonisation cautiously. Instead of the new frontier we might get a new race of Teutonic knights - interplanetary crusaders conquering all before them in the name of America and its allies.
The future is not always bright.
as a consequence, luck, resourcefulness, and help by natives played vital roles in survival. Without these, no expedition party would have made it.
None of the above applies to the moon or to Mars; survival would rely on technology alone, and at our current capability, odds are too low to overcome.
Need an outlet for imagination? how about renewable energy, climate stabilization, global economic theory, etc?
Plenty of huge challenges right here to work on that we'll need solved in order to survive on this planet.
sigs are for losers (except to point out that sigs are for losers)
"The Earth is the cradle of the mind, but one cannot live
forever in the cradle.". Konstantin Tsiolkovsky (1857 -- 1935)
Ever heard of the Matthew effect? It refers to how once someone achieves a certain level of accomplishment, people will attribute things to them whenever they don't know who really came up with them. It happens with Einstein, it happens with Feynman, and it also seems to happen an awful lot with Clarke.
I wonder what George O. Smith would make of it (Google for him if you don't know who he is).
If we achieve interplanetary spaceflight before curing our social ills, then the Intergalactic Federation will deem our bloodthirsty, conflicted nature to be dangerous to the Established Harmony, and obliterate our race.
They won't notice us until we jump out there....we've got time....
--A/C
Clicking on the link brings you to a page with Bush's quote from Jan 14, 2004. ("We choose to explore space because doing so improves our lives, and lifts our national spirit"). Personally, I dont think exploring Mars will improve my life any... Even if we could mine its resources for use here on Earth, it would most likely cost too much to transport it back here...not to mention it would be a while before we even began to benefit from any of it. We should be developing technologies here which minimize our consumption of our resources and that are friendly to the environment...not wasting money on Mars. Instead he should be fixing REAL problems... Like bringing the price of gas (or begin switching the US over to other existing non-gas based technologies) and health care down, creating jobs, developing programs for people in need, etc. Its then that I feel my life will be "improved"... As for my National Spirit... that will be lifted when he is FINALLY out of office. :-) Hell. even use the money to fix the Hubble Telescope. Atleast it would be worth it!
"Sweden being invaded by Spain"??? ;)
there goes quite a bit of his credibility.
> You're exactly the person Bradbury says we should ignore: cold and calculating.
If you knew me I suspect you'd agree that wasn't true. I'm caught up with the thrill of space travel as well.
This is not about calculation or calculation. It's about the lure of a grand romantic cause sending people off on a wild goose chase, expending vast treasure and energies tilting at windmills when we might have better things to do with the cash (starting with tax cuts). People keep casting Mars in parallel with the colonization of America but I have to question that parallel. I've read enough literature on prospective Mars missions to know that those don't stand up to close examination. You can't simply charter a sturdy ship and trust to courage and navigation to get you to a new world. The technological hurdle is huge, the returns miniscule. Nothing in any of Bush's speeches has indicated that America is going to Mars for any reason other than the sheer adventure; everything else is ill-defined.
The Moon is a considerably simpler world to colonize but no-one has yet set up shop there since our first few visits. So why should Mars be any better bet? Maybe we should colonize the Moon first. Use that as our testbed to check the feasibility of an outreach into the solar system.
Why not the Moon first? Why leap, as they are proposing, straight to Mars? And why not leave it to private industry? Why throw public money at this?
I love Bradbury. He's one of my favourite scifi (and other stuff) authors. It's not that he's a good science fiction author - he's a good author period (read some of his non-scifi stories - The Wonderful Ice-Cream Suit, A Medicine for Melancholy).
The thing about Bradbury is that what he focuses on is not the science, but more the social aspect of humanity. He writes about people, not spaceships.
For example, some of the earlier short stories use SciFi as backdrop against which to express more immediate social concerns. There are stories in which a population of black people build their own rocket, and quietly depart for Mars, where they can live in peace.
