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The Top Three Reasons for Humans in Space
An anonymous reader writes "Why humans in space? The Space Review has the top three reasons: 3. To work. 2. To live. 1. To survive. 'To work' means doing stuff in space: research, explore, visit, etc. 'To live' means to have humans/life beyond Earth in colonies/settlements. 'To survive' means that putting humans/life beyond Earth is a very Good Thing in case a very Bad Thing happens to humans/life on Earth."
Rather interesting order this article puts the reasons in...
'to work' is not a real reason to go to space, instead, the article really shold have focused on a) the abundant energy and raw materials available in space, and b) the nearly infinitely-customizable work environments abailable in space. At any rate, this is only a secondary reason.
'to live'? Exactly what sort of reason is this? Sure, life is important (of course I think that...I'm a living being...I can't help it), but does that mean it's our manifest destiny to spread life throughout the universe, merely for the sake of spreading life? Again, this reason, although important, is purely secondary.
'to survive'. Finally we come to the heart of the matter...the reason that should have been number one, with the two reasons listed above in support of it. Humankind must colonize space, and do it soon. Between the dwindling rescources available to us while we remain shackled to a gravity well, and the impending mass-extinction events (asteroid, pandemic, super-volcano...take your pick), we are left with very little time in which to secure our species' future. Establishing a viable space-community should be the primary goal of the human race.
(BTW, more interesting information regarding our continued survival can be found here.)
____
~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
I can understand the first two reasons, but what are the bad things that can happen to Earth that won't happen else where?
If they're talking about things like polution, population, nuclear explosion etc., then aren't we just running away from problems by creating more problems?
Rock that crushes, Paper & Scissors that don't matter.
0. FOX News satellite broadcasts pointing in opposite direction.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
Seems to me these are the same reasons for being on Earth...
love is just extroverted narcissism
Mutants!
Yes, you too can mutate beyond your wildest dreams, slice-n-dice your DNA and see what progeny you yield! Two heads? Three arms? Oh, no! That's fine for the Beeblebrox's next door over, but you could have any of the following with proper exposure to unshielded solar radation:
Or with improper planning it may just be a short-lived pile of goo! Send for free brochure:
(Include $10 for shipping and handling)
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
How the heck did "Work" beat out "Anti-Gravity Porn"?
I can understand Living and Surviving are pretty important but I could list a few hundred things that would beat out "Work" on my priority list.
I'm a big tall mofo.
I/we want to know what's out there.
Give a hand, not a hand-out.
1. Space
2. ???
3. Profit!!!
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
If we can't survive here on Earth, our chances somewhere else are worse.
Someone you trust is one of us.
Instead of pushing outward in it's exploration ventures, NASA should push inward and delve deep into Earth's oceans. There's a lot of possibilites for research and discovery right in our "big backyard bathtub" if only we'd take the plunge.
Mission costs would be lower, and I really believe the payoff would be much, much greater!
GET FREE APPLE STUFF!
That also means having enough genetic material in a good diversity in a self sustaining environment. