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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.
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
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
"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.
including why three Italians should be the first on Mars
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.