In the context of the civil rights movement and equality rights, this is a powerful and strong statement. It strongly reflects the simple sentiment that these people just want to be left alone to live their lives in peace.
Bradbury is a wonderful and imaginative author. He was a large influence on my views and perspectives. What he beleives and says deserves respect - because he is a respectable man.
-Laxitive
> So are you saying that space travel won't improve at all in the next three centuries, or do you just not know the difference between the continent of America and the United States thereof.
I'm saying different conditions apply. It did not require a technological leap to discover America, and once found the resources needed to get there were modest and affordable (at least for commercial companies and combines of investors). Current technology makes a Mars mission prohibitively expensive right now for everyone.
Now, in fifty or a hundred years time we might have cheap, safe and reliable lift capacity to make the payload problem less of an issue, and essential problems of long term habitation may well have been resolved. I imagine those problems will have been solved closer to home, in near-Earth orbit or on the Moon.
Unlike America, which took courage and a leap of faith, Mars will require a series of stepping-stones. Rather than couching our goal as Mars, maybe we should be setting our sights at something more achievable.
Oh, and thanks for correcting me regarding the America/US thing.
China builds with stolen Russian technology,
India builds it's own. Besides India is way ahead of China in tech.
nada
Perhaps some parenthesis can clarify the intended meaning. ...this is an in-between generation caught between ((the brutal and primitive) and (the advanced)).
Sputnik, first man made satellite in space
Yuri Gagarin, first man in space
Alexei Leonov, first walk in space
Valentina Tereshkova, first woman in space
> Of course you may argue that the technology is not there yet. And you would be right, but the only thing we can do to overcome this problem is to start developing and using it. Sitting back and hoping that it will just materialize is not going to work.
Fair enough. However, it seems to me that the journey to Mars will not be a grand leap but the product of stepping-stones that may take decades or to build.
We have become used to the idea of rapid technological progress, even though our experience of it is relatively recent. We went from Kitty Hawk to jet aircraft in less than 40 years. At 20th Century rates of progress we might have expected to go from Apollo to Mars colonies in the following three decades, and many expected that to happen. But it didn't, and space travel is still expensive and risky.
My understanding of space is that the technological hurdles are much greater than most of the public percieve. They are real, hard limits on our ability to do things in space. And experience has not reduced costs significantly. The rapid progress paradigm does not apply to space travel. We might have to accept that it may take a century to get a man on Mars. It might be much less than this, but right now we cannot make assumptions that gumption and cash and good old frontier spirit will get us there any earlier.
I live in Sweden and I'm pretty sure Spain has never invaded. The man is talking out of his ass!
I don't get how people can be not fascinated by space exploration. I mean, how can someone look at the Cassini/Hyugens mission, for example, and not wonder what it's going to find? What sort of pictures will we get on these unprecedented close flybies, including passing right through gaps in Saturn's rings several times? Will there be a drizzling ethane rain falling into lapping hydrocarbon seas with huge ice mountains on Titan? Why do we have such stark features as Iapetus's two faces, and how did Mimas manage to survive such a huge impact as created Herschel?
Etc... unless people simply don't care about learning unknown knowlege (which I have trouble believing - people have done that throug history), space will always have a strong draw. I can't wait until the data from some of our upcoming planet-finding missions starts coming back. If we can find a planet out there with an atmosphere that contains the spectral signature of O2.... it'll be a complete paradigm shift in public thinking about space exploration.
"99 dead duelists of Dios on the wall. 99 dead duelists of Dios! Take one's ring, pass it around..."
There is a disturbing school of thought that says that great technological innovation is the product of war. Certainly the space race was part of a Cold War, when it was feared that the Russians could hurl nuclear weapons from the Moon, and the one of the prizes was military space superiority. One wonders whether the drive into space will be militarily-led. What if China doesn't go bust and affords colonies on the Moon? Will the US follow suit? Will space exploration end up being nothing more than a cosmic land grab?
I think the word you're looking for here is genocide.
