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Van Allen Questions Human Spaceflight
An anonymous reader writes "James van Allen - the discoverer of the Van Allen radiation belt - has called into question the motivations and expectations of space exploration and research, particularly manned space exploration. Van Allen comments that 'the only surviving motivation for continuing human spaceflight is the ideology of adventure.'"
Van Allen comments that 'the only surviving motivation for continuing human spaceflight is the ideology of adventure.'
Good enough for me.
MORTAR COMBAT!
'the only surviving motivation for continuing human spaceflight is the ideology of adventure.'"
And this is a problem because....?
Keeping all your eggs in one basket is a strategy for failure.
-- The morphemes of your disquisition are ascertainable, but they have eschewed an ambit of transpicuous exposition.
"Van Allen comments that 'the only surviving motivation for continuing human spaceflight is the ideology of adventure.'""
Uh...so? The only motivation that got us off our asses and away from our idylic hunter-gatherer lifestyle on the plains of Africa was our desire to see what was over the next hill, what happens if we bash flints together, what happens if we lash a bunch of logs together and float it on the river...
I'd say adventure is a good enough reason to get me my damn spaceship and lunar weekend retreat!
-EvilMagnus
Space chicks!
I was like, odd hair metal and space don't really seem to go together
He should swallow his pride and get back with David Lee Roth and rock like he used to.
I'd been wondering why Bush, customarily wrong on everything, was advocating a strong space program. That guy is all about "adventure."
I survived the Dick Cheney Presidency 7 to 9 AM 7-21-07
What about the promise of cheese mines on the moon.
Heck, thinking about the shuttle... it's a money pit, cut hardly even an adventure anymore!
Wrong again. Liberal media
But who the hell does he think he is talking about spaceflight?
I'm inclined to agree with him - van Allen were a great rock band.
"To boldly go where where no man has gone before."
I think that is enough. This guy must not be a trekkie fan.
Take, for example, the struggle of Galileo against the church to permit society to recognize the fact that the world is round. Or perhaps the modern day battleground of evolution against the challenging new scientific theory of intelligent design, which suggests that certain biological features such as the flagellum are irreducibly complex and therefore could not possibly have been developed by increments as evolutionists would have it. It's a bit like hazing, and while people on both sides of the issue become almost fanatical in defense of their sacred cow the end result is good science.
There is a lot out there to be discovered, and only so much we can do with computers. It'd be nice if we could do it on the cheap, but clearly safety concerns intrude. Space is like the rainforest of the next era -- the sooner we investigate the faster we'll be able to refine its secrets into practical earthbound uses.
Try not. Do or do not, there is no try.
-- Dr. Spock, stardate 2822-3.
He can end government spaceflight for all I care.
But, private spaceflight, that's none of his business. If he doesn't want a ride, nobody's forcing him to buy a ticket.
Van Allen's work involves fields and particles, not rocks or life. It's not at all surprising that he doesn't like manned missions; they are no good for his (narrow) field of science. But that doesn't mean that we should take him as anything other than a proponent of his own parochial interests; we should certainly not regard him as an authority on the worth of all expeditions into space.
Sustainability and energy independence essay
Space...The Starting Frontier!
James van Allen - the discoverer of the Van Allen radiation belt Isn't that an amazing coincidence?
Van Halen Questions Human Spaceflight...
What is left now to feed the desire of most humans to explore and gather knowledge about what is beyond our own vision. The balance between the cost of the exploration and its proportion to the budgets of each nation state is debatable. Add to this the future of private space flight and we will see no end to the exploration of space.
And it rendered on, until the end of its days.
A "waste" of something is when you're not using it for anything. Wasting a computer is when you have a computer, but you don't use it. If you don't have a computer, you can't waste it. If you have a computer and use it, you're not wasting it.
Similarly, putting something in a space is using that space. We have the space, and that space is being used. Therefore, the space is not wasted.
On a similar but unrelated subject, it's viruses, not virii.
No weapon in the arsenals of the world is so formidable as the will and moral courage of free men.-Ronald Reagan
(1) Avoiding single points of failure for the entire human race (e.g., giant asteroid nails Earth);
(2) Profiting off the immense riches to be had in space, once the technology is advanced enough to gather those riches at a profit;
(3) The same reason people climb K2
Max
My god carries a hammer. Your god died nailed to a tree. Any questions?
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How about to continue developing the technology that would be needed to make use of that which our (assumed) robots would find. Unless we want to find nice planets for robots to live we would need to get there ourselves. And if you are asking why we would want to spread to another planet lets just say redundency is usually considered A Good Thing. Errant asteroids and other unpredicitaed system failures aside.. just a though on other possible motivations.
We can't honestly keep on going like we are on this planet and survive much longer. We're using up resources faster than we can keep track of them and it's becoming easier and easier to make weapons of mass destruction... which terrorists will inevitably use against other nations/cultures. Especially as the population continues to skyrocket.
So, call me whatever you want, but Van Allen is just missing the big picture. We gotta get off this rock.
Or should we just wait for an asteroid cataclysm or some other natural disaster? I'd rather not. Personally, I think we should spend more money and effort on things like space elevators and fusion/antimatter/exotic matter propulsion.
In short, to Van Allen: screw you too buddy.
I do not respond to cowards. Especially anonymous ones.
ideology of adventure he cites as the only reason for manned spaceflight is not an end unto itself - it is a way to maintain human interest and thus funding. It's pretty hard to get people interested in space when the only thing riding on it is a handful of integrated circuits. The average person couldn't care less about space travel or advancing science (Except perhaps in the medical arena) and in order to maintain any significant public interest whatsoever is is probably necessary to keep sending up manned missions.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
'the only surviving motivation for continuing human spaceflight is the ideology of adventure.'
The motivation is that humans
Might as well jump (...Jump!)
Might as well jump
Go ahead jump (...Jump!) ahead
That is, up into space.
Sorry.
Van Allen comments that 'the only surviving motivation for continuing human spaceflight is the ideology of adventure.'"
Oh, is that all? Well, if that's the case we should abandon manned spaceflight entirely. After all, what has the ideology of adventure brought us in the past? Well, there was that "get out of the cave to look for food" thing. Then there was the "discover new lands" thing, and the "found new cities" thing, and the "develop trade" thing. Then there was the whole "New World" thing.
Yes, Van Allen is right. We should've stayed in the caves. We should've left the "ideology of adventure" to some other species and blissfully sunk into extinction as a result.
In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, Make us your slaves, but feed us. - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Space exploration is so expensive right now. Any large scale things cost way too much with current technology and building methods for how much they bring in to the community. Although commercial projects to make cheaper space devices seem to be making it big as of late. I'd love to see space exploration exlode(not physically, cause ouch) and be a plossible commercial oppertunity.
I'd think that manufacturing and power plants would be great on the moon as to reduce pollution and accidents close to home. Maybe when the technology gets cheaper though. Still a ways off I'd say.
Boxing Equipment Reviews
'the only surviving motivation for continuing human spaceflight is the ideology of adventure'
There is lot more money to be made from the taxpayer from pursuing human space flights. Robots are much cheaper and not nearly as lucrative to NASA.
and what better motivation is there?
getting bloody hard finding something on earth that someone hasnt done before...
I am very sucseptible to "let's have another drink"
I expect that within my lifetime people will finalize realize just how messed up we've made this planet. It would be nice to know that people are on some other planet continuing our existence while Earth withers away.
Whatever happened to getting our (planetwise-our) spacefaring technologies ready for escape? It's only a matter of time before we (planetwise-we) crash and become one with old Sol. Maybe we should be content with sending Sea Monkeys on a probe according to this guy.
HAD
and the entire band is usually in orbit as well!
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If we didn't try to make space accessible to humans would we still have all the benefits from the space program? Comets are great and all, but I don't think there is much about them that applies directly to life here on earth. At least not to the same degree that technology that enables human exploration does.
has given us on of the best tasting inventions ever. TANG! Yes, it doesn't taste all that good, but it is lighter then carrying a gallon of FL Natural OJ on your back for a camping trip.
...if you follow this assumption:
"Let us not obfuscate the issue with false analogies to Christopher Columbus, Ferdinand Magellan, and Lewis and Clark, or with visions of establishing a pleasant tourist resort on the planet Mars," van Allen suggests
The space shuttle is PR. The ISS is a waste and a flop. The ISS should be a means not an end. Flags and footprints of COURSE aren't worth it if, again, they are an end and not a beginning.
However, those analogies to Columbus, Magellan, L&C and the tourist resort on Mars cease to be false if the goals are changed. If the point is to continue to grow out and off our ball of dirt, then none of the steps are a waste. If the goal is to put a flag on Mars and never return, then yes, it is a waste.
Moo.
//Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.
Everything from watchmaking to watch repair.
Ummm...correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't the thrill (or ideology in this case) of adventure what has driven mankind to grow beyond their boundaries? I mean, because of adventure, we headed west from our comfortable homes in England.
We destoryed the indians.
Then we headed west to the plains from our comfortable homes in the 13 colonies.
We, again, destroyed the indians.
And, of course, the lure of gold and adventure brought EVERYBODY to the Pacific coast.
By this time, the indians had become wise to us and had moved to Canada.
Okay, well, the thing with the indians could've been handled a whole lot differently. But, the whole "thrill of adventure" is what causes the human race to grow. He's saying space exploration just exists for adventure?
Exactly.
There are no green alien chicks on Earth.
"Talk minus action equals nothing" - Joey Shithead, D.O.A.
"Talk minus action equals
Next book - Clear Cutting Space. How to rape and pillage other planetary systems for fun and profit. by Sheetrock
I'd just like to point out that "we have explored all of Earth" is definitely not true. The deep oceans are something that we are just barely starting to explore. There are some crazy looking motherfuckers living down there. They glow and shit. And they don't even need light to live -- how wack is that? Seriously, though, I understand your sentiment (and I agree with it) that space is the next big frontier. I just wanted to point out that there are still a few exciting opportunities still here on Earth.
GMD
watch this
Manifest Destiny.
"It takes many nails to build a crib, but one screw to fill it."
...and if we're not sustainable somewhere else by then we will go extinct.
"Let him go, Ralph. He knows what he's doing." --Otto Mann (simpsons)
"Let us not obfuscate the issue with false analogies to Christopher Columbus, Ferdinand Magellan, and Lewis and Clark, or with visions of establishing a pleasant tourist resort on the planet Mars," van Allen suggests.
He has to explain why those analogies are false, and what's wrong with those visions. And I have the feeling he can't.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
those damn adventurers and their ships... i know i'd be content living back in europe where walking was my only mode of transportation. all those people wasting their time building those 'motor buggies' or 'flying machines'. nope, no thank you. no adventure for me, folks. i'm satisified living a static existence.
I know I'm going to be modded up on this
Van Allen is a crotchety old man. He knows his useful life is over and can't bear to see a younger generation accomplish this kind of space travel.
Modern proponents of human spaceflight always seem to fall back on two arguments: (1) Get off the Earth so humanity won't go extinct when we blow up the Earth, and (2) exploration is an inherent human instinct.
(1) If we're so stupid we can destroy the only planet we live on, I don't see how we're doing the universe a favor by spreading.
(2) Satisfying an inherent human instinct shouldn't require a multi-hundred-billion-dollar budget. If you have an instinct to explore, check out your city sewer system, or look into the obscure corners of the Mandelbrot Set, or play an online game. All these activities satisfy the brute animal urge to get into new places.
In my experience, people who argue for human spaceflight on the grounds of "instinct" haven't examined their positions closely. They seem remarkably similar to religious ideologues.
Are missing the point entirely. Van Allen is questioning HUMAN spaceflight. He simply points out that most of our discoveries have been made by robots, and he's probably right. Space is much more suited for our metallic brethren than people, and is much cheaper as well.
He's not advocating that we stop space exploration entirely, as many of you seem to think.
Has he considered the current population growth rate? What happens when we hit the point of saturation?
Dr. Van Allen would also do well to consider what great advances the space program has already brought us as a human race. How many times have we heard "nothing left to invent," only to see more disruptive technology a decade later?
This statement is not very bright and not at all visionary. Besides the likely scientific and possible economic benefits (and opinions of the potential for these vary, admittedly), there's one overarching reason of critical importance: Survival of our species.
With time, our ability to create a planet-wide catastrophe threatening our species survival grows exponentially. There are any number of ways we could do ourselves in ecologically or militarily, but the chances of those wiping out all of humanity are reduced when we're spread out among more than one planet - moreso if that planet is terraformed or otherwise made human-friendly on a large scale and self-sufficient without shipping of either raw materials or finished goods from earth.
Anyone who is interested, as Van Allen claims to be, in "the ever-present potential for the loss of precious human life" should be unequivocally for, not against, manned human spaceflight with a final goal of extraterrestrial colonization.
OK,
- B
http://www.bradheintz.com/
- updated
i'm just wondering how the robot is going to
transmit the feeling of ZERO Gs?
Space exploration is a dangerous business, and humans are too valuable to risk. Or at least they should be.
Computers and robots are terrific explorers. I believe that they can also be terrific builders of infrastructure. That's the direction that future space missions should follow.
I'm not saying that humans should stay home. I am saying that if I had to build a log cabin on the moon myself, or have a robot do it for me, I'd let the robot do it.
We need to reduce expenditures on manned spaceflight and redirect those resources to basic research in materials, computer systems, robotics, and planetary chemistry. Out of this research would come technologies allowing us to explore the solar system remotely, build robust spacecraft, and actually make a living off the materials available on the planet or moon we happen to be standing on.
No weapon in the arsenals of the world is so formidable as the will and moral courage of free men.-Ronald Reagan
Survival of our species should be the prime reason for manned space exploration.
We MUST spread our seeds far and wide.
Keeping all our eggs (literally) in the same basket is asking to follow in the path of dinosaurs.
I don't know the meaning of the word 'don't' - J
If not "adventure" then where would the funding come from? Pure science is boring to the masses.... but adventure... Argh maties!
Van Allen comments that 'the only surviving motivation for continuing human spaceflight is the ideology of adventure.'
or to scope out new places to bury our earth garbage.
the thing is there is stuff to do with MACHINES for at least several decades. several decades during which tech would advance regardless of space exploration. several decades during which pumping money into manned space flights wouldn't produce the same amount of benefit for mankind as pumping those resources into tech advancements here on earth.
space flights are cool though.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Seems good enough for me.
Risk, adventure, curiosity and the will to expand is the essence of human kind. We'd still climb trees in fur if it was otherwise.
Computers are getting better but the human experience is where all advancement has been achieved. The current mission has taught somethings, but the next mission (if robotic) would need to be limited in scope (travel to 'x' drill hole, look for stuff), and missions repeated until objectives reached, whereas human interaction could alter actions outside limited parameters.
Although life is precious and reckless endangerment is to be decried, the fact is life is sometimes jeopardized/sacrificed for the greater advancement of the species (human or otherwise). Although not a good analogy, it is similar in sentiment to those unwilling to risk lives in battle.
Unwillingly to sacrifice one sacrifices all. THe 'all' in this case just happens to be knowledge and experience. If carefully balanced, some risk is acceptable (I'd do it).
Van Allen answers his own concern, it seems to me. First he says,
"Casting an eye on the space shuttle's contribution to science, van Allen suggests they have been modest, 'and its contribution to utilitarian applications of space technology has been insignificant.'".
Okay, maybe. But then he says:
[the ISS crew] "have barely enough time to manage the station, never mind conduct any significant research."
So.. it seems that he's saying that it hasn't really been tried, so we shouldn't do it. I'll admit the ISS isn't where we wanted it to be, but I hardly think failure to support it makes the case for scrapping manned spaceflight.
-Zipwow
I don't know which is more depressing, that 2/3 didn't care enough to vote, or that 1/2 of those that did are crazy.
When space travel gets to the point where this is possible, the human inclusion will not only be justified, it will be necessary.
'the only surviving motivation for continuing human spaceflight is the ideology of adventure.'
I find the idea of venturing into space for the use of expanding the living quarters of us here human race an appropriate motivation too.
For a couple of reasons:
1. We have to know if anyone else is out there. Yes, it could possibly be done via Telescopes (Ground and Space based), but there's no way we could ever entirely be sure we looked everywhere.
2. And this is the biggest reason in my estimation. We can't stay here on Earth indefinitely, if only because our civilization will collapse eventually from some natural (Asteroid or Cometary Bombardments, Biosphere Collapse, Ice Age, and possibly Global Warming due to fluctuating Solar Radiation) or man made disaster (Nuclear War, Plague spread via air travel, Nanotech Disaster, or even in the distant future Global Demographic change whereby the world is too old and set in its ways to wish to leave).
Now it's fun to explore new territory and Space is no exception, but from a practical standpoint it is only logical that Mankind expand his influence beyond this one tiny sphere, to find other sentient beings and to guarantee his survival indefinitely. Manned spaceflight isn't at an end, it's only just begun.
