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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.
'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 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?
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!
yes poets, management consultants, hairdressers, telephone sanitisers. Send the lot of em.
This is a manual signature virus. Copy to your signiture file and help me spread.
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.
Are you saying that writing fiction and working for the government are somehow different?
Osama, that you?
--
Mac OS X--Unix without the assholes^Whassles.
If the Chicoms make it to Mars first, American industry is doomed.
Our IT companies are losing out to cheap foreign competitors from countries that are poor but have highly-educated workforces. A newly colonized Mars would be extremely poor (no natural resources!) and everyone who lived there would be a MENSA-level scientist!. There's no way a patriotic John Q. MSCE could compete with that kind of competition competitively.
Also, if some Chicom "hacker" outfit wanted to publish stolen source code or red-blooded American credit card passwords over the World Wide Web, a Mars-based broadcasting rig would be unreachable by current missile technology!!!
Our national security and livelihoods are in danger. We must colonize Mars immediately and render it a Chicom-free zone.
Thank you for your support.
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
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.
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
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?
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.
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
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
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.
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 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
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..."
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.
including why three Italians should be the first on Mars
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.
The moon suffers from three main issues. First, it has no atmosphere. Second, it has a 28 day light-dark cycle, and third, it is very resource poor, from a survival standpoint.
Not having an atmosphere is a big problem. Experiments have shown that C02 can be cheaply made into hydrogen and oxygen, with little more than hydrogen feed stock. From hydrogen and oxygen you can get air, fuel, and water; three of the four things you'll need on a colony. Mars has a lot of C02. Plants also use C02 to function. This means that a Mars base can use pressurized greenhouses to grow food. On the moon you would have to create a biosphere, which we've never succeeded at on Earth, let alone on the Moon. Also, the atmosphere on Mars provides protection from a lot of radiation. This means that a Lunar base would have to be underground in order to work, making construction that much more difficult.
The 28-day 'day' on the moon presents another problem. Plants have been growing on earth with a 24-hour light-dark cycle for billions of years. To get them to grow like heck during the 14 days of light and then to lay dormant for 14 days of darkness on a lunar greenhouse would be very difficult, not to mention the glass would also have to provide protection from radiation as well as thermal extremes of ~400 degrees. Growing them underground would require having enough light bulbs to last for a few years and a nuclear reactor or solar panels and enough batteries to run for 14 days straight, unless it was a polar station (which limits the amount of space we have to build on considerably). Martian greenhouses could use construction much like terrestrial greenhouses, and with the Arean (Ares, Mars. Get it?) day only about 30 minutes longer than that of Earth's, the plants would adjust quickly. Not to mention that the Martian colonists wouldn't be out of direct communication for half the time they are there.
Finally, there is no atmosphere and very little water on the surface of the moon. Most of the water has been evaporated away. Unless we find a lot of water, there's no economical way we could colonize the moon: I'm not going to pay to ship water to a colony on the moon. Mars has recently been shown to have lots and lots of water, as evidenced by the Free Shrimp Give-Away from Long John Silvers. This is easily processed on the surface into all the things needed for life.
Also, space is such that the total cost of going to the Moon is only slightly smaller than going to Mars, because most of the cost is from getting off of Earth and out of our gravity. And since we have to ship everything to the moon (air, food, water) the cost rises quickly compared to the needs of a self-sufficient Martian colony. Not to mention that Mars is closer to the asteroid belt, which is where all the really great stuff is, like raw materials.
So, as you can see, a Martian colony, though farther away, is a better option than a lunar colony, unless you want a nice, quiet place to set up a major astronomical station. (The far side of the moon is always radio-silent and has lots of ready-made craters for radio telescopes and no atmosphere to interfere with visual/IR/UV observation.)
I'm in the hole of the broadband donut.