Many of us graduates were a little dissappointed in the speach, accurately pointing out that there were likely not any future astronauts or SF writers in the audience that day. While I thought it was kind of neat to get to hear a literary icon speak at a graduation, I am skeptical of the role that these writers should play in influencing public policy on these issues. People like Bradbury are driven by their emotions and immaginations, noble characteristics, but I think that a solid cost/benefit analysis is the only reasonable way to decide what to do with the billions of taxpayer dollars at stake here.
Still, he seems like a nice guy. It would be nice to give him his mars mission while he's still arround.
Yes, launch costs need to become radically cheaper. However, a number of nations and agencies such as Russia, China, NASA and the ESA have been working on this for years. My understanding is that in real terms savings have been marginal while accidents -- very expensive accidents -- keep occurring. In spite of all the R&D both costs and risks have not crossed the threshold that makes manned spaceflight commercially desirable. Why is that?
I have to question the notion that the technical problems can be solved quickly, even pooling resources. Great breakthroughs have not been as forthcoming in spaceflight as they were in the aeronautics industry in the early 20th Century. Technical progress in key engineering areas, such as fuels and materials, has been gradual, not radical. I have no doubt that progress will eventually come, but I suspect that might be a lot slower than we want. In more than four decades of manned spaceflight we haven't gotten further than the Moon. How can we be sure that Mars is not another four or more decades away, and what are the stepping stones to getting there?
You see, in their world, the wealthy nations have funded everything. There are very few people from poor nations in space, and they lack space age technology even when the rest of the world is so advanced. When the largest nations reach an agreement as to how they are going to divide up the resources of the moon, they decide to base it off of what each nation has contributed.
This puts an unimaginable gap between the wealth of the different nations, so much so that the impoverished nations form a terrorist group to halt the conference where it is to be announced and hold the people hostage in order to make them change it.
While this may not necessarily happen in the future, I think it is CERTAINLY a possibility with the way things are today. I mean, if the US were to colonize the moon, do you seriously think we'd want to let other countries share the resources? The world has seen what our president will do for oil, just wait until he finds out about H3.
Buy Steampunk Clothing Online!
I'll be damned, we have a Nazi on /.
...to the idea of colonizing space itself? O'Neill habitats and that whole thing. It seems to me to be a much better idea than colonizing other planets: why would you want to go back down into the gravity well once you've gotten out of there? And why would you want to live somewhere where you're stuck with whatever gravity the planet gives you?
Okay, so there's the small matter of building the things, but still. I want my grandkids to grow up with lakes and forests overhead.
At least someone at NASA seems to think it's still a good idea.
"Why can't everyone just be straight with me?"
"Because we live in a bendy world, dear."
Can't help but notice Ray Bradbury constantly reminicing on why we should go "because life wants to exist, wants to survive, wants to be free of the conflicts of Earth, even as America, when it was created, was free of the conflicts of Europe". Free of the conflicts of Europe? Did he never hear of the French-Indian war (http://www.u-s-history.com/pages/h608.html)? Or any of the other wars, conflicts and turmoil between the European powers fought in the New World over the same old world rivalries? Wow, I guess he also really believes when Columbus, et al "discovered" the new world they found it empty. Hopefully Mars really is empty - or we'll just have to Americanize it!
I saw it. I stepped on it. My bad, but other life forms are likely to visit our planet at some point.
including why three Italians should be the first on Mars
"Planyeta yest' kolybyel razuma, no nyelzya vietchno zhit' v kolybyeli", which translates to "A planet is the cradle of mind, but one cannot live in a cradle forever,". It's often misquoted as "Earth is the cradle of humanity, but one cannot live in a cradle forever."
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
I hate to sound so cliche, but it is the "final frontier".
Several hundred years ago they probably said the same thing about the Atlantic Ocean. The same was probably said about leaving the Fertile Crescent many thousands of year before that too....
