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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.
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.
"The missing link between apes and man . . . is us."
Other reasons to go:
Sir, there is a dragon outside with an armful of armor. He's inquiring if we offer free refills.
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.
The difference this time round is this: Back then people with money could simply invest in stuff like that, and send out people on their own. Say for instance you had a billion bucks right now, there is no way in hell you would be able to privately fund a mission to Mars. Look at the Azanti (?) X Prize, every team needs special licenses from the FAA (or something like that), they need a launchpad, etc etc. Stupid Government regulations would sadly kill any such venture .....
Veni, Vidi, Velcro!
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.
If you read the book by Arthur C. Clarke, that's actually an orbiting nuclear weapon. Which I guess is a satellite, but the transition in the film was supposed to be more poignant because it was between two weapons (the bone and then the nuke) separated by millions of years.
- Jim
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.
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
There is no conceivable technology that would allow us to send people elsewhere fast enough to have nay significant effect on population growth or pollution. So going to space will not relieve us of the need to solve our problems.
Oh, I fully agree. But that's not the point. If our species is intrinsically incapable of living sustainably, then being confined to earth will mean that the problem lives and dies here. If we spread to other planets before then, it means we may destroy habitable planets in the entire galaxy or even beyond--leaving behind trashed planets and dying human populations.
There's nothing like managing life aboard a space ship or colony to make people acutely aware of the importance of resource management and recycling.
Most likely, that will be orchestrated and enforced by machines if it is to work at all for long voyages. What makes you think that people don't revert to their biological imperatives once they land?
We need to demonstrate first here, on this planet, that we can live responsibly and sustainably at a planetary scale, not because something is forcing us, but because it is how we operate. Before we reach that point (if ever), it would be a disaster if we got out.
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
Well if one buys the evidence that the Chinese did in fact get to the Americas before the Europeans, and they did, in fact, produce the original charts that were the basis for the charts used by the Portuguese (sp?) to nagivate to North America, and the records of what resources were there to actually motivate those trips, then that makes the Chinese exploration massively important.
Either the Chinese didn't get here, and you're absolutely right, or they did and they were of primary importance to the exploration that followed. The fact that its existance, if it happened, wasn't understood until recently and the fact that, if true, the Europeans were going to American knowing it was there and what they would fine wasn't fully understood until recently is irrelavent to its significance. Lots of critically important discovery over the centuries has inspired later discovery, and the sheer importance of the original was not appreciated until much later.
"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
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)
"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."
When people decide to have children, they don't know whether their children will grow up to be humanitarians or criminals. But most people give their kids an opportunity at life, knowing that most people turn out alright.
We don't know whether humanity's child will be good or bad. But we believe, based on past experience, that we should take this chance, knowing that human settlements are more likely to be good.
Well... at least whoever colonizes mars won't be committing ethnic cleansing of its natives. Ya know, that little piece of American History that is typically conveniently ignored.
"99 dead duelists of Dios on the wall. 99 dead duelists of Dios! Take one's ring, pass it around..."
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.
...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."
The US is only one of many countries that have pushed the boundary of democracy and freedom. It wasn't the first, and it isn't the country that has pushed it the furthest. By modern standards, the US electoral system is for instance fairly bad at providing a representative government, grouping it with a few of the other of the early democracies as countries that still stick to one man circuits for many types of elections.
The US weren't crucial at revitalising the concept of democracy any more than France or England or Germany or any other of the countries that had growing movements pushing for democracy were. The US was a result of an ongoing movement all over the industrialised world for liberation from feudalism, that heavily influenced your founding fathers, as it influenced thinkers, politicians and rebels everywhere.
Trying to pretend the US is some kind of beacon for freedom and democracy is an insult to the millions of people all over the world who fought, and died, to protect and extend democracy long before the US was conceived, and who has fought, and died, since then to expand democracy and freedom often in the face of international intervention to keep them down - including US government supported oppression (Chile, Indonesia, Nicaragua to name a few).
Nobody should have any reason to discredit the importance of the founding of the US and the US constitution as a step towards a more democratic world, but neither is it fair to ignore the shortcomings of the US and disregard everyone elses accomplishments and participation either.
I'm not trying to downplay the efforts and trials that others have gone through to bring democracy to the state that it is in now.
The point is, nobody else was the fucking powerhouse of the 20th century. The Americans were the biggest, and the baddest (in both senses of that word). You may not like that. But the last century has been the American century. And when I say 'modern concept of a democratic state'.. that means the 20th century. Modernism is a 20th century thing.
I'm not saying that the Americans are perfect. They have serious fucking problems. It's pretty obvious right now. It was obvious back in Vietnam. It's obvious with their treatment of Cuba. It's obvious with their fundamentalist trends in religion. It's obvious with the ease with which they blithely ignore their own principles when it suits them. I'm not trying to dispute that.
All I'm saying is that in the last century, they provided the power with which the idea of democracy as the just and right way of any state to function, into the global consciousness. That credit belongs, in a large part, to them. You can hate what the Americans do all you want - I do - but you can't deny them their due.
-Laxitive
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's disgusting to be talking about pissing trillions away on folks who are perfectly capable of doing exactly what we did. Want running water? Build a dam and run some pipes. We'll even give you the plans! Sell you the pipes for cost! That's better than we ever got!
Life is a gamble. There are no guarantees. You want to throw billions at a third world country; it's a greater gamble than a trip to Mars that that money will ever benefit any of that country's citizens. Chances are, it will be absorbed and squandered by the corrupt government that put that country into poverty in the first place.
--If something I said could be taken two ways, and one of those ways made you cry, then I meant the other way.
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.