Getting back to the topic, ID proponents are somewhat like James Van Allen; both assume that they already know all that is worthwhile or necessary, so there is no need to go further except for those things which particularly interest them (plasma physics or biblical exegesis, take your pick). Both are wrong.
Sustainability and energy independence essay
Every time I see a criticism of manned space flight I just think the person is a coward. Adventure is the spice of life, and if someone thinks this is unimportant, well, they are welcome to their opinion. I just wish they wouldn't try to stop the progress of the rest of the race. Space is our destiny.
I meant Mars not the moon!
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
This article here draws an interesting comparison between ancient China and the current views toward space travel being held a good number of americans.
It would appear that the average person is content with their idiotic tv, fattening foods, gas guzzling road yachts, and other such pointless pursuits.
My patience is infinite, my time is not.
Was it much better when our only motivation was getting there before the Russians did?
Geez!
Van Allen seems to be looking at this purely from the Cold War stance that he grew up in, i.e. only the government can send people to space, and it has no major motivation to continue. I agree with that much; what Van Allen's nearsighted view doesn't allow is the idea of private exploration.
He says, "I ask myself whether the huge national commitment of technical talent to human spaceflight and the ever-present potential for the loss of precious human life are really justifiable."
To the government and a nation, definitely not.
To a private investor? That's his choice to make.
So Van Allen is only half right. But he makes it seem like government spaceflight is by far the only option.
"In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, 'Make us your slaves, but feed us.'" -Dostoevsky
ruminescing == ruminating reminiscences?
Angry old man. He's probably complaining about kids walking on his grass too.
the only surviving motivation ... is the ideology of adventure
The "ideology of adventure"? As opposed to what?
Nice way to trivialize perhaps the only justification for our existence. Why are we here if not to travel and discover? The universe granted us enough awareness to perceive that there might be something worthwhile over the next hill. It seems to me we have a duty to adventure; it's our job!
That, or we could just hang back and breed. Should be fairly plain that one 8k mile dia. ball of rock is not sufficient for that to go on indefinitely.
Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
although it is adventure we seek, it is progress we find through the space program. i was tempted at first to write about the spirit of adventure, the importance of having something to reach for, the fulfillment of an immortal dream. but perhaps, in truth, their is but one great reason for the continuation of the space program: technological progress.
were it not for nasa, the computer industry would be just now marvelling over VLSI and DRAM. we'd have to send our slashdot posts via type-writer. cell phones would be the exclusive domain of star trek. these are "what wouldnt have been" examples, but the continued advancement of composite materials, hardened electronics and orbital propulsion systems are all just a number of simple areas where the space program will no doubt continue to spin off countless technologies.
all these technologies will still grow under the weight of satellite systems alone, but the demand has already been sufficiently met. there is little calling for better orbital delivery mechanisms; we all read that wired magazine. sending humans into space is a demanding enough task that continued progress is not really optional.
if we stop aspiring, we go no where.
From the information I'm getting, this little globe in the sky is kinda doomed at the rate we are going.
wouldn't it be logical to say that space travel is one of the only ways our species will survive for the long run (outside of environmental dome's that is).
Waiting for Rama...
Did Van Allen have no sense of adventure when he was younger? Was there no excitement when he chased, and found, the Van Alen Belt? [1]
.
Or was it just his job? And if so, why bother? That article reads as one of the best demotivational pieces I've seen in some time.
I predict this will inspire new products from http://www.despair.com/
[1] black leather, 32", plain bronze buckle
I am no astronaut, but I bet that he would change his opinion if he would do some orbits around earth :)
I've read alot about astro-/kosmonaut experiences and nearly all of them are addicted to this "space drug".
Van Allen concludes: "I ask myself whether the huge national commitment of technical talent to human spaceflight and the ever-present potential for the loss of precious human life are really justifiable."
Just replace human spaceflight with just about anything we do (war, anthropology, underwater exploration, antarctic research, ping-pong, water polo, chess) and it becomes that old easy argument of "it doesn't give me anything immediately, so why should we do it?"
Simply enough, humans want to be in control, and they don't want to be bored waiting around for some fictional utopia.
Not to pound too hard on the point, but if he expects UN-manned missions to be publicly funded by telling people "Hell, no, YOU can't go!" he doesn't live on the same planet as the rest of us. The ONLY reason for supporting robots is as a step toward replacing every Chesley Bonestell illustration I've got with a photograph, preferably taken by me.
Or perhaps the modern day battleground of evolution against the challenging new scientific theory of intelligent design, which suggests that certain biological features such as the flagellum are irreducibly complex and therefore could not possibly have been developed by increments as evolutionists would have it.
Are you trolling, or are you prepared to give some evidence and references for this "irreducibly complex" argument? I wouldn't call intelligent design 'new' or 'challenging'. It's the whole 'how did the eyeball originate' argument all over again. It hasn't managed to topple evolutionary theory before, I fail to see why it would this time.
In fact, I don't think 'intelligent design' deserves the designation of theory, either. It essentially states that things could not have evolved without an intelligent hand's intervention. Notice that could not is a negative. One can almost never prove a negative with certainty. That's one of the fundamentals of the scientific method and logical thought.
If you weren't there, personally, when the first flagellum was created by The Almighty, then you can't prove it did not arrive by other means (such as some kind of natural selection).
However, you can, by a metric tonne of evidence, painstakingly accumulated over years and years of scientific research, present a solid argument that it did possibly arrive via a series of modifications to existing structures (or even some happy accidents that benefitted the organism so much that it was passed on to offspring).
ERROR 144 - REBOOT ?
He's forgetting the huge symbolic value. We're humans. It's a human thing to like great symbols, monuments, achivements.
What if a Pharao of Egypt had said: "Screw this pyramid stuff, I'm spending the money on defense instead. And you can bury me in a wooden casket".
What if Charles Lindbergh had said: "What's the point? I can take the boat."
What if Columbus had said: "You can't sail to India. Everyone knows that."
It'd have been a much less interesting world to live in, I'll tell you that. I don't believe every single thing we chose to do should follow from the utilitarian principle of the "greatest good" in strict scientific or material terms.
Or to paraphrase Kennedy: We choose not to do these things because they are useful. We choose to do them becase they are a human thing to do.
...else what's a Heaven for?
Van Allen has apparently forgotten why he went into science in the first place. Discovery is a survival trait, and if we as a species don't remember that it won't take an asteroid to wipe us out.
What do we know about spaceflight? Its toxic to humans and there is nowhere anywhere nearby by any conceivable technology that we could get to. The reality is that one day something from Earth will reach another planet in another galaxy but it is going to look more like R2D2 than Captain Kirk.
"No. We have to stay here [Babylon 5] 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, Einstein, Morobuto, Buddy Holly, Aristophanes .. and all of this .. all of this was for nothing unless we go to the stars." (Infection, season 1, ep. 4)
Sappy, yeah. But it makes the point nicely.
(quote copied from http://jdmoncada.tripod.com/babylon5.html)
And there is nothing wrong with this idea.
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
This is apart from the issue of distance. In the real universe, scale matters. You cannot compare travel to another galaxy to travelling across the Pacific.
When asked why/if we should be out in space, he said the following... just change it to answer the question we face now: should we (meaning people) go into space at all... the answer is the same...
.. and all of this .. all of this was for nothing unless we go to the stars."
"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, Einstein, Morobuto, Buddy Holly, Aristophanes
Our SURVIVAL is at stake. Forget the Sun going out, what about an comet impact? That's not an unprecedented event in Earth history, and we're due, statistically speaking. We HAVE to go, and it has to be sooner rather than later because that comet might hit us sooner rather than later.
Sorry Van Allen, your dead wrong on this one, and so is the human race if too many agree with you.
If a pion (n-) collides with a proton in the woods & noone is there to hear it, does lamdba decay into the source pa
. . . and doing rather well, all things considered.
Patience.
What about bringing humanity together for great accomplishments?
What about colonizing the solar system?
What about exploring the universe?
What about inspiring future generations?
What about showing democracy is superior to communism...
sorry, i'm a sucker to reply to your sig but...
do you think voting third party will bring real change if bush is re-elected?
I understand that Kerry is not an ideal candidate, but politics is about compromise.
Know what I like about atheists? I've yet to meet one that believes God is on their side.
Remember that market value is tied to both the supply and the demand, a planet of platinum is quite likely going to cause the market to fall out because platinum isn't used in enough quantity to maintain the current value if a planet of it was found
However, it is quite likely that if something is found that's going to make people rich its either a) going to be something that is extremely rare here on Earth and quite useful for construction or b) a new way of making energy and the fuel can only be found in quantity somewhere other than on Earth.
> has called into question the motivations and expectations of space exploration and research, particularly manned space exploration. Van Allen comments that 'the only surviving motivation for continuing human spaceflight is the ideology of adventure.'
Hmm.. How about.. colonization? Or should we just stay here on Earth till we think we're ready to colonize, maybe in a few hundred years, and then just go colonize w/o ever having been there? I think that is short-sighted - sounds to me like he's suddenly interested in the politics and economics of it rather than the science.
BTB, I love the FP: "[the ideology of adventure] - good enough for me."
Must-not-watch TV!
The Honorable Prof. Van Allen has long been a detractor of crewed spaceflight. This is old news. And not very surprising, either.
I am an Iowa Physics and astronomy student. Van Allen works only two floors up from me. Although I don't know him personally, I have certainly read the various articles and commentary posted by his door.
Why not surprising? Professor Van Allen is a pioneer of robotic spaceflight. As a plasma physicist, humans are of little use to him in any place other than on the ground doing data reduction. That's okay, but there are other scientific disciplines such as geology and SETI (which is certainly taken seriously among radio astronomers, contrary to some popular belief) where human investigators are hard to replace.
Is orbiting the earth in an elderly tin can a waste of our time and money? Maybe, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't go to Mars.
Even if you don't believe that the scientific merits of spaceflight are worth the cost, consider the technological benefits. Attempting a new task of spaceflight is a technological challenge that yields benefits felt in every corner of society.
The only thing that can be said for the human cost is that astronauts do their jobs fully cognisant of the risk. They know they could be making more money in a safer job in the private sector, but they do it anyway. They have that "ideology of adventure" that Professor Van Allen does not.
When NASA sent out job offers for the astronaut class of 2004, candidates were asked if they would still want the job, even if there was a chance they would never fly in space. All but one said yes. These are people who are fully committed to the enterprise of crewed spaceflight, even at great personal risk. I for one would not stop them from voluntarily assuming that risk "in peace for all mankind." I would also happily join them.
\
He's already got his name on something in space, so he supposes it's time for everybody else to pack up their kit and go home.
"C'mon, everybody, back to Earth. Nothing to see here...except for these VAN ALLEN BELTS, baby! That's right! Booyah! In your FACE!"
Mr. Van Allen,
Sorry, but I do not take pleasure in the adventure of pure science. I know its not very sophisticated of me, but if my money is spent on it, I'd at least like some of it to go to activities that keep alive the dream of actually being there someday.
To this point, I've been understanding of the extensive expenditures on your pure science missions though I think Hollywood could probably create better images that are just as real to me at much less cost. But, you are now attacking my adventures. So, apparently, the ground rules need to be defined.
If you want your adventure, give me mine.
Sincerely,
"apparently not as geeky as you"
I have to admit reading such an article by someone so revered does upset me. It almost makes me feel that the writer has forgotten what it means to be human, and has attached himself so much to his work that he can only quantitativly see existance and usefullness though the lenses of percieved productivity. To me manned space flight is simply an extension of the human condition which most have to explore and learn, for if it were not for this same condition we would not be where we were.
...
If someone did not bother to care to explore, we may still not have re-discovered america
My Web Site - www.ocean-liners.com
umm waitaminute, maybe too many Cabo Wabo's (or does that guy still count as being VanHalen)
Oh, elbow room, elbow room Got to, got to get us some elbow room. It's the moon or bust, in God we trust. There's a new land up there!
School House Rock
No matter how subtle the wizard, a knife between the shoulder blades will seriously cramp his style.
The author is right in his reasoning to warn against false Columbus / Lewis and Clark analogies - it would be easy to look at space falsely as a vast frontier waiting to be conquered. We are eons away from finding routes to pleasant vistas in other galaxies.
The sad reality is space flight does have other ends, which have goals in common with the aforementioned explorers' missions. Commercial exploitation of raw materials, military industrialization, colonization in the name of territorial supremacy - these are the shared ends of these endeavors. The question is not what purpose can space purpose possibly serve, but do we have any true interest in these purposes?
M
Uhh... How is commenting on the profit of human space travel not talking about human space travel?
Some Slashdot moderators need to get some asskickings.
I'd rather dump 80 billion into space in the hope of advancing humanity instead of dumping it into war (which as a concept usually keeps us from moving backwards.....usually). Call me crazy, but I think expending human effort and the occational life for science is the best and most noble thing we can do. And the lives lost in this endeavor CHOSE to do it KNOWING the consequences. And why? Because they believe in something more than themselves. If we dont continue to push ourselves forward, then we just end up being a bunch of walking talking meat on a dirty chunk of space dust.
Did you know you can be apathetic to apathy? Not that I give a shit...
Van Allen's vision is short sighted if he views "the only surviving motivation for continuing human spaceflight is the ideology of adventure."
Seems to me many scientists, while cognizant of the scientific aspect of the best way to procure data, fail to see humanistic and emotional aspect of their science.
Even though its possible that many of the experiments on the moon could have been performed without ever having sent anyone there, putting a man on the moon is widely seen by the public as among the pinnacles of human acheivment.
How much money is the inspiration from that worth? or the public interest garnered?
Velcro...need I say more?
so I can ensure several backups of my DNA
I am in quite a bit of agreement with this thesis. Knowledge is gained not only in the act of exploration, but also in the development of the tools we need to explore. Such exploration is dangerous and often unpleasant. Many of us are not up to the task. However, personal exploration is the one thing that defines us as people of action instead of wussies that would do anything, including cheating, to avoid action, and then lie about the fact that we instead chose to live our life in a drug induced stupor safely protected under our parents control.
This of course does not mean that everyone of us has to go out there and risk our life to discover novel information. Just that we should all realize it as a fundamental task done in exchange for the gifts we have all been given.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
You might want to brush up on your history. One popular theory is that he got in trouble for advocating the heliocentric theory, but it's not even the only theory. It may be that he just pissed off too many powerful Jesuits. All educated Europeans in Galileo's time (and even long before Columbus' time) knew the world was round. The church's position was that "the Bible teaches us how to go to heaven, not how the heavens go." Some historians even think he got in trouble for advocating atomism (the existence of atoms), which was perceived as contradicting the doctrine of transubstantiation.
In any case, it's hard to apply the Galileo analogy to modern times, because the scientific method wasn't even accepted in Galileo's time. There are plenty of examples of scientific discoveries since then that have overturned the apple cart against established opposition (Darwin being an excellent example), and they did it be providing empirical evidence, which the scientific method accepts as the ultimate arbiter of truth.
The fact is that Cassini and the Mars rovers are sending back exciting, unexpected data that we didn't have before. Reality is out there, and we discover it. It's not something scientists just make up.
Or perhaps the modern day battleground of evolution against the challenging new scientific theory of intelligent design, which suggests that certain biological features such as the flagellum are irreducibly complex and therefore could not possibly have been developed by increments as evolutionists would have it.
Intelligent design is not a theory. A scientific theory is supposed to make testable predictions, and ID doesn't. Here is a good book on the topic. Creationism isn't a coherent body of thought at all; it means whatever a particular creationist happens to think it means on a particular day of the week.
In it's own way, this is comparable to the battle against entrenched interests that new theories must undergo before they become the accepted norm.
Scientific theories are not the same as political opinions. And what's remarkable about the way human spaceflight is funded in the U.S. is that it has its own funding procedures that entirely bypass the normal process of peer review that you have to go through to fund scientific work. That's because it doesn't produce enough real science to jusitfy even a tiny percentage of the money it consumes.
Find free books.
While I agree with him that there is a LOT of scientific evidence that can be gathered without having humans aboard a mission, there's just certain things that a robot can't mimic when it comes to human experience.
I don't think they've gotten quite to the level yet with AI and robots where they could glean *all* the information a human could about a specific landscape. Sure, they can gather scientific data ad nauseum, but what about senses that border more on the emotional? I'd defy a robot to report back to NASA things like "this place is beautiful" or "it's eerie" or things like that.
Sometimes you just need a real human's perspective, if only to get the overall "feel" of a particular location.
If Van Allen's views make it so that NASA decides to send cheaper unmanned missions more often, and that in turn results in more data available so that we can send more reliable (and cheaper) manned missions to more places in the future, then I say he's right on target. There doesn't need to be a human on EVERY mission, and certainly not most of them, but once in awhile it is nice for us humans to hear about the details of some far away place from one of our own...
I was in the park the other day wondering why frisbees get bigger and bigger the closer they get - and then it hit me.