There is still plenty of exploring to be done here on Earth (ie. deep ocean trences, rain forests). Granted, we would require space travel to explore other planets, but our physical universe isn't necessarily the last place to go spelunking. What about the possibility of extra dimensions and alternate realities that we can't even conceive of at this time?
Karma: NaN
Sagen was a scientist and he could play the room too.
To be an effective entity, one needs well-defined goals with benchmarks. Only then will we have a way to gauge our success.
Fair enough, but does that goal have to be Mars? Why not a long-duration mission on the Moon? If we can't achieve a viable Moonbase then we have no real right to be flying to Mars.
If people are serious about colonizing space, then credible work making long-duration spaceflight both affordable and viable would seem to be a first. Commercial exploitation of the Moon would seem to be a reasonable first step rather than grand gestrues at exploration.
The rarest thing in the universe isn't petroleum or gold or diamonds or iridium, it is life.
uhh... i'm not sure, but don't you need fossils in order to get fossil fuels?
Karma: NaN
in an airplane, and only the gummint was holding us back.
But it doesn't, Columbus used regular old coastal trading ships to sail to the Bahamas.
Mars will take specially designed ships & thus a significant part of the GDP to get there, there are only a few private individuals who could finance that, and only if they dropped most of their other causes and threw most of their money at it.
Human travel to Mars & human settlement is the kind of expedition that only makes sense for Govts. to fund, for a very long term ROI.
A decent comparison is this: the 1492 Columbus voyage cost about $300,000 U.S. (in 1992 dollars - someone actually made the calculation for the 500th anniversary of the trip). Even allowing for a factor of 10 fudge, that is 3 million US dollars (1992 dollars). It was less than 1% of the 1492 GNP of Spain.
Any decent research/development/exploration program for Mars will cost, er, a *lot* more - feel free to cite your estimate here..
I've always found Bradbury's outlook on the future of mankind to be rather pessimistic and depressing.
This was the impression I got from reading the Martian Chronicles.
>And we are the beacon to the world, because we >would not let ourselves be destroyed. The beacon of the world, what a sad world that would be.
I think travel to mars could end poverty
... on mars
much like the Freedom Boat the cost of anyone living on mars when that eventuality occurs would be quite prohibative allowing only the richest to enter and ending homelessness.
Heck, given a couple of thousand years, earth could just be mars' lower east side
The Neo-Bohemian Techno-Socialist
Interest on the debt is income for US bond-holders (except for the foreign debt, and foreigners investing in US bonds is a good thing). Most will simply save the interest in more US bonds, unless they have better use for the money. Then they can sell the bonds to others who have less need for their money. As long as the economy is growing, you can always borrow more money to pay off current bond-holders and interest on the debt.
The government already "defaults" on all of the money it collects in the form of "taxes". The less money that is taken away as taxes and the more the economy grows, the more money will be available to lend to the government. With the revised current deficit figure (3.1% and falling) less than the growth rate of the economy (4.2% and growing), we can easily afford more than the current debt, another tax cut, and trips to the Moon and Mars.
All of the depressions in the US have happened during or immediately following periods of budget surpluses. The last thing I want the government to do is raise taxes to buy bonds.
When the board member said to Mr. Bradbury [SIC] "You're giving aesthetic reasons, are there any PRACTICAL reasons?"
He could have kept on with the approach he had taken at the outset;
Have Columbus Cabot and Verazzanno given us any return on investment?
Look around you at the United States; the most prosperous nation in the world. All the growth, all the profit, all that from taking the chance the kings of yesterday took on those explorers.
Could the explorers or the kings have predicted all the riches that resulted? Of course not.
Imagine what we'll discover THIS TIME.
I don't know the meaning of the word 'don't' - J
Select quotes from Is Space Exploration Worth the Cost?"
"For instance, this year, total pet-related sales in the United States are projected to be $31 billion - the double, almost to the cent, of the $15.47 billion NASA budget. An estimated $5 billion worth of holiday season gifts were offered - not to the poor - but to the roving family pets - six times more than NASA spent on its own roving Martian explorers, Spirit and Opportunity, who cost the American taxpayer $820 million both."
"Instead of betting on the future, Americans spend $586.5 billion a year on gambling. It is perhaps immoral to criticize one's personal choice, so instead of kicking the habit and feeding the poor with this money, one should stop instead the enormous waste in space who stands at a scandalous amount of 40 times less than gaming tokens."
"Speaking about personal choice, $31 billion go annually in the US on tobacco products - twice the NASA budget -, and $58 billion is spent on alcohol consumption -almost four times the NASA budget. Forget space spin-offs - here are genuine tangible benefits: $250 billion are spent annually in the US on the medical treatment of tobacco- and alcohol-related diseases - only sixteen times more than on space exploration."
These figures represent how, as a society, how lowly we value space exploration. If we spent 50% as much on space exploration as we spent on Hollywood entertainment, Orbitz would selling weekend passes to the most popular lunar resorts.
I think that from your comments, this is not a can do vs. can't do issue.
The real question that they are asking you is why should we do such a thing.
It is very clear nowdays that we can't enginner our way through to solve the important problems of humanity. The early vision of well being for all man kind fueled mainly by technology has become a nightmare of oppression by those who control technology.
Maybe the answer is that we should go. The important thing is not the answer, is making the right questions.
Give your students my regards.
Uh huh!!
--If something I said could be taken two ways, and one of those ways made you cry, then I meant the other way.
this is an in-between generation caught between the brutal and primitive and the advanced.
Half measures are the curse of it. A civilized society would either kill Bradbury or put him to use.
I am Sartre of the Borg. Existence is futile.
--If something I said could be taken two ways, and one of those ways made you cry, then I meant the other way.
Student (enthusiastically): What about Ray Bradbury?
Martin Prince(uninterested): I'm familiar with his work?
"We shall party like the Greeks of old! You know the ones I mean." - HedonismBot
10^100 is more than .005 % of the planetary systems. In fact, 10^100 is several dozen orders of magnitude larger than the estimated number of atoms in the known universe, and as far as we know every planetary system must contain at least one atom.
You might try to argue that the universe is much larger than the portion that we can detect right now, but that is a purely unscientific opinion with (by definition of the term "known universe") no data to back it up.
It can be difficult to distinguish between a real democracy and the illusion of a democracy. For example, what is the difference between state controlled media via financial/political incentive (US) vs. state controlled media via direct government enforcement (China)? The end result is the same, only the prior gives the illusion that a democracy exists.
Space travel is old news. Didn't you hear? Mankind went to space. People went all the way to the moon, before I was born -- before some of your students' parents were born. And the photos must have been really great at the time. But the kids you teach have spent years looking at similar photos (taken -- much more easily, safely, and cheaply -- by robots and satellites). They've spent years watching people like Jerry Doyle and Leonard Nimoy and Ben Affleck and Ahhhnuld walk around on Mars. They've explored Mars themselves, in games. If the games aren't realistic enough for them, they wait a couple of years for Moore's Law to supply them with more polygons and better sound. (Though it doesn't take a lot of simulator to accurately represent a lifeless desert.) Younger people prefer to dream of a future that isn't 35 years in the past.
I know it sounds like a hippy tree-hugging perfectionist attitude, but right now the world is SCREWED. I'm not talking about "could be better" screwed, but "if we don't do something soon it's gonna get a whole lot worse, very quickly" screwed. If we spent the money on the space program now, on people who actually need it to survive, we could actually do something good for our planet.
You're advocating Communism, aren't you? The Communist Chinese tried what you wanted from 1958 to 1963 with the Great Leap Forward and it turned into a MAJOR disaster for everyone involved. Is it small wonder why they embraced capitalist economics starting in 1979?
We're not going to advance human civilization if all we want to do is try like mad to solve our Earthly problems first. Go read Alvin Toffler's The Third Wave and you will understand what I mean.
