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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."
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?
I, for one do not want to see this fascist, totalitarian state score a propoganda win by landing humans on Mars first.
This really doesn't sit well with me. Why does patriotism always seem to require hatred for everyone else? Isn't it enough to be proud of your country without considering a different culture fascist and totalitarian? Or, is 'pride' just a nice way of saying 'hate', as in "I'm black and I'm proud of it" = "I hate whites"? I don't think so. I think that you can be proud without being hateful.
Have you considered this option: Become friends with the Chinese and work together to get to Mars using the best minds and resources of each country.
The previous comment is purposely vague and generalized, but all of the facts are completely true.
He's a popular author. He knows how to tell a story, a story that can include some fairly complex ideas, to the general population. If a scientist stood up there and tried the same thing, half the audience would be asleep within five minutes while most of the rest wouldn't understand how anything he said had any real importance.
You need someone who can put some fire behind the ideas. non-scientists just can't see any reason to do things just for the science, you need someone who can appeal to their sense of adventure, excitement and mystery.
Ah... you know how it is. We're always taking our purchasing advice from professional athletes and Hollywood celebs too....
But seriously, plenty of science-fiction writers turned out to do a pretty decent job of predicting things that eventually became real science. If nothing else, you're dealing with people who made a career out of thinking things through and imagining what things could be like, based on the present. That may not qualify them to give advice to the govt. - but they probably have more interesting input to offer than many people.
there are many armchair scifi nuts...he is just one that captures the imagination of the many and can explain it to the masses.
"Only one thing, is impossible for god: to find any sense in any copyright law on the planet." Mark Twain
Or maybe its because no scientist can find a compelling reason to divert almost all of NASA's funding from the current excellent science its to the underfunded pipe-dream of sending a man to Mars?
This is an irrelevant comment at best, and misleading at worst.
Just because someone is personally afraid of something does not translate to that thing being bad for people. I personally am terrified of bees, but that doesn't mean I won't eat honey!
Sorry to tell you but the population bomb myth has been shot down. Developed nations are already slowing down their growth or even shrinking. Maybe this is the "correction" you speak of, though I expect you're suggesting a more cataclysmic one.
:-P
Too bad, because it'd be fun to watch from the confines of the richest nation on earth.
Have you any idea what kind of resourcesHave you any idea what kind of resources are in space? Everything you could ever want (Iron, nickel, cobalt, platinum-group metals, He-3) in effectively infinite supply. And because there's no tectonic motions or air resistance (and because we live at the bottom of a gravity well) it costs almost nothing to harvest, and is in extremely pure forms. The value of one asteroid is over $10 TRILLION. How's that return for a $10 billion investment?
The rarest thing in the universe isn't petroleum or gold or diamonds or iridium, it is life.
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.
It isn't a matter of technology. We have the technology *right now* to go to Mars, and colonize it at the same rate as America was colonized in the 1500s. Heck, we could have done it with Apollo-era technology. The chemical reactions for processing Martian and lunar materials have been used for almost a hundred years and are very robust. All it takes is someone willing to take the risk. I'm willing, but I don't have the money. The only reason it takes a major nation-state to foot the bill isn't because the technology is all that expensive, but because the fuel costs are so high. Solve the problem of lifting 100 tons to earth orbit for the cost of electricity, and it's relatively economical. Cost-plus accounting is mostly to blame for the myth that space flight is monetarily expensive.
Why limit ourselves to this planet when we could easily (and cheaply, compared to the cost of blowing each other up) spread throughout the solar system and universe? Once you get to orbit, the cost of going to the moon or mars or anywhere else in terms of energy is very, very cheap. Focus our energies on getting to orbit cheaply and then humanity will take over.
For more information check out Mining the Sky and The Case for Mars. And for more information about the best way to get to Mars, check out Mars Direct.
I'm in the hole of the broadband donut.
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.
I put that in quotes because it brings the question to mind: "What is fixed?" Most of the things we are talking about are social ills. So what is "fixed"? I mean, how do you define it? No crime? No poverty? I doubt that's possible, ever. There will always be those willing to exploit weaker individuals (crime, at all levels), and there will always be the myriad of reasons for poverty (from purely lazy to the exploited).
Saying we need to fix Earth before going elsewhere hamstrings us. Why not set up an experiment in a new place, with no history to tie you back?
Think about the Americas in the late 1700s. The Great Experiment was the government of the US. Granted, it's far from perfect, but it was a helluva lot better than anything else around at the time (emphesis to prevent misunderstandings). Moving to a new place was the catalyst that allowed the experiment to occur. Personally, I think the relative stagnation and degredation of most of society (globally) since then is the result of the lack of new places to try things like this out. When the disenfranchised have no place to go and do things their own way, they fight the system, and the system fights them back out of reflex, without regard to the merit of the ideas.
If, however, the disenfranchised have a new place to go and do things their own way, they can demonstrate to the system that they have a better or improved system. It's like evolution: you need a niche to grow. If a new species fights an entrenched one for a niche, it will lose unless it is vastly superior. Normally, the improvement is too small to be considered an overwhelming advantage. If, however, the new species (or system) is capable of exploiting a new niche, it will thrive and eventually be able to demonstrate its superiority by thriving, or its inferiority by its demise.
There is a reason for everything. Sometimes that reason just sucks.
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.
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.
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..."
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
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.
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.