Over the short term, putting talking meatbags into space and keeping them alive is cripplingly expensive. So it makes sense to put up robots / computers / etc.
But once you get around the problems in keeping that talking meatbag alive, you will find that the talking meatbag can try a whole lot more and do a whole lot more then the robot.
So which is easier long term? Solving all the known issue problems in keeping a talking meatbag functioning in space, or creating a device that can improvise and use tools, is capable of learning and higher reasoning, and can interpret situational input and act on it in real time?
END COMMUNICATION
|Van Allen comments that 'the only surviving motivation for continuing human spaceflight is the ideology of adventure.'
Gee...I can think of one other motivation...
Survival
So say I was sailing to America from Europe and dropped you off in the North Atlantic 500+km offshore you'd be able to sustain yourself in the native ocean environment? Somehow I doubt it...even if you did survive the cold and could tread water to prevent drowning you would eventually need fresh water.
Its certainly faster with space and harder to protect yourself against it but we have come a long way technologically since we stuck a sail on a few planks of wood and set sail to conquer the oceans.
Do not presume that humans as they exist now represent the highest form of evolution. Anthro-centrism is another fallacy of scifi.
There seems to be a struggle within NASA between the engineers and the scientists. The engineers would contend that building the space station is an accomplishment far beyond that of the space telescope, and yet the space telescope has produced far more useful information than the space station ever will. Heck, even those little rovers that cost, what, 100M, have produced more science than the space station.
It seems odd to me, and probably other astronomers that people would spend 80 billion on an orbiting cottage, when so much more could be done with that money.
Why build a vehicle before you have a place to go? We don't even know if we will need snow tires yet?
If we had spent the 80 billion on better remote sensing gear then we might, by now, have found earth like planets around other stars. We might, by now, have discovered alien radio transmissions, we might, by now, have retrieved fossils of former life forms from Mars. Any of which would teach us far more than a space staion would.
Unfortunately, fed with a constant diet of bad sci-fi, most people are incable of imagining any possible method of exploration that doesn't involve laser cannons and leather clad chicks.
Most people, it seems, are not interested in real exploration. People don't want to discover something new, they want to find the same thing somewhere else. That's why all the Star Trek "aliens" breathe the same air, look human, and run their societies like the United States, hell there is more variation in the real societies on earth than one finds in the english speaking universe of Star Trek.
Real exploration involves going somewhere new, not going to somewhere you have been, using a different route. The thing about learning is that one learns the most through novel experiences, the more completely unknown the experience the more you learn. Given a budget you can send a robot a lot farther than a human. Even if the human will provide 1000x the science of the robot, the robot will still deliver more information, because it will be in an area that is a million times more novel than the human. The Saturn system is far more novel than than low earth orbit. It costs 80 billion to send a humans into orbit to study Earth for a couple years, it costs 1 billion to send a robot to Saturn. You tell me which one is doing real exploration.
because of the trees...
Van Allen comments that "the only surviving motivation for continuing human spaceflight is the ideology of adventure."
Is there any other reason for science, any science, to exist? We as a species survived for thousands of years without it. Most species on Earth today have absolutely no concept of science and still manange to thrive.
Science exists soley because we as a species are curious, very curious. As my high school science teacher, all those years ago explained it, "If science didn't exists, we, as a species, would invent it". As a species, we need it to keep us and our intelligent brains challenged. The specifics of the science really don't matter, it is the pursuit of knowledge that is important.
So science has added a few years to my lifespan, cured some deseases and has in general raised my quality of life above that of my ancestors, but as far as the human species is concerned, nothing has really changed. We still survive pretty much the way our Great, Great, Great, Great, Great, Great, Great, Great, Great, Great,... Grandfather did all those years ago. We spend most of our time hunting for food, shelter and an opportunity to mate.
Granted these also have the motivation of riches, and possibly exterminating a civilization, and several speces of what have you. Still none the less, there is some ADVENTURE mixed in there.
We may find that outer planets have the cures to cancer that our rainforests held before we burnt them down. Or a better tasting Red # 5, or something that makes Potassium Benzoate look like Soy Lecithin. Think of the possabilities. Just the pet industry alone would boom should we find some small gremlin like creature.
Many argue that we should take care of the people on Earth before we spend Billions on Space Exploration, the truth of the matter is that Space Exploration is a HUGE Public Works Project (sort of, same idea, kind of.) The fortune 100 company(s) that get these contracts, sub contract out to little "ma and pop" machine shops that employ thousands of people, many in Middle America's poor towns. Benefitting the economy is nice. Me like. 2 Trillion dollars to visit a rock sounds pretty useless but a pitence of that does trickle down to Daryl, and his other brother Daryl.
I boycott signatures
Sometimes the ignorance of the slashdot community seems endless. The article is not suggesting we should stop exploring the space, just not use humans for now. The cost of human space travel is so much higher then for automated systems. If not for more than the life support needed to sustain us in space. The savings from not having to send huge amounts of material in space and maintaining it could be used to design better robots. With these better robots we could to better research in more hostile locations than we could with humans, and could even find places we could live. When that spot if found we could start planing on sending humans there for colonizations. We are so far from having the technology for long distance space travel, and let alone living on a hostile world. Face it, he is right for the most part, we have no business is space except for fundraising for NASA. Sorry for the rant, but I just got fed up.
What's really annoying about this guy is that he seems to think that un-manned spaceflight will somehow benefit if manned spaceflight is scaled back. Of course, that's nonsense. Cut manned spaceflight and I will bet you a donut to a Delta VH that within a decade NASA will cease to exist. This guy, who benefitted professionally to a huge extent from the existence of manned spaceflight programs, now has the nerve to turn around and bite the hand that (probably quite literally) fed him. That's annoying. And it hurts all of space science in the long run.
On a dollar-for-dollar basis space research of any kind (manned or unmanned) is pretty much a total waste of money. Some examples will help: the Hubble Space Telescope cost something like 2 billion. That's about 20 times the cost of the Keck Telescope, and it is about neck-and-neck when it comes to scientific output between the two. When it comes to planetary exploration - can you honestly say that there have been spin-offs that are useful here on Earth? I mean, let's be honest here: the science return from space research is all pretty trivial. Between us, who really gives a sh*t about some radiation belts around the Earth? A few power-line operators maybe, but it's not like they need a detailed understanding of the Earths bow-shock to operate, now is it? As for the rest of it - well, pretty pictures of Saturn are nice and all, but who really cares? They're ice and dirt, and have absolutely no impact on our daily lives. None whatsoever.
Some would argue that certain kinds of science can only be done from space, things like far-infrared, or X-ray observations. But those missions have in effect been subsidized to the tune of billions by other, less worthy missions. If you had to factor in the development cost of heavy-lift boosters into the cost of developing the Chandra X-ray observatory, it would have cost $20 billion or more. I doubt that would have been seen as worthwhile science.
In terms of improving human life, wouldn't the billions spent on un-manned space exploration be better spent curing disease through the NIH? Or a tax-cut. I mean, tax -cuts and de-regulation make more ultra-billionaires; if they want to fund space research privately then they can do that, and the free market will reward it accordingly (if in fact it is worthwhile).
Only a true naif would think that science is funded for scientific reasons alone, and Dr. van Allen has an inflated sense of his own importance when it comes to national funding priorities. Sciences like physics were funded because physiscists know how to make very, very large bombs. Bio-medical science is funded because people don't want to die. Everything else is pretty much not funded, or lives off of the table-droppings from the big sciences. And the big sciences are not funded because Congress has a love for deep knowledge.
By somehow pretending like his particular kind of science is more worthy than other science, he's starting a discussion that by all rights should hurt all of space science. In other words: Jim, SHUT UP. We've got a good gig going here, and you're messing it up.
Human genome = 3 billion base pairs = 6 GBit. Windows + Office = 20 Gbit. Which is more impressive?
Related to adventure is challenge. Did van Allan perform all his research into radiation etc. because it was a way to pay the bills or because of the challenge of exploring unkowns? It would appear that his fire and imagination has gone out. Some people scratch that itch for challenge and adventure by crunching the numbers. Good for them. Others feel the need to get out there and discover new things up close and personal. Good for them to. Humanity involves humans. If we ever get to the point where we choose to only use robots to do things, humanity will then slowly and inexorably fossilize.
Sure it is. You can experiment with 'space' in a jar. You just have to have a good vacuum pump.
Specially constructed vacuum chambers work better though.
He believed the key to expediting space exploration was to remove the human factor. Believe what you may, but if you remove that element, we could explore a lot more a lot faster. Also, it would enable poorer countries to get into the race. Of course, his vision of using artillery to launch pieces into space mandated no humans be involved:
Gerald Vincent Bull (born 1928 Ontario, died March 22, 1990 Brussels) was an engineer who many consider to have developed long range artillery beyond what anyone else has accomplished. He was a driven man, who moved from project to project always chasing his dream of launching a satellite using a huge artillery piece. To this end he designed the Project Babylon "supergun" for the Iraqi government, during which he was killed (purportedly by Israeli Mossad agents) outside his home in Brussels.
http://www.fact-index.com/g/ge/gerald_bull.html
"All great things are simple & expressed in a single word: freedom, justice, honor, duty, mercy, hope." --Churchill
I believe he's saying the past human explorations had another goal - a political one - and that was good enough for them to go out into space.
If we never take the risk to explore different ways of doing things, we might still be living in caves.
Human space exploration too obsolete? We haven't even done much with it. Robots might do their jobs better in harsh space environemnts but it is more special to get a first-hand account of actually being in space. People care more about things involving...surpise PEOPLE than robots. Remember what happened this January. In any given day in space news, two Mars rover landings would've made headlines but Bush's plan stole the thunder when he mentioned manned missions.
Look at that, manned missions that wouldn't exist for at least 10 MORE YEARS made bigger news than a few robots that are ALREADY in space. That tells us something on where our interests are.
This is just plain ignorance. Columbus didn't even set sail expecting to find a "New World" he just wanted to get to China. Contrast that with space exploration and we don't want to find any new worlds we just want to go to Mars. Who knows what we might find on the way. Cure for Cancer? Intelligent Life? New minerals? How can you say that "adventure" is the only reason to go. It is also funny that all of the people mentioned failed in their quests.
Still all of them are famous as making history and advancing civilization. Shouldn't that tell us something about doing something because its an adventure and never been done. That is the only way we discover.
Not to mention that it puts lots of money into the economy. Think how many engineers the x-prize gives jobs to. Wait until we actually privately put a man into orbit. Then we'll see lots of jobs in the "private" space sector. Lots of high paying ones at that.
I tried for 5 years to come up with a clever sig...only to realize that I am not clever.
There's no point in suiting up until we're fully prepared to colonize the cosmos.
"Let us not obfuscate the issue with false analogies to Christopher Columbus, Ferdinand Magellan, and Lewis and Clark, or with visions of establishing a pleasant tourist resort on the planet Mars," van Allen suggests.
I think that space exploration is EXACTLY akin to Columbus, Magellan, etc...
Back when they left their ports most of them had no idea where they were going... had no "life support" in terms of food, supplies, etc... Just like space, if they were left without their ship and supplies they would die within a few hours, despite being surrounded by breathable air, etc, etc...
The only major difference between then and now is the issue that our current propulsion systems are unable to carry us the distances required in a short enough span of time to make meaningful use for the vast, vast, vast number of known star systems... where their journies ended in months, our journies would take hundreds of years at the current available rates of speed.
But what if they had had robot probes back in 1400's? Would Columbus have flown a probe over a small sliver of america, seen plants and maybe a few animals, but no cities/towns and concluded that it was populated with life, but no intelligent life?
I think that until our computers become as sophisticated, intelligent and creative as our own minds are, we still need the human brain involved in real time exploration out there... granted, it's down to just sight and some limited touch, when you're in a space suit but I think it's still worthwhile...
PS, when our computers DO become as sophisticated, intelligent and creative as our own minds we will have become obsolete and people like Van Allen will be ground up for use as lubricating slurry for the giant robot brains and bodies that will rule this planet.
Once again you are suspending a basic understanding of space science in place of some vague glib appeal to otherwise minor achievements. Scale matters. Don't compare Lindbergh and travelling to another galaxy.
...I know someone who will be stuck at the back of the line.
When we come to the point of exploring other solar systems, will we be sending robotic probes dozens of lightyears to explore these "strange new worlds?" No. This kind of exploration will require sending teams of human explorers on long journeys. The only way we can prepare for that is by practicing within our own solar system, by establishing bases on the Moon and sending people to Mars.
It's not about the quality of the science returned. That's what the probes are for. It's about the necessary first steps out of our own solar system.
Dear Will, the plums were poisoned. -- Cheese Club
In order to travel long distances in space, we will need to develop systems to keep us alive indefinitely. This will also benefit us if, heaven forbid, some catastrophic event occurs to the earth that limits or removes its ability to sustain life.
Spinoffs of technology from this effort will help people in their everday lives in immeasurable ways (velcro, Tang, space blankets, and other exotic materials that save lives or allow us to do things previously impossible are a result of our manned space program).
Robots currently don't have the intelligence and flexibility to cope with changing environments quickly (look how long it took the mars rovers to cover the few miles during their explorations, that would have been a day trip for manned exploration).
There is no substitute, yet, for a human being on the ground. There is a whole level of real-time experiences that a robot can not take in or comment on - that humans are more than capable of doing. Aside from collecting specimens and taking pictures, robots will never have the immediacy that humans offer.
The idea of a completely automated space program, is similar to the idea of a completely remote controlled military aparatus. I think we can all agree that, except in rare circumstances where a robot would perform better (air combat beyond gforce limits of human pilots, and remote reconnaisance), war must be fought by humans, due to the ability to make the right decisions that AI is incompetent to make - and, more importantly, to not distance ourselves so much from the life and death on the battlefield as to make it easy for us to choose war as a first option. Human beings bring moral and esthetical issues into the mix, which robots, for all their precision, lack.
Lodragan Draoidh
The more you explain it, the more I don't understand it. - Mark Twain
Like everything else, it comes down to cost-benefit ratio. Currently, manned space flight is absurdly expensive and dangerous, but who knows how this will change in the future. Early aviators probably were exposed to much higher risks than astronauts. Once planes became somewhat more safe and reliable, they were adopted by governments and as travel for the extremely wealthy, but it was a long time before air travel became common among "ordinary" people.
I don't think the reasons why people will ultimately live in space are possible to foresee - you can be sure that a 40 year-old CT scan technician didn't dream of that career when he/she was a kid.
Because it's there...
Our planet is an insignificant dot when compared to the rest of the solar system. We should at least try to explore our own solar system. Robots have been used to explore the moon, other planets, asteroids and even comets. This should continue.
Because we're here...
What else should we be doing? Consume more of our non-renewable sources, watch the latest blockbuster, play video games and amuse ourselves? There are things that can be done here to improve our collective lot in life but that shouldn't stop some of us from having dreams and goals of someday having our progeny live in space (or Mars or wherever).
Because there's stuff up there...
If we just captured 1% of the materials in the asteroid belt there would be enough gold, silver, iron, water, etc that we would never have to launch raw materials in space again. The first one to grab an asteroid and return it to Earth will be remembered longer than Magellen.
Because it can make $$$...
It might throw some of the commodity markets into short term panic but eventually those markets would correct and everyone would eventually benefit.
Because we are mortal...
Setting up shop off this island Earth is our only long term guaranty of survival.
Because God said so...
Told me in a dream that this was our future, if we are to have a future.
Because God said not to...
According to some, God only gave us this planet. Well, let's just see about that.
Because James van Allen said not to...
Screw him, who the hell does he think he is? Just because he got his name attached to a radiation belt he thinks he knows what's what? When someone says something isn't possible or that something shouldn't be done, it just makes it more possible that it will be done.
Besides, if we don't get into space, we'll never meet the Vulcans and there will never be a federation. The thought of that is too horrible to imagine.
And I bet they all taste just like chicken.
.where the mars explorers are now, how much more could be accomplished in an exponentially shorter period of time by a person? Seriously. They don't often get stuck by a rock in front of their foot. They don't take 11 hours to descend a crater (with fingers crossed), they tend to solve their own problems, et cetera.
Until remotes become much more effective a human will remain the best options for on-site research.
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Yes- perhaps that is what we should do. Send fertilized eggs for all kinds of organisms in every direction. After that we can put this argument behind us, and focus on robotic exploration to get anyreal science done. The eggs have better chances of surviving and escaping this solar system than any grown up human being will have, and this way we ensure that DNA is spreading, in the event of disaster.
Most of the wetware reading this is getting older. Eventually the joints begin to wear out. Wouldn't it be nice to have an option to retire to a microgravity enviroment?
2) He also totally ignores the long term gains. He seems to think that short term gains are more important. There are many jobs that we can not have machines do. That is why we keep losing machines (50% of mars bound machines are destroyed, usually by simple mistakes that a human on board could have solved). Yes, right now we don't have huge advantages for putting men into space, but only by repeatedly trying and figuring out how to do a BETTER job of getting men into space will we eventually conquer the high obstacles that make it not cost effecient to do it.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
it's 'belts' .... just a leather fetish thing ....