I think humanity really needs to start embracing some far-out scientific research, to say the least. After all, who would have thought in 1950 that the average digital wristwatch by 1990 would have more computing power than the gigantic room-sized computers back then? The space program provided a huge emphasis on that research that resulted in a huge amount of spinoff technology (like the computer you're using right now and the public Internet we're communicating on). With a new space program to go to Mars using Robert Zubrin's Mars Direct scenario, we could have another round of technology spinoffs that could really benefit mankind.
Besides, we could see within the next 15-20 years huge breakthroughs in energy production that could render the whole idea of using petroleum to fuel our transportation infrastructure obselete. One idea that is current somewhat on the fringe of scientific research is something called zero-point energy, where when you shape metals in a certain fashion you actually get electron output with no need for fuel or moving parts! If they can mainstream this idea it could cause a HUGE revolution in both electric generation and transportation, because 1) instead of a huge powerplant to power a whole city we'll have small zero-point energy powerplants at every residence generating power in a highly-distributed fashion (think of it as "Beowulf-cluster power generation") and 2) we will finally fulfill the promise of electric vehicles, since they will never need to be charged! Yes, it's a very wild idea, but there are quite a lot of scientists doing serious of research in this field.
In short, it's time we should start looking at major quantum leaps in technological research to solve the world's problems.
Your septic tank example...what is really happening is that a legal entity independent of the contractor is assuming legal liability for the septic system. The "homeowner" is not in a position to do this, because the "homeowner" can't repair the damage done by a faulty sewage system. On the other hand, an engineering firm with hundreds of thousands or millions in revenues IS in a position to repair that damage, and in certifying a plan, asssumes that liability. They also stand to lose that revenue forever if they certify a poorly designed system.
Yeah, in theory, all that's involvde is knowing which entry in which table in which book, but in practice there is this whole legal liability structure brought into play. Stuff that in the pipes of the guys at work - ask if they're prepared to deal with the federal, state, and local environmental bureaucrats and pay both the costs and fines associated with the cleanup of a faulty septic system, or if they'd rather pay an engineer $200 to put his mark of approval on it.
Ray Bradbury is a great writer. But, like many sci-fi writers, he misses two things. One is the fact that self-replicating space habitats using sunlight and asteroidal ore could create thousands of times the surface area of the Earth and Mars in total across trillions of O'Neill, Bernal, and Savage style habitats (forming a sort of loose Dyson shell around the sun).
The other is a basic rah-rah view of US history. Consider his statement in the light of books like _A People's History of the United States_ or _Lies My Teacher Told Me_: So on the way to India, all three of them bumped into a huge obstruction. An obstruction that was empty, that was uncivilized, that was cold, and rejected them. ... Four hundred years before Kitty Hawk, an Italian lands on an empty shore, and four hundred years later the Wright Brothers take off into the air above the Earth.
Uncivilized? Then why was the Iroquis Confederacy an inspiration for the US constitution? Many aspects of several native cultures surpasses what the US has now. (Not all, but many).
Empty? Tell that to the ten to twenty north american natives who were mostly wiped out by disease brought by such visitors.
Unfriendly? Who kept up forest trails, made the praries, offered food, guides, and other assistance? Again, the natives.
Cold? The continent has a wonderful climate in many parts.
400 years? Just think what such wise people as many of the American Native Peoples (such as documented in the book _The Walking People_) could have accomplished without terrorist occupiers using biological warfare and other brutal military methods against them. Perhaps they would have reached Mars and even the stars a century ago.
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
You're right, in considerably more detail than me.
But my argument is still that behind those septic - or many (*but not all) other regulations - is someone who did it wrong in the first place, and stuck others with the consequences.
