Slashdot Mirror
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....?
"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
I was like, odd hair metal and space don't really seem to go together
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
(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?
...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.
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.
"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)
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
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!"
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.
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.
Yeah, a rocket engine is complex but you are trying to make it seem like it is harder than any other numerous engineering challenges that have already been surmounted by human kind with trial, error, many times loss of life, but most of all with time until we have finally reached the day when the feat to be accomplished is routine.
I think you vastly underestimate the challenge needed to build a tower hundreds of feet tall that will not topple in the first storm or park a submersible on the bottom of challenger deep, under 11 miles (17700 m) of water at a pressure exceeding 16000 pounds per square inch (1125 kg/cm^2).
To you they are trivial because they have already been bested by engineering. Space is the new challenge and it will still prove to be a hard master for many years to come but we will eventually, given the willingness to challenge it, advance in engineering powers to the point where it too is a routine endeavor.
On thing that I find odd, is that in the context of space exploration loss, and the resulting death is viewed as such a horrible risk that the attempt should not be made. Of course I do not want to see people lose their lives... but I would risk mine to try if I was given the opportunity. Yet still, compare this reaction to the loss in the context of other human endeavors... If we made a roll of all those lost at sea in the name of exploration it would read on for pages, no for volumns upon volumns. Heck it was not that long ago when the building of a skyscraper was considered well managed if fewer than 15 workers died during its construction, but in the exploration of space, any risks seems to great to those of us that would rather we just stay here, at home.
Yes we should acknowledge the danger and we should not take undue risk... but we should not let the fear of loss paralyze us into inaction.
Have you thought for yourself today?
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