Let us not obfuscate the issue with false analogies to Christopher Columbus...
Van Allen is wrong here. The analogy to Christopher Columbus is spot-on in one very important way:
Space travel, like the "Age of Exploration", is a matter of wealthy white men helping themselves to an unreasonable portion of the Earth's resources, without concern for the harm they do to the rest of the human race.
The billions of dollars spent on space didn't spring into being from nothing. This is wealth that the "first world" has and the "third world" doesn't have. Why the disparity? Is the first world "naturally" wealthier? Were all those white people born smarter or more productive? No, absolutely not. All men are created equal. Inequality is, by definition, always an unnatural and artificially imposed condition.
When Nike spends US$0.50 making a US$80.00 pair of sneakers in a third-world country, that's US$79.50 in wealth transferred from the third world to the first world. That is the template for the world economy these days. You can call it "colonialism", or you can call it the "world economy", or you can call it anything you like, but the bottom line is that somebody's paying those folks in the third world a hell of a lot less than their labor is worth, and they're powerless to do anything about it.
Even leaving aside the staggering and unprecedented environmental damage done by the rockets themselves, the human damage of colonialism far outweighs whatever microscopic worth the entire enterprise may have. And without colonialism, there would be no space programs at all. Only colonialism can produce such massive concentrations of wealth in such a tiny set of hands.
The International Space Station is no less an assault on racial and social justice than the conquest of the Americas was.
I understand the fine poetry of exploration, but the reality is a brutal nightmare, and it's the reality that we have to live with here on Earth.
"Offtopic, Inflammatory, Inappropriate, Illegal, or Offensive" -- hey, that's me!
I don't see a whole lot of point in manned missions into space if there's nothing important for them to do. With the dangers involved, it makes much more sense to me to let the machines do the work.
If, however, we come up with something important to look into, say, on Mars, then by all means, we should send a dude in a spacesuit there. Because, yes, there are some things that people can do better in person than they can remotely...though not much.
Also, I would be fully in favor of coming up with a way to send a couple hundred (or even a couple thousand) people off in search of another world to colonize. Well, with as long as this would take, I guess you could start with 2 people, or 4 to keep things fun. But why not waste our time, effort, and money on building some kind of self-sustaining big-ass space ship, with a way to grow food, and sustain people for generations as they search for a planet to call home.
I personally would rather have seen the 80 billion that the ISS will cost put into basic science such as materials and propulsion research. Eventually there will be a strong desire to explore, but it's simply too expensive with our current level of technology.
If 80 billion was instead sunk into developing ultrastrong material for space elevators or light composites to make standard rockets more efficient, I'd think it was money well spent.
People need to focus on the long term, not just election year slogans.
If we took all the money for that human exploration, we would be able to send hundreds of probes. The time would be rather pointless then. Of course they will get better each time.
They need more POWER then solar to realy go places.
Come the revolution, the Bourgeois, Capitalistic, "A PARKING STICKER HOLDERS", will be first against the wall!
Yes, NASA is a government agency, and a government agency represents a political constituency. While scientists make up some of NASA's constituency, the vast majority are For Profit contractors and local communities where their employees are. Claiming that NASA only exists for scientific purposes is unbelievably naivete. (Especially as its role in Cold War Dicksize Fighting wasn't exactly a state secret.)
then he is, of course right.
I don't mean to denigrate science as a goal in the slightest, but it simply isn't the ONLY goal.
But to dilute his assertion from a scientific perspective, for a moment...
One could argue that Columbus, Magellan, etc were wastes from a scientific perspective. But let's just look at one simple exploration that descended from their "adventures" - the Galapagos Islands. The Galapagos were the extreme examples that prodded Darwin into writing Origin of Species - clearly a work of science. Would we have figured out evolution without exploring the Galapagos? Probably, but it would have taken much longer.
Science is largely a method, a careful method that consists of theories and experiments to prove those theories. But remember that science attempts to explain observations, and nothing forces science to move like new observations that don't fit the accepted models.
So for the moment ignoring "adventure" as a value proposition, space science by robot probe is largely (though not excusively) like designing experiments and confirming results. Space science by man is more likely to 'peek the other way' and see something that turns current models on their head. The Mars rovers are an interesting case, because they're a sort of telepresence, and allow us to exercise our own curiousity. They're also a special case, because they're out at (or slightly past?) the limit of that kind of activity.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
doubt whether being adventurous is worth billions of dollars and the risk of human lives.
That's fine and dandy, but drop the "human lives" part of that. That's not for you to decide; that's for the people who are willing to take the risk to decide. Sky diving, scuba diving, mountain climbing, hiking, camping, driving anywhere - they are all a risk to human lives. Every single one of them, and in some cases, not just their own. It's not your place, or my place, to decide that these people should or should not be risking their life pursuing adventure. You can make that choice for only yourself and those you are legal guardian of, and since your tax dollars are represented in the "billions of dollars", you get a say in that too. But throwing around "human lives" is a weak attempt along the lines of the tired "think of the children" meme.
As already pointed out by another poster, the ocean through which the listed explorers travelled could provide sustenance.
No, it could not. Try sailing for a year, eating nothing but fish. You won't make it six months before you die of malnutrition.
Point is, early sea explorers did, in fact, have to bring a large portion of their food with them.
I suppose there are other people than me who just wish to get as far away as possible from the so-called global village Earth...
The need for a group of humans to establish life away from a place they are ideologicly unhappy with?
Or maybe the need for more resources for continued human expansion?
Somebody elighten me with a single reason manned space flight should have anything to do with me. Does it help our nation? Does it have anything to do with the roles of the government defined by our constitution? If so, please somebody tell me what that might be. Why all the blank stares now? Don't you assholes have a halfway legitimate reason for jacking up my taxes to put people in space?
However, for the romantics, a private sector space industry doesn't bother me one bit. More power to 'em. If enough people are crapping money and don't know what to do with it and would like to watch some guy on the moon on TV, fine with me. Go nuts guys, put your money where your mouth is. Just don't touch my piece of the pie. Hell, put it on Pay-Per-View to help offset the cost. If in a few years my boy is dying to see it, maybe I'll end up chipping in money to the cause so he can see it. If he'd rather have a bicycle, I'd like to be able to afford one.
As for those who want to buy the tickets, here's a news flash: Buy your own ticket. If you can't find a ticket, why don't you contribute to your cause. I'd like a roller-coaster theme park in my home town, but instead I've got Dutch Village. I'm not asking the city to raise taxes to fund a government-run theme park so I can afford roller-coaster rides even though half the people in the city can't ride them (or have no interest). I'm not complaining. It's not as if I'm working toward building a theme park here with my own time/money. Why is manned space flight any different? Let the people who want adventure pay for their own damn adventure, don't drag me into it.
And for the record, I'm in my mid 20's and well trained as an astronautical engineer, now working in technology. So don't cry to me about the jobs. Instead of taking home your tax money for a new car and spending my days producing nothing for you except brief periods of entertainment every once in a while, I work in a company that is productive for my nation and makes it a better place on daily basis instead of a cooler place where we strap rockets on people and send 'em real high.
The only thing more dangerous than a file named -rf is renaming it -rf\ /
Space exploration is a dangerous business, and humans are too valuable to risk. Or at least they should be.
Computers and robots are terrific explorers. I believe that they can also be terrific builders of infrastructure. That's the direction that future space missions should follow.
I'm not saying that humans should stay home. I am saying that if I had to build a log cabin on the moon myself, or have a robot do it for me, I'd let the robot do it.
We need to reduce expenditures on manned spaceflight and redirect those resources to basic research in materials, computer systems, robotics, and planetary chemistry. Out of this research would come technologies allowing us to explore the solar system remotely, build robust spacecraft, and actually make a living off the materials available on the planet or moon we happen to be standing on.
If that's really a cost-effective solution to discovery through research, businesses would do it specifically for that purpose. Last I checked, Nabisco wasn't sponsoring a shuttle for the purpose of running into an unbeatable cracker, or even the rights to any snack food coming from research for space flight...particularly manned space flight, just to stay on topic here.
The only thing more dangerous than a file named -rf is renaming it -rf\ /
This guy, who benefitted professionally to a huge extent from the existence of manned spaceflight programs, now has the nerve to turn around and bite the hand that (probably quite literally) fed him.
So, you're saying that he sould act like a good American politician: Bite down on his free thought and stay bought.
My Karma: ran over your Dogma
StrawberryFrog
I fail to see in really broad terms what the urgency is to get 'out there'.
Van Allen says the ideology of adventure is insufficient reason to continued manned spaceflight. His argument would be much stronger if he proceeded to suggest what ideology to replace it with.
Suggest the ideology of compassion, that expensive manned spaceflight be curtailed in favour of improving the situation in our own backyard first. Educate some kids, cure some diseases, etc.
Why can't this wait a couple generations until we've done better here on the home planet?
I understand what you are saying, but we'd only get back the barest of astonomic data. Probes are crap compared to people. As with all things in reality, balance and compromise are the best answers. Some problems, some manned, et cetera. Until remotes can do it all.
For example, it would be so much easier to search for life on Mars with a human there instead of the rovers.
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Only such people use such words...
If you're worried about the risk of an asteroid strike, then we should be concentrating on detecting and deflecting rogue asteroids. This is a relatively easy and solvable problem, because the more advanced warning you have, the easier it is to deflect the asteroid.
So we launch launch more space based telescopes to take constant surveys, monitor the asteroids that put us at risk, and send out drones that intercept the ones that are the most worrysome and just push them into a nonintersecting orbit.
Besides, you know damn well that humanity wouldn't get wiped out by an asteroid strike. It'd cause a death toll in the billions, but it won't wipe out every last one of us. If that scenario really worries you then fine, build a nuclear reactor powered self-sufficient bunker 10km underground or at the bottom of the ocean or whatever. Anything will be cheaper than a Mars or Moon colony.
I'm a seeker too. But my dreams aren't like yours. I can't help thinking that somewhere in the universe there has to be something better than man. Has to be.
- Taylor, Planet of the Apes
Ave Molech Setting
Ignore the limited resources motivation, ignore the profit motivation, ignore the information we have been collecting through very "human" methods, and take a crack at Bush at the same time? Why not?
Adventure has value, it's just not always easy to quantify.
I know for a fact that if I get myself into a rut with work, a couple hours in the surf clears me right up for about a week. I've learned to quantify the value of the adventure of surfing.
If you look at the X-Prize, and the SpaceShipOne success, you could say that on-going Nasa activities has kept many people's motivation high, which combined to produce the X-Prize and SpaceShipOne's entry. You could say it's leading to even more advances in the private sector, and I think anyone with a sense of history would realize that the best way to get into space is for private enterprises to see a reason for going. Nasa put us on the moon, but the hearts and minds of the people will keep us going, and opening up space to private enterprise will make it practical, widely available to everyone and perhaps, even, our entire future.
So, adventure has value. Everything isn't always a 1-for-1, "you pay this, you get this back." Sometimes you throw it into the sea now and it rains gold later.
It is depressing to think that one of our species' greatest accomplishments (apollo 11) was largely catalyzed not by curiosity or noble sentiment, but rather by the age-old motivation of competition and nationalism.
It doesn't have to be this way of course. If the Earth was in fact flat, people would I believe be rather insulted by this brazen limitation to their lateral inclinations. It would be very difficult to not think about space, if it ultimately/obviously curtailed all of our primary vectors of motion. Unfortunately, like caged hamsters we are fooled easily by the affected infinity of looping- around.
Perhaps if large scale space-tourism ramps up, then people will become more cognizant of the limit that lurks above. Hopefully this will insult us so much that we push off to save our dear collective ego.
If not this, then maybe China will get on the ball and threaten to colonize the Moon, Mars, Europa...ad astra.
Once again you are presuming humans as we currently exist must be part of the future equation. We will evolve ourselves into something that can in fact live for ten thousand centuries, able to endure open space (in which case we will not be human any longer). Yet another comment that presumes the Star Trek universe in which only that which we want to change will change - in your case, the assumptions that humanity stays as it is and everything else moves around it.
Space Exploration has always been a much more longer term before we really see or understand what the Return On Investment was.
Space exploration provides a platform for us to tackle new problems, which result in new solutions. Even if we find nothing of value on mars for example, just getting to the point where we can be sure of that will have resulted in a wealth of knowledge.
I'd also like to add that we need more research being done for the exploration of our own planet. Exploring the deepest oceans is on the same difficulty level of space exploration.
My fat ass...
reasons is to get someone off this planet, just in case one of those near orbitting asteroids makes contact! In the past, we had no possibility of surviving a catastrophic impact event.
Now we do.
You also won't get a variety of things that matter at the human level. What does the sand of Mars feel like bewteen the fingers? To walk on? What does the air feel and taste like? How does a human react to this environment?
You can write these off as irrelevant. If you're a soulless robot, you will. And that would be foolish, even at the purely logical level of a Vulcan. The feel of the sand between your fingers might be exactly the trigger to some insight that yields a new application, process or product that revolutionizes an industry.
(Frankly, whether it yields new products or not, I still want to feel it!)
Never discount the human presence or capabilities in these things.
From the article:
Casting an eye on the space shuttle's contribution to science, van Allen suggests they have been modest, "and its contribution to utilitarian applications of space technology has been insignificant."
The still only partly put together International Space Station, van Allen points out, has already garnered a price tag of some $30 billion. "If it is actually completed by 2010, after a total lapse of 26 years, the cumulative cost will be at least $80 billion, and the exuberant hopes for its important commercial and scientific achievements will have been all but abandoned," he argues.
Given that NASA has not and will not renounce, abjure, and utterly forsake the folly of the last 25 years of their human spaceflight program (Shuttle and Space Station), I think he has a valid point. Sean O'Keefe, NASA Administrator, says that NASA "gets it" in relation to the need to change, but I don't see much evidence of that. They seem to understand the need to improve their effectiveness, but they don't seem to understand that the bigger problem is a lack of relevance.
To give an example, consider the contributions of Charles Lindbergh to aviation. I just finished reading his biography, written by A. Scott Berg. Lindbergh helped to solve many practical problems and helped the early airlines set up routes. Over his lifetime, the problems of civil aviation were solved well enough that he saw little point in going for additional performance (supersonic commercial transport).
But where Lindbergh was Promethean in his outlook, NASA leadership seems to be Olympian. Wherever there has been a choice to be made between jealously guarding access to space and opening up "the high frontier," they have come down in favor of the status quo.
So, if NASA wants to be taken seriously, they need to address the credibility gap. They need to demonstrate their contributions to the "utilitarian applications of space technology" that Van Allen refers to. Their plan to scuttle the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission is the most recent demonstration of their values.
That does not mean that human spaceflight is a bad idea, only that NASA has not demonstrated why they should be entrusted with this responsibility.
It's absolutely the best reason. God forbid, we try to avoid extinction by not keep all of our eggs in one basket. As Larry Niven said, "The dinosaurs died out because they didn't have a space program."
You are assuming like most other posters that the universe is here for humans and needs humans. At some point something that came from us will go out there and maybe it will keep your history in mind for nostalgic purposes, but don't presume that you need to be there or were ever meant to be there. Maybe we're just a step on the path to something higher, bound to be forgotten.
Insert Magic 8-ball resoponse here.
Christopher Columbus is a FANTASTIC example. Many times science has been advanced when someone with modest goals embarks on an endeavour, and stumbles on something fantastic. What untold discoverys lie in the vastness of space? ("There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy." --Hamlet) What important discoveries will be made when we solve the problems that space travel presents? With a universe that is 'bylluns and bylluns' of light years across, what kind of foolishness is it to say that there is nothing worth seeing or doing but that which is on our own porch?
One of Mankind's greatest abilities is to be able to envision a goal, and strive to achieve it. He would never achieve space travel, because he is ready to give up right now.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
After all, he's already discovered everything he ever will discover. At this point he's only taking up resources. Let's end this waste.
Instead of a 2 year timeout while the Shuttle is being revamped, I think we need to take a 10 year timeout until new launch systems are invented.
Here are the technologies I would invest in:
Any of several forms of launch assist, most likely Magnetic Rail. Any other technology would benefit from having this as a virtual first stage. Find the ideal location and buy the land -- DO NOT LEASE. We could probably build it in America, but why be trapped long term with less than ideal initial launch orbits. To be really radical, make it accessible to all nations, maybe build it as a coalition of the gravity well escaping.
Scram Jet and VASMIR, lets throw bucket loads of money in those directions.