*I suspect another source of regulations is a friend of a friend of an official, trying to protect his business from competition.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
Everything that a human needs for survival, except for some DNA in the form of seeds and genetic diversity of the people living on Mars, can be found on Mars. The only thing you really need to bring to Mars is the tools to make the tools that make the tools. While you are busy trying to build up the infrastructure to get this all to happen, yes, some initial supplies will have to be sent from Earth, and it may take decades or even centuries for Mars to be fully self-sufficient, but there is no doubt that the supplies are there. The basic elements of life, C-H-O-N (Carbon, Hydrogen, Oxygen, and Nitrogen) are all found with abundance on Mars. Yes, not the same proportions that you find them and in the form you find them on Earth, but that just means you have to use your imagination to make them come together in a form that is more useful.
Other elements, like Iron and Silicon, are also found in great abundance on Mars, and even current industrial processes on Earth can extract them from minerals found on Mars. I doubt (but I may be surprised on this one) that you will find Coal deposits on Mars, but the truth is we don't know what we will find there. Mars has water ice and other elements.
In terms of natural organic expansion, I have no doubt that despite all of the precautions that NASA has done to deliberately decontaminate the space probes that have gone to Mars, that some form of Earth bacteria and blue-green algae have already made it to Mars. The real trick is to see what will happen if that is done deliberately. Life is already there, even if it wasn't there before.
As for a great barrier, travel across the seas has always been a great barrier. I have heard it suggested that it was sea travel from people in Australia that could most likely be considered the current "ancenstor" of modern mankind, not Africa. In order to navigate across the islands of south-east Asia, people needed to develop the intelligence and skills necessary to build boats that could travel across bodies of water where you couldn't see the shore on the other side. I don't see tranoceanic travel any different from that viewpoint than interplanetary travel, and indeed from a technological viewpoint we are well ahead of what our ancestors had to deal with in this sort of travel. Diseases like scurvy didn't make sense for early sea travllers, and often the early tranoceanic voyages would have people dying by dozens due to new environments they weren't used to. When the British Royal Navy insisted that each seaman eat one half of a Lime per day when at sea, they finally were able to eliminate this dreadful disease (of a lack of Vitimin C). We already know many of the physiological problems people will be facing when going to Mars, even before people have done it. To know more, we simply need to go. Transit times for going to Mars are in many ways very similar to transit times for travel between Europe and America in the 18th Century, and communication time is considerably less. King George III of England would have killed for a 1-3 hour method of communication with the Americas in the 1770's
Uhh, sorry too burst your bubble, but
1) Switzerland is still a republic, and
2) Women got the vote here before they did there, so it is very arguable that our form of government advanced far quicker than theirs.
3) Switzerland (as per McPhee and others) still has a racial pecking order:
German Swiss
------------
French Swiss
------------
Italian Swiss
------------
Romansch Swiss
------------
Everybody else
which is rather tacky.
There is nothing wrong with yr Internet. Do not attempt to adjust the picture. We are controlling the transmission - NSA
I have always liked Bradbury's work. As a child I read the Illustrated Man and was blown away by how imaginative it was.
... that would become the center of civilization, the center of a new thing called democracy, and change the history of world, and become the most powerful power of the world"
Bradbury is a wonderful author but he is no cosmologist or even an astral philosopher. He's just a person like you or me.
But why did he write that the USA was
"a nation
Please! What a pile of manure. Such conceit and arrogance is what we've come to expect from politicians or other self-serving individuals attempting to play the lowest common denominator card.
ferretous
Damn... I thought at first, reading this, that somebody agrees. Yes, eugenics is the solution... But then I read on... and found your talk of inferior races. That stuff disgusts me. There are no inferior races. The notion of race in this context is largely pseudoscience. From reading your other comments, I am not surprised to find you are a BNPer. I think that the voters here really need to realize the views of the BNP such as this. This stuff really freaks me out.
You should be freaked out.
your day is coming, untermensch. Your kind will be exterminated, either through selective, controlled breeding, or due to starvation and anarchy.
I don't read or respond to AC posts
Of course, we could always exterminate the BNP members by throwing them off cliffs... But then a bunch of retards littering our beaches is not the way forward for the environment.
Yes, that would be a typical communist method.
I'll see you on the battlefield you pinko scum.
I don't read or respond to AC posts