Ditch the Space Elevator (at least for now), concentrate on something that could really be built, and that would be a "rotovator"
For items like oxygen, water, propellant, food -- fire them into orbit with a cannon. Massive G-Forces will not hurt them (though it might over tenderize steaks if that's the kind of food your sending up). This is really-really cost effective. Iraq was constructing a cannon capable of hitting Israel, it's just a matter of scale
Put any two or three of these together, then manned space flight begins to make sense
Letter To Iran
If you compared it to the number of people who died in persuing other adventures space travel is relitivly safe. How many people died crossing the Atlantic or the Pasific in times past. Still how many a year die today in cross atlantic voyages by boat. How many times to plains crash causing death or Car Crashes or people dieing trying to climb the highest mountain. Space Travel has a lot more dangers then all of these activities but we get relitivly fiew deaths from space. A Crew of around a half a dozan every 10-15 years or so. Compared to the explores in the past space exploration is much safer then say take a buch of logs nail them together put up some sheets and go cross the atlantic and hope for the best.
Besides learning these dangers helps for safer travel in the future. Without human space travel we loose a lot of the ability to analyse information and able to make informed judgments about things.
For the argument about loosing presious human life, How many people died in wars?
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Van Allen apparently struggles with the concept of "Don't put all your eggs in one basket."
Any number of catastrophes could occur which would wipe out life on this planet (or at least the human variant of it), from the uncontrollable (asteroid hits, neighborhood novae, solar instability, etc.) to the self-induced (disease, ecological, nuclear...)
Only one way to ensure humans survive - get off the planet and spread out. Only way to do that - human space travel.
Now, if Van Allen's argument is that the human race isn't worth saving, then let's have that argument. But to say the only reason for human space travel is "adventure" shows a critical lack of imagination.
Space travel beats the shit out of blowing stuff up in Iraq.
Lets do a short course: the Earth is the only place in this solar system we can live unaided. The next best truck stop is a looooooooooong way away and humans probably won't be around as we know them to arrive safely.
People seriously need to stop "learning" about science from Star Trek.
The worst thing about this article is, he's starting with valid data and then drawing the wrong conclusions from it.
He's pointing out the failure of our human space flight since Apollo, or perhaps since Skylab. All the budget-busting cost overruns, all the delays, and the relatively crippled capacity of the International Space Station -- yes, I'm familiar with all of that. Dr. Allen says that the paltry results we've gotten from manned space flight for the last 30 years don't come anywhere near justifying the resources we've expended on it, and he's right. Manned spaceflight for the last 30 years can be summed up as a costly failure.
The catch is, he concludes that manned space is a bad idea. Any more reasonable or unbiased observer would look at the same span of history and conclude that we've been doing manned space flight stupidly for the last 30 years.
I personally think about 70% of the failure stems from the decision to scrap the Saturn rockets and replace them with the Shuttle. The other 30% can be laid down to NASA's ever-shrinking budget and general bureaucratic ossification.
Moving a serious human presence into space isn't going to make sense until we have an economical, high-capacity, transportation and freight link between here and there. We could have constructed that link in the 1970s if we'd gotten serious about it, and we could do it more easily today. But instead our leadership (both inside and outside of NASA) keep dithering around without any focus.
The only way space will be colonized is if some filthy rich individual funds a private space mission and then finds something of value. Paul Allen is financing private space efforts. Suppose someday that group lands on the Moon. If they find something of value, like gold or rare earth minerals, there will be a new capitalist gold rush to the Moon, and everyone will say "NASA who?" At least this is the way that exploration and colonization has always happened throughout history.
But there's a bad problem with human space exploration that always gets lost in these discussions -- there is deadly radiation in space. The Earth's atmosphere and magnetic field protects us from this radiation. But out in space, you're on your own. The usual comeback to that is "lead shielding" but that adds too much weight and is otherwise unfeasible. OK Trekkies, lets see a show of hands -- how many of you would volunteer to get your gonads irradiated in space?
Human space exploration cannot be viewed like Columbus and Magellan, it's just not the same thing, no matter how many Trek episodes you watch.
Steven Weinberg, Nobel prize winning cosmologist, published this article a few months ago, detailing his reasons for not agreeing with the president's call for manned missions to the moon and mars. Basically, the argument is that science can be done cheaper and more safely by robots, and that people are clumsy and expensive. An interesting read to compare to the parent story, if for nothing else than to see what happens when scientists get old and opinionated.
"What the masochist doesn't know can't hurt him."
The ESA, Japanese, Korean, Israeli space programs are all unmanned. They exist for one purpose - put satellites in orbit. Some are very big spy satellites and some are small telcom sats and some are science satellites but that's pretty much it. In fact the real reason that the ESA is involved in the ISS at all is to help them get the Ariane 5 program off the ground (literally) and now that they're close to making that a stable production platform they will begin to back away from the ISS. The Chinese (PRC) program put one man in orbit so they can say they did and we'll be waiting a long time for them to replicate that.
In fact I'd submit that the commercialization of space portends the end of all space travel manned or not, beyond the range of geosynchronous orbit. Oh there will always be rich rocket groupies who want to spend 20 million bucks to be human cargo in orbit but by and large there is no practical use in exploring anything for the sake of exploring it.
I would tend to agree that it isn't obvious that current manned space flights by superpowers have real relevance to advancing scientific knowledge. What IMHO is _more_ important: how does humanity make development of space economically viable? I tend to think robotics is more likely to make this happen sooner than manned space flights under present conditions.
Another old-fool primate who has lived past his time to die.
Just because he discovered something doesn't mean he's not an idiot.
Plenty of idiots with degrees and patents and Nobel Prizes, even.
Fuck off and die, Van Allen.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
Let me rebut. First of all, the only reason that space travel seems adventurous is because it is still new, dangerous, expensive, and controversial. All of those aspects need to be removed from the equation of space travel before it can be a productive endeavor. We have to keep working at it, improving it, productionizing it, until space travel becomes old, safe, cheap, and boring. THen we won't have any old-school scientists (taken your metamucil today, Roger?) spewing drivel like this.
Second, any "scientist" who states that manned space travel is a waste is simple envious of the "whopping" budget for manned space flights. True, the space program is expensive compared to say, dinner at Burger Barn. But compared to the 2003 GDP of $10.7 Trillion, the entire NASA budget for 2003 was $15.0 Billion, or only 0.14% of our nation's productivity. Or as a percentage of the $2.128 Trillion 2003 federal budget, only 0.71%. (Holy crap, I had no idea that the feds took 20% of the GDP!) Or finally, as a percentage of the interest we paid on the national debt last year of $181 Billion, only 8.3%. Of Social Security's $472 Billion, 3.2%; of National defense's $368 Billion, 4.1%; of Medicare/Medicaid's $390 Billion, 3.8%; of other 'discretionary' spending's $390 Billion, also 3.8%. Compared to the major federal spending programs, NASA is small potatoes indeed.
There will always be space exploration, but what we need now is to start harvesting the resources available in space. Space travel will become a national priority when it becomes a net positive on the balance sheet. Or in other words, when the expenses are clearly outweighed by the benefits, by the resources made available, and by the money to be made, in outer space.
Argh! I hate it when "distinguished elder scientists" come up with this kind of crap. Do they just enjoy shooting themselves, and their colleagues, in the foot? Sheesh.
"The only good windmill is a tilted windmill."
Although I think there are potentially many reasons to go into space (ie all eggs in one earth theory), my most personal reason is not linked to adventure per se or any especially practical reason in an economic sense.
I want to get a greater perspective on things. I find it hard to imagine not having my own completely earthbound perspective blown away by looking with my own eyes down upon Earth in its entirety, or upon another world altogether. I've looked up at the stars countless times wishing I could render it in 3D... but I can't... I don't have the perspective.
I can read about this stuff in books, even look up endless amounts of images on the web, but I don't think anything would compare with seeing something like that for myself.
I'm gonna die eventually anyway and I think it would be worth some risk to see if I can't transcend my earthling bias and conceptual limitations if only just a little bit.
Not only does God definitely play dice, but He sometimes confuses us by throwing them where they can't be seen. -Hawking
Maybe they did. In which case they are now at least 65 million years more technologically advanced than we are, wherever they are out there!
Adventure, myass...
The primary incentive for space travel is to get all of our eggs out of this basket called Planet Earth before some religious zealots destroy its inhabitants, or some corporate zealot destroys it through a genetic engineering accident, or other scientific or Malthusian error.
This could be seen as a parallel to the reason that America was created... time to escape religeous persecution by going to Mars and the asteroid belt.
In a word, wrong. Maintinance.
It's cheaper repair a satelite than to put a new one in orbit. There are plenty one-off statelites up there that once they go, that's it. See, for example, the Hubble space telescope. It can do a lot of science, but it'll need some help soon, or it's a gonner. Is that worth sending a man up for? I think so.
Note that that doesn't require a continued presencein space, just send a crew of mechanics up every so often to keep things working. I accept that most manned space flights are redundant, but that doesn't mean that all of them are.
Human space exploration with current technology is just way too expensive, dangerous, and time consuming.
We can send dozens of sophisticated robots out into the solar system for the cost of sending one manned mission back to the moon.
We can send robots to the most distant reaches of the solar system. The furthest we can reasonably expect to send a manned mission with today's tech is Mars.
I would rather, in my lifetime, see photos from the depths of the Europan Oceans, from the surface of Pluto, from the surface of Titan. I would rather, in my lifetime, see robotic archeological digs done on the surface of these worlds. All the while we would be learning how to work in space without the cost and danger.
I would rather see these things, than have one half-assed attempt to get some people onto the surface of Mars, made by some government to prove it's technological prowess over all of the rest of the nations of the world.
We'll know when it's time to send men when the cost is within an order of magnitude of sending a robot.
this post is entirely spurious. they due intend to make money.
I think what we should do instead of blowing all this money on manned space flight is to plow money into basic physics research. I'm not talking about String Theory or Cosmology. I'm talking about good ol' fashioned experimental science. Whether it be quantum teleportation, collapsing bubble fusion, materials science, or anyone of a number of cutting edge research areas that increase our understanding of and ability to manipulate the physical world. This is where the real advances are going to come from that are going to allow for human space exploration. We are still using chemical rockets for space travel which we've known about since the 30s!!
Far too much money goes into these partical accelerators and underground partical detectors that help scientists prove cosomological theories about the universe and about places that we won't get to in a million years and about energies that are far beyond our ability to manipulate. Let's focus the money on the practical science.
What if a Pharao of Egypt had said: "Screw this pyramid stuff, I'm spending the money on defense instead. And you can bury me in a wooden casket".
How about: "Screw this pyramid stuff, I'm spending the money on science and education instead. What is a giant freakin pile of blocks good for? Screw the symbolics! Can we for instance grow more food? Build better ships? How can we use those Greek steam machines ? [I know, not exactly the same century, but the right place.] I want to see some progress, now ! Maybe we should use all those blocks for a Great Wall to protect our Civilisation (Sid Maier laughs now) from the barbarians ? And you can bury me in a wooden casket with no gold inside. I would not want those greedy thieves to desecrate my dead body. Just remember my name, that is the most important thing for us, Egyptians. "
Seriously, any ruler who puts his dead body at higher value than the happiness of his people deserves to be taken out of his grave and put in a museum for the amusement of future generations.
Fight Frist Psoting!
Browse Slashdot with 'Newest First'!
http://vesuvius.jsc.nasa.gov/er/seh/quotes.html
Kind of ranks up there with Bill's quote that "640k ought to be be enough for anybody."
Towards the end of the 19th centry, it was widely believed that they had discovered everything there was to be known about physics.
When the Alvin submarine was sent down to explore the mid ocean ridge, it was widely thought it would be a waste of money, just a silly publicity stunt that couldn't do any real science, and that there was probably nothing worth seeing. But when they got there, they discovered an exotic ecosystem with many hithero unknown and undreamed of species of life thriving at unimaginable temperatures and pressure.
The same sentiments initially existed regarding radio and X-ray astronomy. Why bother, as there is nothing of importance to see?
Robots can do some of the advance work, but there is still no substitute for having a man on the ground. We won't know until we plant feet on new worlds what wonders lie waiting to be discovered.
My rights don't need management.
The introduction of foreign disease from Europe (smallpox etc...) wiped out most of the Native American population.
I'm a huge supporter of manned space flight, but I have to agree with Van Allen on one thing: We need to have our goals clearly defined. Why is there a space station if the science isn't being done? Why are we going to the moon? Simple things we need to answer before we go.
Wouldn't it be nice to set our milestones before we try to achieve them? After that, lets move 100% towards the goal.
The more you know, the more you know you don't know.
"Let us not obfuscate the issue with false analogies to Christopher Columbus, Ferdinand Magellan, and Lewis and Clark, or with visions of establishing a pleasant tourist resort on the planet Mars," van Allen suggests.
While we're at it, let's not obfuscate the issue with unnecessarily sarcastic comparisons between manned spaceflight and frivilous excess.
Perhaps the world would be a better place if Magellan, Columbus and Lewis and Clark had stayed home? We certainly wouldn't be discussing the potential for manned spaceflights to other planets. We'd be discussing the short-term profit potential of voyages across the Atlantic Ocean.
Business isn't willing to pay for products, innovation and careers, so we get brands, mortgage commercials and layoffs.
Val Allen has a good point. Why are we gaining as compared to the cost with manned space exploration right now? Not much that's concrete and measurable in the daily comings and goings of the people (i..e, you and I) who are ultimately paying for this.
However, as space exploration/exploitation transitions away from big governments and into the providence of private industry, Van Allen's concerns will become moot. Let the private sector piss away its money if it wants, nobody is being forced to invest in such endeavors, but taxation is compulsory.
Basically, in 20-30 years, you and I will be footing the bill for regulation, grants, and subsidies, and that's about it, and that's acceptable. Market demands will carry the day on which direction space exploration/exploitation goes and the government will only be involved in so far as national defense/security and infrastructure goes.
I get up and it gets me down
...wich I thought was particularly interesting a few years back. But now, it seems he's backtracking human's aspiration to jump outer space.
You got it tough I've seen the toughest around
Oh can't you see me standing here
I've got my back against the record machine
I ain't the worst that you've seen
Oh can't you see what I mean?
Might as well jump (...Jump!)
Might as well jump
Go ahead jump (...Jump!) ahead
The reason to colonize space is to have more grandchildren. That's plenty motivation.
However, our current mastery of space isn't going to give us any more grandchildren. We need to be able to form colonies that pay for themselves and can build new colonies. They don't have to do everything themselves, but they have to make a profit even after subtracting the cost of the support they get from earth.
Once we can do that, great, colonize space! But in the meantime, we'd be better off developing the needed technology rather than pretending that we already have it. I agree with Van Allen, robot probes are doing us far more good at the moment than our manned space program.
Ahh exploration. Perhaps the problem is that it's being done incorrectly? Or that there is still a space race, when everyone should just pool their money. I don't know, but let's not stop. There's still too much that we don't know, and whether or not space will be the best classroom, let's not rule it out as a possibility.
Haven't read the full article/interview but in my opinion space travel is restricted to those with the money and power to make it happen, thus governments or big business. My opinion has always been that we will travel in space once me have used up or over populated this planet and need another place to settle, think of the first Matrix and the idea that humans are parasites and that we just consume and consume until there is nothing left and will move on to the next thing without a thought. The little guy who has dreams of greater things and of adventure will never ever be able to drive space exploration. Hell even the early explorers had to ask the king or queen for the backing.
That said, there are many, many thing out in space that we can't know about without going there ourselves. Cassini is a great example as you pointed out, and we amassed a wealth of data from the Galileo probe which taught us much about Jupiter that we never would or could have known otherwise, as I expect Cassini will for Saturn. For Van Allen to say that there is no longer a reason to go is presumptuous at best.
It took Magellan a couple-three years to go around the globe.
Magellan himself died in the Phillipines. Of his five-ship fleet, only one made it home:
"On September 6, 1522, the remaining crew of Magellan's voyage and the last ship of the fleet, Victoria, arrived in Spain, almost exactly three years after leaving. "
Link @ wiki.com
-kgj
Columbus was searching for India, not China.
Lewis & Clark and the Northwest Passage, wtf? They were trying to explore the western half of the U.S., not northern Canada.
Magellan was trying to circumnavigate the globe, and he never considered a Northwest Passage. He went down below South America in fact. He died in the Phillipines.
-------- In Soviet Russia, "Soviet Russia" sigs hate Slashdot.
... Van Allen Belt tightening!
We must go because we must go? This is known as "begging the question" - at least if your object is to persuade us to pony up for a space program.
If you're trying to say that it's inevitable that we WILL go, perhaps you could offer some evidence to back that up. The bit about Everest, the North Pole, etc, is interesting... but even getting out of Earth orbit is orders of magnitude more difficult. I don't think you can look at mountain climbing and conclude from that that it's inevitable that we're headed for space.
Sean
Seems to me humans might want to extend our reach beyond Earth so that the species has a better chance of survival. A stray meteor or comet could hits us any day. I think this illustrates at least one practical reason for sending humans into space.
Here's a story, Recently Discovered Near-Earth Asteroid Makes Record-breaking Approach to Earth that illustrates my point.
several decades during which pumping money into manned space flights wouldn't produce the same amount of benefit for mankind as pumping those resources into tech advancements here on earth.
Except that this is merely supposition on your part. You have absolutely no proof that what you say is true.
Max
My god carries a hammer. Your god died nailed to a tree. Any questions?
And if we invest 80 billion to understand how to survive in earth orbit, we might bring down the price tag on putting people in orbit around saturn. I can certainly see a few uses for that.
The more you know, the more you know you don't know.
He also gave us pigeons, to provide us with both an irritating reminder of our lack, and an implicit provocation to do something about it. Lamentably, we decided to develop the gun before the airplane. =)
//Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.
And they're going to the bank, presumably, to deposit some... recognition? Recognition is very nice, but it doesn't pay any bills. Ultimately, you have to have a product.
Sean
We better get training because apparently the Death Star is in orbit around Saturn.
4 0727.html
http://www.space.com/imageoftheday/image_of_day_0
"Should we go to Mars? .... This is not a new dream. As long as humanity has been human, it has looked toward the heavens and dreamed that some day, some way, there would be giant federal contracts involved"
...
... every rocket fired, in a final sense, is a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed."- Dwight D. Eisenhower
Dave Barry
The idea that we can keep expanding the boundary flies in the face of a much more important truth, which is that THIS is all the water there is, THIS is the air that we have, and THIS is the planet we have.
As long as we can delude ourselves about new lands, and new planets, we postpone the day of reckoning with the finite nature of the planet earth and its habitable regions.
All talk of space travel is ultimately the product of a deluded attempt to disguise the need to achieve a state of ecological and economic balance.
From Kennedy to Bush, space travel is a way for politicians and teenagers to avoid dealing with the real problems here on Earth... with militarism and with hunger and with poverty and ill health. Those problems are all so messy... and require such incredible changes in how we live.... how much more fun to think of zooming through space... and how completely irrelevant and cruel.
I'm all for small budget robot exploration of the solar system but
"
Van Allen makes a couple good points. The International Space Station has an unacceptably high cost/benefit ratio, and probably won't produce any significant science. The significant science (so far) has come from automated probes. Analogies between space travel and past explorations on earth may also be weak, but that is because space travel is an entirely different sort of undertaking. Beyond learning anything or exploring new territory, space travel is a conscious evolutionary step.
With all due respect to this legendary scientist, suggesting that human space flight may be obsolete is like the Patent Office suggesting in the 1800s, according to myth, that there was nothing left to invent. There may be no tangible material benefits to space travel in the foreseeable future, ignoring Teflon and the standard list of by-products. The most important benefit will be the long-term survival of the human race. We know that our planet is subject periodically to catastrophic events that can extinguish us. Populating at least one more world will be as significant as climbing out of the primordial ooze.
Incidentally, grounding the remaining space shuttle fleet "to take steps to improve their safety" doesn't conflict with starting "a more costly and far more hazardous" Moon/Mars program. Astronauts, and I think most people in general, are fully aware that no spaceship is "safe" in any normal sense. Safety in the space program is more of a euphemism for "avoiding setbacks."
May I inquire.. er... how you got into that or failing that, how does one interpret the symbolism?
"A witty saying proves nothing." ~Voltaire
"d'Oh!" ~Homer
wake up people
this rock is
one rock away
from disaster
The rest of us will escape to the stars.
Today's vices may be tomorrow's virtues.
According to my inbox, there is an abundance of high-quality vacuum chambers available for a good price. We should have no problem recreating "space" for research here on Earth.
Intel transfer the difficult from Hadware to software, for get more power, programmer need more technology. -- chinaitn
The best motivation for us to go into space is for sex in Zero-G. And best of all guys, breasts will float!
"You'll get nothing, and you'll like it!"
What I think that makes more sense is to focus our resources on planet earth. An hostile alien race will find easier to conquer a series of mildly defended space colonies than an extremely defended core planet.
But... the future refused to change.
Aparently it is hard for some people to understand that it is worth the trip even if you don't expect to have a nice native population to exploit uppon your arrival.
... valuable realestate for providing the open space we will need for our ever-expanding population
... valuable realestate which provides means to study the universe (physics etc) without the bothersome atmosphere.
... valuable realestate to occupy, if we do it _BEFOREAHND_ if the earth takes a hard punch at fractional-C (or solar orbital velocity) from a "massive" body. [If we wait for the punch, it will be too late to scramble into space.]
... will fund research in Environmental Sciences.
... will fund research in Physics.
... will fund research in Materials and Manufacturing. ...
... will fund research in topic(N+1).
The "but there is nothing there (to live on)" argument falls apart thusly:
1) There is something there. It isn't a lush tropical expanse of airable land. It is, however, "valuable realestate" for providing the raw materials we will need once we use up this planet.
2) There is
3) There is
4) There is
5) The actual pursuit will fund research and development in Medicine.
6)
7)
8)
N+1)
This debate puts me in mind of some song from the seventies (cant remember the title) that had a line like: "spent a billion dollars to go to the moon. Brought back a bag of rocks... Must be nice rocks..."
In this case, the trip itself is incredibly valuable to us here in terms of our own life and well-being.
In this case, the understanding of habitat necessary to create *artifical* habitat could revolutionize our own habatat here on earth (notice the repeating word) and coudl lead to ways to sustain and repair the one we are shitting all over down here.
The argument against seems to be "if there are no native inhabitants there to exploit, and the streets of the cities of those primitives are not lined with gold, we might as well forget it."
After all, you seem to say, if its work and the payoff isn't obvious in banannas and slaves to pick them, we might as well stay home.
(Yes, that last is a troll-like and unfair generalization of your position; but if you get to generalize away all the benefits of the pursuit because the travelers will not easily survive shipwreck; then I get to generalize *in* what you might demand of the trip in order to have the trip seem worthwile. 8-)
Innocent people shouldn't be forced to pay for inferior software development.
--"Code Complete" Microsoft Press
That is the best/main reason to me.
there is quite a bit of evidence for macroevolution, see:
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/comdesc/
specifically, take a look at the section "common descent can be tested independently of mechanistic theories".
hth,
tw
You going to argue with the Governator?
You must think in Russian.
This is where the background of Slashdot's readers becomes clear: somehow IT people seem to find space travel very exotic and compare it to Columbus and Magellan, I mean, what's with that? As a physicist, I have to say that Van Allen is right on: manned space travel is way too expensive, and the real returns are questionable. Life, if that's what we're looking for, is far away, and radio-telescopy is the way to go. And, while we're at it: I know people who have sent experiments up with the Space Shuttle: again, I find this to be highly suspect: you lose gravity, and that's it: big deal.
I think your wrong, this is the best common goal of the world, the only one truly bringing the world together. Eventually planet earth will become uninhabitable or will simply not support the population. Where do we go then. I look at it on a scale of billions of years, we have all our eggs in one basket right now and we keep breaking the basket. Human life is precious, but Americans risk there lives in war all the time, with very little benefit to the human race. A few people may die trying to achieve these goals but I think it's important that we achieve these goals. Not for exploration but to preserve the human race.
"the only surviving motivation for continuing human space flight is the ideology of adventure." No it's not, a wonderful side effect but not the reason.
And the money and lives it costs have never been better spent.
The way we are going about achieving these goals may not be working all that well but I really do believe it's absolutely necessary. What other places would you have this man power and money spent?
The space program such as it is; is a huge waste of resources. That is not to say that a space program is a waste of resources just the one we have, the same is true for education.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
I heard a prediction today that cell phone service will be so cheap one day that it will be free, and all you'll pay for is your high tech phone. Think about it a minute and it makes sense. Everything does seem to get cheaper and better. Same goes for space travel. Eventually sending a 5000 ton battleship into space will not be such an impossible task. I say we aught to get this show on the road. There won't be any progress if we're sending nano-satellites everywhere to study the makeup of the upper atmosphere of titan. Lets build an ore refinery on the moon! If you put it in perspective 50 billion dollars is not a lot of dough, and that would build quite a few rockets.
"What the superior man seeks is in himself; what the small man seeks is in others."
- Confucius
It is his business to the degree that he can talk about it, like everybody else can.
Hmm. No, it isn't his business. There's a world of difference between "the right to free speech" (a protection against forcibly imposed silence) and "minding your own business" (a moral constraint on civilised behavior).
As an anarchist, I see one of the biggest faults of democracy to be the way that (1) it encourages everyone to opine about everything (2) it presents a real threat that those nosy and unwarranted opinions will be enforced. Discourse becomes politicised, and rival opinion becomes not something with which to debate reasonably, but an enemy to fear. Thus when I hear of a doctor proclaiming "fast food is bad for you" I fear for my choice in food, and when I hear a rocket scientist opining "end manned space flight", I fear I will be trapped dirtside.
"But only a tiny number of Earth's six billion inhabitants are direct participants. For the rest of us, the adventure is vicarious and akin to that of watching a science fiction movie. At the end of the day, I ask myself whether our huge national commitment of technical talent to human spaceflight and the ever present potential for the loss of precious human life are really justifiable."
Is he really suggesting that a life form that has 6 billion+ instances is actually precious on the level of each instance? Or is he just bandying about the largely unsubstantiated modern notiont of "every life is precious" because he wasn't satisfied with the "too expensive money-wise" angle? Really, every life is not precious in any general sense. The loss of, say, half a dozen volunteer astronauts is utterly inconsequential to the vast majority of the race in general.
Now, before soom boob says "how would you like it if YOUR MOTHER was blown up in a moon rocket" and thinks he's come up with an unbeatable counter-argument, let me acknowledge that yes, people DO care about their friends and relatives. But I would never dishonor my mother's dreams of space exploration by saying she never should have been allowed to volunteer for that fateful doomed moon mission. Van Allen has no business telling someone they have no right to risk their own life on space exploration, as if he or anyone else has some claim on the value of another person's life. Dammit, my mother deserves the right to risk her life going to the moon if she wants!
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
Do you have any proof that space travel to other planets _will_ bring any benefit at all ? If not then you are as dumb as the parent poster. But I would go with the parent poster since his/her point about tech advancemnets on the planet makes more sense (at least we live on this planet and not some galaxy 1 million lightyears away).
If choosing between the ideological adventures of conquering space and conquering Iraq I would have preferred space.
In the article he compares the science generated by robot expeditions all around the solar system versus the science generated by the shuttle and the ISS.
Well, why doesn't he compare science generated by robots AROUND EARTH ORBIT against the shuttle and ISS? Of course robot expeditions to places NO ONE HAS GONE BEFORE generates more knowledge! Now send a human there, and you'll see even more knowledge come out of it.
Besides, science is irrelevant. The main reason to go to space is the egg basket problem.
(8-DCS)
And the timescale for humans to start routinely traveling around the solar system is going to be 10^2 years, regardless of whether a particular national government funds a particular program in a particular year. I've been seeing a lot of slashdotters saying things like, "You can't put all your eggs in one basket," or "What if a big asteroid hits the earth." The time scales are mismatched. The real trick is going to be avoiding nuclear war and global warming for the next 10^3 years. If we can't handle that, it's not going to matter if we can escape the biggest asteroid impact of the next 10^6 years.
Find free books.
Scientific theories are not the same as political opinions.
I would disagree. Two different groups of scientists can look at the same set of data and arrive at two different, and sometimes conflicting, conclusions. How is this different than a political opinion? Scientists tend to associate themselves with one camp or another and are just as passionate about their cause than any politico. Being a scientist does not prevent one from behaving human.
What those who want activist courts fear is rule by the people.
Why go into space? Why bother to do anything?
Why continue to exist at all? The universe doesn't really hand us any obvious reason, but we exist anyway. As long as we're going to continue our ambiguously pointful existence, we may as well pursue whatever fascinates us.
Otherwise, we just sit here on Earth bored to death until we die. There's no reason to do anything. At all.
So just do something interesting and stop caring so damn much about why. It doesn't matter. You don't need an excuse.
Upstairs Dog, Downstairs People.
You really need to watch less Star Trek.
I think there are too many people out there who think that we should stop all technological development and spend more time solving current human problems by various means.
Alas, that will NOT work well, as we've seen in hunter-gatherer societies, the feudal society of Middle Age Europe, the highly-regimented social class system of China up until the Chinese Revolution of 1911, and the old caste system of the Indian subcontinent.
When you look at the height of Ancient Greece, the Roman Empire, the Islamic states up until 1100 AD, the Rennaissance, and the rise of modern science since the 1500's, the very fact they allowed human inquisitiveness to prosper resulted in enormous advances in science and other general knowledge.
I don't know about you guys, but I am fairly confident that leaving the earth is our only option... Unless we want to be destroyed with it. Sure most people think we have plenty of time left, but I would rather we be well adapted and know what we are doing. Gotta start sometime.
Well, he can question human spaceflight all he wants. But I still question Van Allen ditching David Lee Roth for Sammy Hagar.
Simply put:
If you are not growing, you are dying.
With no human space program, what is the point of going to high-school, what is the point of college, what is the point of making any effort on anything?
Humans need goals and a desirable future to strive for... and I do NOT consider a world with no human space program, one government, human tracking tags, controlled breeding (forced sterilization), and government determined life-spans a desirable future.
I live in Iowa City, IA, home to the University of Iowa and Dr. Van Allen, and I can attest to the fact that this is a regular tirade of Dr. Van Allen's. Why? Because he likes to send up satellites, and manned spaceflight funnels off millions of dollars in NASA funding. He wants the $ for his satelllites. In other words, it's all politics. Surprise.
Serving your airship needs since 1995.
The purpose of space exploration is to find other worlds that we can inhabit. I do not want to doom my children and future generations to this one planet. We could wait until it is safe, but that is like waiting to walk until you own a car. We must walk, stumble and try again, if humans are to survive beyond this planet. We cannot expect the vulcans to show up and save us. Some species must be the first into space, it might as well be us.
Man will return to space when we have "stainless steal man", that is understanding the brain is not that far off, reimplementing it in silicon will then be possible.
The ethics of it all will no doubt be more difficult to deal with than the science. When discussing ethic with my children I told them to think about it, if Bush doesn't succeed in destroying western civilization it will be an issue their generation not mine will have to face.
Sending silicon man to mars makes a lot more sense than sending a bag of water delicately held together with carbon.
innovation.
I would not be employed at my current job if it wasn't for manned space flight.
We got TANG, dangit.
:P
Commercial spaceflight will hopefully beget commercial orbital platforms, will hopefully beget commercial R & D on orbital platforms, and maybe then we'll start seeing some serious uses of microgravity science and engineering.
If anything, it's worth getting off of this rock just to get away from guys like Van Allen who seem to think we should just stay put until we run out of resources and the sun burns out.
Kufuu wanted to leave a momument to himself to let others know how cool he was.
Lindbergh wanted to win the prize. He netted $25k for doing it.
Columbus wanted to be rich capitalizing on faster trade routes to the orient.
Didn't Kendey want to go to the moon because the USSR was upstaging us in space?
Wow...do these guys sound like they wanted to expand humanity or show off how cool they where?
I've posted many other times calling into the question the value of the X-Prize. I think it is important to go into space purely as a research venture but I have no illusions we'll find nothing out there but useless rocks.
This is not to mention the fact that many times our knowledge has increased by accident. Columbus found America by accident, Magellan found the way around the world by accident, Lewis and Clark found a lot of things by accident. Lost people, entire civilizations, new technologies, all of these caused changes to how we looked at everything because of a need to know. The driving force behind human existence is that we want to, as Gene Rodenberry once said: "To explore where no man has gone before."
:-)
This isn't to say that NASA is the way to do this. It isn't to say that NASA is not the way to do this. There are more efficient ways to get into space and we are starting to see them come into existence. Eventually, we might even have a Army, Navy, Air, and Space Force.
However, I do agree with Mr. Van Allen that we are spending a lot of money on a space station which is taking forever to be built. According to the timetable put forth by the government of China, they plan on having someone on the moon by 2010. (A year or two before the space station is to be completed.) At the rate they are going - I think they may just make it. They have already put a ship into orbit and that ship is going to be carrying someone into orbit very soon. (If they haven't already done so.) Now all they have to do is to just not stop, but to continue pushing further and further into space. It might actually motivate other governments to get their act in gear. I, for one, would like to die on the Moon and be one of those who's body is shot into the sun than live and die here on earth.
In any event, if SpaceshipOne makes it - the above will have gotten just that one step closer to being a possibility. And maybe we will accidentally do what Mr. Van Allen doesn't think we should do.
Someone put a black hole in my pocket and now I'm broke.
Mr. Van Allen seems to propose a future where we minimize the amount of money that we spend on space missions while maximizing the return of scientific knowledge. Imagine a bunch of guys who are either too skinny or too fat sitting around a bunch of computers analyzing data telling jokes that only they think are funny. Imagine a bunch of bureaucrats sitting in endless meetings trying not to take any unnecessary risks. Imagine those bureaucrats dictating how things will be done. Imagine endless political battles and ass covering when mistakes are made. Imagine the ebb and flow of money from congress as they gain and lose interest. How uninspiring. No wonder enrollment in science and engineering programs is waning among Americans.
He reminds me of the geek sitting in the computer room with his mainframe thinking that is the way things will always be. He is sorely missing the point.
We're on the verge of a revolution. It may take 30 years but it is coming. Guys like Burt Rutan and Paul Allen are going to open spaceflight back up to adventure. They aren't going to sit around in a stale old government funded program and play the risk averse bureaucrat. They are going to grab the dragon by the tail. They're going to do what 30+ years of bureaucracy hasn't been able to do. They are going to reduce the cost per kilo to get into orbit. They are going to figure out how to make it safe and repeatable. They will eventually figure out how to make some money at it so that they can do more of it and discovery better ways and refine their techniques.
Mr. Van Allen is like the old mainframe guys who thought that computers had to be big and expensive and complex. They never imagined that one day I would be walking around with a cell phone that could send email, browse the web, and play MP3's and only cost a few hundred bucks.
I just think that the future can be so much sexier and more exciting that what he imagines.
You are missing the point. What I was trying to refute was the argument that the early ocean explorers were somehow sailing through an aquatic paradise where the environment was non-hostile. The ocean is, or at least can be, a very hostile environment. Not as quite as hostile as space but none the less dangerous given primitive (by our standards) technology. You cannot survive it without a ship, no more than you could survive space travel without a ship. Thus, the two media are in this regard very similar.
Perhaps he hasn't heard about things like global warming and running out of oil and that the NASA Space Power Satellite can solve both of those problems. Or figured that the people who can solve these problems stand to make one hell of a lot of money out of it. Space-based solar power appears to be the logical replacement for coal.
Mankind traditionally has been willing to go to dangerous places in search of profit and there's no reason why space can't be one of them if the price to orbit is dropped radically. This goal is now within reach.
Perhaps we have a man who has made great scientific contributions a generation ago but is fundamentally irrelevant now. All he's interested in is making a bigger rice bowl for his friends who are interested in the kind of science that can be done with unmanned probes. That isn't what it's about anymore. Figuring out how to explore space is about human survival now, not getting tons of rocks from alien planets to study.
For more information about solutions to energy problems that include space, go to my page and follow the links. They make a hell of a lot more sense than Van Allen does.
Tech Public Policy stuff
to the human spirit, looking at pictures of the Grande Canyon (or Tetons, or Yellowstone, or other great vistas and locations) or actually BEING there to see and experience it yourself? What is more satisfying, sending a remote piloted vehicle with camera to see the Great Pyramids of Egypt, or actually going yourself to see them? It is irrelevant whether or not MOST people actually do any of the above, the point is they CAN and some actually do - and there is an indirect solace for the soul in that fact.
Looking at pictures or spectra from this or that rock in the solar system may be nifty neato, and may make a few scientists come in their panties, but for most people, it isn't enough. There is something very much viscerally superior to actually having humans there to see/experience something directly, and by proxy for the rest of us, than simply receiving a stream of bits to toss together into a pretty picture.
If we play our cards right, one day, travel to various locales within the solar system will be in reach of many/most people, much the way air travel has brought virtually any and every location on planet earth within reach of most people (at least in the developed world). The only way to get to the point where one could actually end up on Mars in a way that is more relaxed than a virge-of-death adventurous feat by a handful of select astronauts is to actually that the first steps and SEND a handful of select astronauts. Again and again. In ever improving vehicles with ever improving technology. Do that enough and you end up with passenger liners for regular people doing the same thing.
Earth has a finite lifespan. So long as we are locked to it's surface we are certain to experience a lifespan that is significantly shorter than that of the earth (we have roughly a max of about a few tens of millions of years left before earth is a gonner regardless of anything we might do - by some reasonable estimates). That is a long time, but it is a short time too given the time available if we untie ourselves from earth's surface.
Van Allen is a parochial jackass interested only in furthering HIS particular cut of research. He has no soul.
In Bushworld, they struggle to keep church and state separate in Iraq as they increasingly merge the two in America.
Our current habitation system has one pont of failure. If Earth ever buys it--be it bomb or disease (engineered disease)--we all will be gone. We need more isolated habitats. That is where space exploration comes in.
I can't believe that someone who has made such a significant impact upon our knowledge of the environment outside our own planet, could show such a utter lack of vision and foresight.
I'll give you the only reason we need to continue our manned exploration of space; unless someone can figure out a way to stop human beings fucking each other we'll fill this little planet of ours to capacity within a handful of centuries. It's expand or perish, folks, and the only direction we have left to expand is Up.
Anyway, how are we supposed to take over the galaxy if we bum around the bottom of a gravity well? Duh!
--
Karl J. Ots (Professional Nobody)
That we rip open the Stargates! What are we waiting for? Sheesh.
If we don't do it, we are fossils already.
All poetry, mathematics for nothing.
Just dust.
We need to build eco systems in space so we can live off world, just as easily as on.
The reason for space travel is more than just adventurism I am afraid.
Perhaps if this was 1500AD we could argue about adventurism...
But in an age where there are no absolute truths, religion is being perverted, and anything goes depending on your perspective of so called human rights, technology provides us with a momentous decision.
Apply it and diversify the human race, or apply it and nuke ourselves into ruin all in the name of a perverse religion, ideology or the doctrine of submission to some of the worlds worst organizations such as the United Nations.
We need to leave this place soon, and establish a real outpost in space before we lack the resources to do so.
When I mean resources I mean many things, such as moral resources, financial, military and the list is quite long...
Desperate times might call for desperate measures. To insure our survival, we might need to make some short term decisions that may be painful.
Such as, diverting funds from social programs, including social security, medicare. Besides social programs we might have to sacrifice security. We may loose whole cities if we reduced the military program to pay for the outpost. With little security, nations might decide to take advantage of the situation.
Would you be willing to see the United States fall? How about Europe? All in the name of preserving the human race off world? It would not be a sacrifice in vain.
At least as the world fell into ruin, technology and our history would have a chance to be preserved.
Other sacrifices would have to be made....who will go? Families may never see their relatives or whole family trees ever again.
How would we select people? All races would need to participate, even those who may not always get along.
Life will be hard....the outpost will be a free floating structure in space, perhaps many miles in diameter. The entire colony of perhaps 1 million people would be entirely devoted to sustaining the structure and society. Resources and comforts will probably be not affordable. Class structure and ruling class/structure of power would have to be very rigid. Human achievment and what can be done would have to govern societies existence. Contribution would be key driving force in society in technological progress. Ideas and thier successful implementation to preserve the outpost would be the new currency, not wealth or power.
Such a society in a position like this would die too quickly over such details as money and conquest of any kind.
There are many reasons to go, none of them I would describe as adventurous. It would be a struggle to survive.
Advances in science and technology at a pace that would literally be hudreds of times faster than it occurs now would be key to surviving every day that passes. Technology and Science would have to be the driving force for a millenia or more to insure the outpost survival so it can grow.
Education would take on a new meaning, if children of the outpost are not properly educated, the next generation might not be able to sustain the technological pace required to keep the outpost healthy. Everyone could die if technological problems, social problems are not solved and solved quickly.
Such a life is not imaginable by many, but I would risk everything in my life in a second if such a project needed volunteers.
A "Homeworld" in space. With so much at steak in the 21st century, the future is looking very bleak.
Even now the Dragon is waking and it is very hungry. Soon its eyes will wonder...I pity the nation it first sets it eyes on to devore.
-Hackus
Got Geometrodynamics? Awe, too hard to figure out? Too bad.
"Wow, it's only 1 percent" you want us to say, right? Well it's 1 percent of a FRIGGIN HUGE NUMBER!
Let's talk real, relevant numbers,
$15 Billion is THIRTY times the annual budget for heart disease research.
Its SIXTY times the annual budget for breast cancer research.
It's over TWO HUNDRED AND FIFTY times the annual budget for prostate cancer research, which kills 40,000 people a year.
What's more important, folks? Wake up and realize your adventurous little pet geek project is costing us thousands of lives each year.
Is it really worth it? Clearly the answer is no.
And do you know how hard it is to build a vessel capable of maintaining a pressure difference of 1 ATM? Can you imagine how hard it would be to travel about the surface of the Earth in a vehicle that would fail, possibly fatally, if a pressure vessel maintaining a 14-15 PSI pressure difference lost integrity? Can you imagine the carnage on the freeways?
Hold on, wait a second, that's HALF the pressure in my tires. And they're not floating in freefall... they're being bashed against the ground, over and over and over, for hours at a time, while supporting a couple of tonnes of steel in a 1G environment, and being given pretty much zero maintainance (trust me on that bit) for months at a time.
Hmmm... maybe the pressure problem isn't really the tough one after all.
While I think that Van Allen's concerns come from an important introspection brewing in the space community regarding mission safety and purpose -- and hence have an important short-term merit -- I think that history ultimately will reveal such a prohibitory stance toward direct human participation in spaceflight to be anachronistic. Unless as a civilization we choose to shirk the undeniable energy and material resources that avail us in space, and we also choose to stem the population growth of humanity, we will find great purpose by settling the solar system.
"the only surviving motivation for continuing human spaceflight is the ideology of adventure.'"
fine. Seems like a perfectly legit reason to me.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
"They were able to reach the moon..."
I, for one, cannot live with that. It makes me feel uncomfortable because of my greedy nature. I AM human after all.
I kinda find it painful that we put more money into cigarettes than we do trying to go to other planets.
I wonder if we will die out on this rock and never get to colonize other planets.
Yeah... We have our priorities well sorted out.. *Grumble*
1) Expansion. It's true that we could seek to limit the population here, but it is far from clear that we will, or that such an effort will succeed. Having someplace else to grow is a good plan B.
2) Expiration. One day, the earth will not be habitable, whether by our hand, unforseen causes, or old age. Yes, that could be 5 billion years from now, but if General Relativity is right (and even M-theory supports GR), it could take a really long time to get someplace else. Plan ahead! Better to be ready and waiting than stuck with our pants down.
3) Defense. A planet-killing celestial object is not only possible but probable in a cosmic time scale. True, there are unmanned solutions, but continuing to push the technology envolope helps insure we could defend against such a thing; having people on spaceships helps insure they're reliable.
4) Life. The best way to find something is to go looking.
5) Planetism. We're already living on a big spaceship, we just don't think of it that way. Weather it's a hollow asteroid, a 12 mile diameter steel cylinder, or a big ball of rock, we've got to live in space - getting around in it seems only logical.
6) Growth. How but pushing ourselves will we ever grow and learn? And I don't think pioneering / adventure is a bad reason either, but I do think the above reasons constitute something of a mandate.
Look, manned spaceflight as it exists, and as it's projected over the next thirty years, is useless. He's right about the shuttle and the ISS. If Bush's proposed Mars mission is more of the same, then I say scrap it. A one-off Mars shot is just a big waste of time. It's only worth it if it leads somewhere, and the trajectory doesn't look good right now. 20 people per year joyriding at 320 km is not a big enough payoff for the annual US investment. Either kill it or invest enough to make it worthwhile. -- "Nose" and "lose" don't rhyme.
We as a species have only begun to explore this universe of ours, and it is much larger than anybody had ever imagined. While I would agree that the current space program as defined by NASA is a lousy way to do scientific research, that is not all that can be done for a scientific endeavor.
Imagine the following scientific research stations that can and should be built, and justified with current NSF/NASA budgets, provided we can make spaceflight more economical:
And I've just described just the Moon and Mars. There are litterally thousands of Celestial bodies we havn't visited yet, including many of the moons of other planets, the Asteroids, and comets. You can't tell me that you know what to expect on all of these bodies, and unfortunately it will ultimately take somebody with a pick axe pounding into rock to really uncover what is there. There are other ways to extract rocks, but that is ultimately what it will take, and is the best scientific instrument together with a pair of human eyes to actually see and reason about what it being held by a human hand. Robots are just an extension to this concept, but can't be replaced by somebody actually being there.
"wherever these explorers aimed for, they always had a hope that when they came to the end of their journey, the land that they arrived at could sustain them"
Are you saying that non-earthly space bodies could never sustain humans? Fundamentally all people need is energy. And other planetary bodies could certainly provide that. I think people that claim space travel is impossible for whatever reason simply lack imagination.
You criticism of the ocean vessel analogy doesn't wash either. Ships were far from safe, and were by no stretch of the imagination self-sustaining. People can not live off of fish and water alone, sailors with diets lacking fresh fruit suffered form scurvy. Also, ships did run the risk of running out of water, it doesn't always rain. In short, space travel is hard, not impossible.
Whether or not it is worth it is another argument entirely. I maintain the spirit of exploration and conquest is what sustains the human race. I don't feel that these things can be achieved vicariously by robots.
Van-Allen has done all the homework a Scientist needs to do. He knows all about his particular field and how much it costs to get the information needed to understand his particular field. His limited view of the problem is akin to a scientist peering through a telescope at distant planets, too distracted to notice that his lab is burning down around him
There are six billion humans on this planet and there will be 10 billion before long. We already have global warming to worry about, petroleum shortages, food shortages, and medical crises. We are rather better armed than fed (obesity in the western world notwithstanding :-)
To change the outcome for the species from the most likely (self-annihilation) or the ultimately inevitable (pulverization by an errant space-rock), to survival and expansion we must not only "explore" space in person, but also learn to live and work there.
This is not something that is learned by scientists, it is learned by engineers. It is sometimes referred to as "applied science" but it has no status at NASA or among "real" scientists like Van-Allen. So we spend millions on medical research combatting 40 million years of evolution in a gravity well and zero on a spacecraft with dimensions and spin capable of replicating that well.
There are energy, metal, water and hydrocarbon resources elsewhere than on the surface of the earth. If we want any hope at all of saving the one planet we have real access to we have to use those external resources. It really isn't as hard as it looks, but first we have to learn to live and work in space
So the investment in the ISS is wasteful because a robot did more "science" at less cost? No... It is wasteful only if the only thing you know how to count is "pure" science. The ISS is the IDEAL platform for us to learn to live and work there. The Shuttle is unfortunately, the only vehicle we have to make the trip regularly, but that CAN be corrected. Cheap Access To Space should be one of our two primary projects at NASA and understanding how to live and work there must be the other.
With those two things in hand, exploration of space will be done without further government intervention and our future as a species is all but assured. If either one is managed we MIGHT be able to survive the next century. If we fail to do either one we are as doomed as dinosaurs looking at a sudden bright light on the horizon.
respectfully BJ-beware the man of one book
Yes, most people say "I weigh X kilograms" but they really mean that "I have a mass of X kilograms".
Perhaps "newtons/cm^2" would be a more appropriate measure here, as kg/cm^2 really doesn't make much sense.
P.S. I'm sure someone will come along and fill in the real units for pressure here. I cannot remember them off the top of my head.
"Empathise with stupidity, and you're halfway to thinking like an idiot." - Iain M. Banks
rj
Without it, James Van Allen's pants would fall down!
I, for one, welcome our new alien smorgasboard!
I like that phrase. Concise. Apt.
Also true. Everything else is rationalization. Some of it's very good rationalization, but rationalization none the less.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
Not to aid the enemy, but science is not about proofs. The Theory of Evolution cannot be proven. No theory can. Theories can only be disproven.
As mentioned before, though, ID is not falsifiable. It is questionable whether the Theory of Evolution is either. If data comes to light that contradicts an element of the theory, the theory will, for lack of a better term, evolve. It is unlikely in the extreme that any observations will seriously impact the bedrock of this theory.
But ID also cannot make predictions. This is also a characteristic of a robust theory. Actually, ID is so flexible, it can predict anything, for if you have a metaphysical element to your "theory", anything is possible. A "theory" that predicts everything in essence tells us nothing, is not a theory.
ID is not universally interwoven with other sciences, another trait of strong theories. ID and creationism regularly contradict biochemistry, archaeology, astrophysics, genetics. The Theory of Evolution works seamlessly with these and every science. When it doesn't, it's scramble time for researchers looking for a Nobel Prize, believe me.
Creationism, and it's Trojan horse incarnation, are not theories. They are wishful thinking of fundamentalists and have no bearing on the lives of the majority of progressive Christians, Jew, Muslims, Hindus, and atheists (like me).
Two words. Peer review.
I'd hate to let the monkeys have all the fun.
> But then evolution on the grand, macro scale that is, isn't testable either.
Perhaps you saw the PBS special on evolution a couple of years back? Though generally somewhat lame IMO, it did have one nice episode that showed testibility in practice. The guy studying the paleontology of cetaceans looked at the known fossils and their dates, and interpolated when an important intermediary must have existed. Then, rather than going around digging at random spots hoping to find it, he consulted geology to see where former seabeds of the required date are now exposed on dry land. On that basis he planned his safari, and bingo, intermediate cetacean ancestors were lying scattered in the sand, ready to pick up with the bare hands.
BTW, that's a bingo for old-earth geology as well.
> it is just as much a leap of faith to say that the primordial evolved into man over many eons as it is to say man was created
Except that one claim has supporting evidence and the other doesn't.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
> Or perhaps the modern day battleground of evolution against the challenging new scientific theory of intelligent design, which suggests that certain biological features such as the flagellum are irreducibly complex and therefore could not possibly have been developed by increments as evolutionists would have it.
"Intelligent Design" is utter bunkum, nothing but an attempt to whitewash creationism with an appearence of scientific respectability. But you you look at it closely you discover that it's nothing but a collection of obfuscations, non sequiturs, and strawman arguments.
For example, in the case you cite there is a strawman, since "evolutionists" have long known that evolution most often operates by tweaking the function of existing features rather than adding new components incrementally, and a non sequitur, since even if the proponents of ID has shown that the flagellum didn't evolve, it would not actually follow that either intelligence or design had anything to do with it.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Yes -- of course -- the government should not and never should have been involved in space transportation let alone human space flight (perhaps with the exception of militarily justified missions). Everything operational and developmental should have been up to free enterprise. But lets give private adventurers their due. We're natural predators -- curious as cats. We need to know what's around the corner and in space just because it is what we do as humans. Science is an aspect of this predatory instinct as is pure adventure. Some may say that science is more noble -- especially scientists -- but when people put their own money and lives at risk to pursue their own adventures, whether it be Biosphere II, X-Prize or Touching the Void it should be viewed in a moral light as an entirely different thing than government funding pseudo-heroes from an affirmative action line-up.
Seastead this.
http://www.spacequotes.com/
...To achieve the goal visionaries have foreseen
Space Quotes to Ponder
What famous people (and some not
famous) have said about why humankind
must expand into space:
To survive To preserve Earth To eliminate war
To grow Time is running out... To evolve
An alphabetical list of authors is coming. For now, use your Find key (Ctrl-F).
We must colonize space to survive...
"Since, in the long run, every planetary civilization will be endangered by impacts from space, every surviving civilization is obliged to become spacefaring--not because of exploratory or romantic zeal, but for the most practical reason imaginable: staying alive... If our long-term survival is at stake, we have a basic responsibility to our species to venture to other worlds."
Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot, 1994
"I don't think the human race will survive the next thousand years, unless we spread into space. There are too many accidents that can befall life on a single planet. But I'm an optimist. We will reach out to the stars."
Stephen Hawking, interview with Daily Telegraph, 2001
"Let me end with an explanation of why I believe the move into space to be a human imperative. It seems to me obvious in too many ways to need listing that we cannot much longer depend upon our planet's relatively fragile ecosystem to handle the realities of the human tomorrow. Unless we turn human growth and energy toward the challenges and promises of space, our only other choice may be the awful risk, currently demonstrable, of stumbling into a cycle of fratricide and regression which could end all chances of our evolving further or of even surviving."
Gene Roddenberry, Planetary Report Vol. 1, 1981
"The Earth is just too small and fragile a basket for the human race to keep all its eggs in."
Robert Heinlein, speech
"Today the human race is a single twig on the tree of life, a single species on a single planet. Our condition can thus only be described as extremely fragile, endangered by forces of nature currently beyond our control, our own mistakes, and other branches of the wildly blossoming tree itself. Looked at this way, we can then pose the question of the future of humanity on Earth, in the solar system, and in the galaxy from the standpoint of both evolutionary biology and human nature. The conclusion is straightforward: Our choice is to grow, branch, spread and develop, or stagnate and die."
Robert Zubrin, Entering Space, 1999
"The question to ask is whether the risk of traveling to space is worth the benefit. The answer is an unequivocal yes, but not only for the reasons that are usually touted by the space community: the need to explore, the scientific return, and the possibility of commercial profit. The most compelling reason, a very long-term one, is the necessity of using space to protect Earth and guarantee the survival of humanity."
William E. Burrows, The Wall Street Journal, 2003
"In time, [a Martian] colony would grow to the point of being self- sustaining. When this stage was reached, humanity would have a precious insurance policy against catastrophe at home. During the next millennium there is a significant chance that civilization on Earth will be destroyed by an asteroid, a killer plague or a global war. A Martian colony could keep the flame of civilization and culture alive until Earth could be reverse- colonized from Mars."
Paul Davies, The New York Times, 2004
"There are so many benefits to be derived from space exploration and exploitation; why not take what seems to me the only chance of escaping what is otherwise the sure destruction of all that humanity has struggled to achieve for 50,000 years?"
Isaac Asimov, speech at Rutgers University
"Knowing what we know now, we are being irresponsible in our failure to make the scientific and technical progress we will need for protecting our newly discovered severely threatened and probably endangered species--us. NASA is
All this seems to me like a mother who can not stand the thought of her babies leaving the nest. Of course, people have left home before, but only the homes of their families or their villages, etc. This is a bit grander in scale....the Earth is home to all of us.
Can't you just hear it?
"Space?! Now what would you want to go to space for? What, the Earth's not good enough for you now? Is that it?"
Sleep is futile.
This misses the point entirely. All successful surviving species have some important things in common:
Bottom line here people: If we do not get off this rock and into space (new habitats) we may not survive the next "big event" here at home - whatever that may be.
This imperitive is, in fact, in our breeding. What we call the "ideology of adventure" is merely this instinct asserting itself. We don't always recognize this fact, but if we were not "adventurous" we would not be here to discuss it. We would have died out in an ice age, or gotten wiped out by some giant rock from space, or some other mass extinction event.
The fact that we are here at all is a testiment to the fact that we are born explorers (at least some of us - enough of us) and that our ancesters happened to be somewhere else when most of their cousins baught it in some big ugly.
All politics aside, please! and I mean that in a "take my wife" sort of way. Get me on the next rocket ship to the new colony wherever... and by the way get on with it - because I want to be part of that crowd that is somewhere else when this blue ball of wet rock takes it's next hit...
Anybody who thinks exploring space is just an adventure, like some E-ticket tourist attraction with a high price tag, has totally missed the point... Exploration of space, deep oceans, or any other niche we can reach is of vital importance in the long run... The fact that it's fun for us is just as biologically imperitive as sex feeling good - and for good reason.
Lets DO IT!
After fifty years of effort, it's clear that chemically-powered launchers are a dead end. Chemical fuels will never get any better. Weight reduction has gone about as far as it can go. Our launchers are terribly fragile, and not getting any better.
If you could build a spacecraft with the weight budget of a commercial airliner, space travel would be straightforward, craft would be reliable, and the technology would be useful. But chemical fuels are just too weak to do the job.
Chemically fueled rockets are the Zeppelins of the space age. They're big, fragile, and have too little load capacity. They work just well enough that you can delude yourself into thinking the technology can become widely useful. But it just can't happen.
This was well known fifty years ago. NASA, and Apollo, led us down a techological blind alley, trying to improve Kennedy's poll ratings.
Until we get something better than chemical rockets, we should stick to unmanned flights.
NASA had a Breakthrough Propulsion Program from 1996 to 2002, but nobody got a solid, reproduceable result of any value.
Nuclear rockets are quite possible; prototype engines were tested in the 1950s. But a crash would be a major disaster. We still can't do fusion. Nor can we create antimatter efficiently. But, fundamentally, we have to harness a better power source or we're not going anywhere.
From the GP(2 friggin' lines!): "...to refuse to explore space is foolish in the extreme."
That wasn't so hard was it?
Sleep is futile.
The solution to extinction on Earth is not to send out a single life-boat to a chosen destination, but to send out life-boats in every direction and recognize that some will last longer than others. The Soviets knew it ("quantity has a quality of its own") and the plant world exists by virtue of it (launch a million spores, produce a dozen offspring).
Bad Canadian S/F features notwithstanding, the future of the human species may depend more on the journey than in the destination.
Robots make very poor scientists. Moving the people to the science produces better science. This is why we send manned submarines to the depths of the oceans and put guys into heat suits to risk their asses at the edges of volcanos.
Relegating the science to the robots is bad thinging, we want the peopel standing over the work for the same reasons that, robots *could* be used for brain/heart/liver/etc surgery by remote control, we perfer to have the surgeon standing over the body.
Solving habatat problems for robots is an uninteresting problem set as it is easier to build robots for the target habatat than to create a habat for a target robot.
Its about getting maximum bang for the buck. It's about how many times you get to spend each dollar.
While some *VERY MEGAR* (relative) gains can be had for in the continuance of the robotic remote probe techniques we are practicing today, the huge advances that came along with the Apollo (etc) manned programs will be lacking.
Consider this thought problem: you have twelve cubic feet and 500 pounds to work with; create a "first aid station cum doctors office" that *must* support ten people for two years.
These are the kinds of thought problems that demand the kinds of innovation that produce legendary advancements in medical, environmental, and material science. How useful would re-usable, electrically self-sterilizing bandages empregnated with a perminant catylist that acts as an anti-biotic be here on earth? Such a beast would be ideal for that medicine cabinet we are packing off to mars with "those brave souls" whomever they may be.
As a problem that challenges man to advance, and would pay off here on earth, "Pack a lander off to Mars, you have 12 cubic feet and 500 pounds" is no where near as fruitful a problem.
See, when you have the strict requirements and no second chances. When "the worst thing that can happen" is much more serious than "the really expensive remote control car isn't answering", you get concentrated motiviation.
If that motivation is aimed at making things better for people (in any context), as opposed to making things better for machines (in spesific context), you tend to produce things that make it better for any human being in every context.
Better to spend 10 trillion dollars to benefit man then to spend 1 trillion to benefit the cause of RC Racers...
Innocent people shouldn't be forced to pay for inferior software development.
--"Code Complete" Microsoft Press
I get tired, I start making orthogonal and consistent spelling mistakes... 8-)
Innocent people shouldn't be forced to pay for inferior software development.
--"Code Complete" Microsoft Press
http://www.nineplanets.org/plea.html
on a side note;
Would a gay guy do a girl anal and still like it and what would you call it ? Would they even notice the difference ?
If a girl BJ'ed a gay guy in the dark would he notice and care and like it or not?
If a lesbian wanted a kid, would she do it with a gay guy instead of IVF to save a few bucks?
I'm studying theoretical physics, but a lot of the folks I deal with are astrophysicists. Here's the key point to remember: a lot of their funding comes from NASA. A push for the manned space program usually means their funds get cut.
Hubble is one example. More recent ones are WMAP and Planck. The science being done on orbital platforms is incredible, orders of magnitude more interesting than anything done by manned space flight. Thus it boils down to how to allocate a research budget. We can spend it all and put two guys on Mars for a week and a half, or we can send out planetary probes and put up orbital observatories.
We need the research into space travel, but may I remind you Columbus did not build a special vessel with huge government funding to cross the Atlantic. He was given three heaps (even if one of those heaps was a beautiful vessel line the Nina). There's a lot of spacefaring to be done around home to develop the technology, and it's actually economically sound. When we've reached the point where putting mass up the gravity well is as routine as coast hopping in a trireme, then we'll see manned space flight of its own accord, just because of that spirit of adventure which manifests itself in a lot of the comments.
I've never understood how anyone could think that the future of humanity can lie anywhere but amongst the stars.
I wonder if in the far future people will look back on things like this article and think that we were off our rocker to think otherwise (much like we think about the "flat earth on the back of a turtle" people).
First a nitpick: robots produce ZERO "science' All they produce is *data*. Nothing more.
Why build a vehicle before you have a place to go?
We have places to go. Mars, for starters.
If we had spent the 80 billion on better remote sensing gear then we might, by now, have found earth like planets around other stars.
Not ot be rude but are you completely ignorant about the laws of physics and the sheer size of the universe? Spend as much money as you can imagine and it will not change facts about how fast light travels, the odds of being in the path of a comumunication you can interecept AND understand.
Gimme 80 billion and in 20 years I'll have a *thiving* self sufficient Mars colony with money to spare. This colony will be producing much better "scientific data", and will be an additional economy and civilization. This new civilization will be producing scientifically interestinng data in sociology, materials, economics, geology, politics, astronomy, astrophysics, medicine and biology, agriculture, ecology, space travel, communications, chemistry, etc.
What will your 80B "remote sensing" instruments be doing in 20 years? Gathering dust as they are obsolete and nearly or totally useless.
How about 50 years? You see, the more time passes, the more leverage a remote planetary colony generates over the initial investment, and the less valuable your data gathering "remote sensing" instruments become.
Instruments depreciate. A martian colony doesn't.
Real exploration involves going somewhere new, not going to somewhere you have been, using a different route.
So then Columbus was not an explorer in your eyes. He thought he was taking a different route (around the ocean) to a place we'd already been (India).
While I am not a proponent of the ISS, over it's lifecycle, it too would generate more scientificaly interesting data than your mythical remote sensing data that is somehow able to ascertain that a given start billions of miles away is earth-like. Talk about the result of a bad-scifi diet.
Properly utilized, an orbital SS would generate biologic, mecial, astronomic, materials, chemistry, etc. scientifically interesting data.
As opposed to "congratulations you've found a what might be a planet around a star system we couldn't reach for 2.4 million years" or "Congratulations, you've found what you think to be a radio transmission from another culture some billions of miles way that is probably millions of years old, and even if it is true we can't actually verify it is artificial."
Even if the human will provide 1000x the science of the robot, the robot will still deliver more information, because it will be in an area that is a million times more novel than the human.
Oh that is priceless! Here, let me set up a little "robot" to crawl the web and email you various snippets it finds. Now that'll be REAL exploration, as you've never gone there, and it is returning scads more data than you going to slashdot and analyzing what you find.
You see, DATA is a means to an end, not the end. I also disagree with your assertion that robot will provide more data. A robot will ONLY provide the data we designed it to provide. If something is different, or would be interesting if we tweak what we do/look for, it is unable to change it's capabilities. If you want that, be prepared to spend well in excess of 800 billion, and fail.
You see, you design a robot for the place it is going to. Thus, that destination is it's "natural habitat". A human in space, or in orbit, or on Mars is NOT in it's "Natrual habitat" (though a bear in a Studebaker is clearly in its natural habitat). and therefore by definition is obtaining more data, and more *interesting* data.
A human travelling in space is a mobile laboratory. Indeed, as we are a very adaptive specis, sending us to other habitats will induce an evolutionary change. Over the years, humans born in orbit that don't go planet
My Suburban burns less gasoline than your Prius.
The old sit by the fire - the young go hunting and the middle aged hesitate As one well middle aged - I wish it were not true
Humans degrade very quickly if not in a 1.0G environment. As far as we know, even if you can get around the bone loss, immune system degradation, and other big troubles with living long-term in microgravity, you will NEVER be able to have viable offspring in a non-1.0G environment.
To my mind this is the real long-term showstopper to human space travel: our biology isn't compatible with living outside a gravity well.
Probably there would have to be large investment in constructing permanently rotating space stations and even planetary installations to simulate gravity, and the issues with keeping a planetary installation permanently rotating are really a big problem.
Seems to me that humans as we know them may be pretty much permanently and severely handicapped in space. And to me, that says that really large-scale human colonization of space is going to have to wait until after really advanced nanotech has reengineered humans to be more survivable in space.
Ummm...according to a review of the book in French he also had an inflatable raft. That's not the same as being dropped off by yourself. To return to the space analogy you could be dropped off in an inflatable ball with a reentry heatshield and perhaps, with the proper preparation, you'd survive too. True we can't build one of those yet, but neither could we build an inflatable raft when America was first discovered by the Vikings (or even later when Columbus finally got around to it :-).
This story is what, 19 years late? James Van Allen has been saying the same thing at least since his 1985 article, Myths and Realities of Space Flight.
Every time a Shuttle explodes, he goes off on it again... but at least this article you can read on the web, unlike this current one which is still only accessible to subscribers. I suggest everyone read it- he directly addresses some of the objections raised by "persons of a science fiction mind-set" on Slashdot.
... be able to be overtaken by people with little regard for anyone else but their own people and nationalistic ideals. If history has proven anything its that without 'physical' might your culture will be taken advantage of sooner or later when push comes to shove and the intention of an entire nation to take by force another nations wealth/resource/power or what have you.
We have war today except its purely "economic". You can bet your ass when the economy and the people in rich countries who are used to a high standard of living and the system they use to consume most of the worlds resources breaks down that war is not far away when times become desperate.
An intriguing point, which I was not aware of. And while it does not preclude the possibility of ID (for which there really can't be a refutation, since any evidence of how things came to be could be written off as "so that's how God did it") it does give one something to think about. Thanks for taking the time to post that, I'll look look more closely at that when time permits.
Two words. Peer review. More words, is done be people and organizations which are subject to political pressures. Hey, don't get me wrong, peer review is great and is the true bedrock of scientific research and HELPS to ensure sound science gets through. I've read enough scientific publications on prions, abortion-breast cancer issue, tobacco and second hand smoke, nature vs. nurture, to know the review process is far from being objective. Only with that constantly in mind can peer review mean anything at all.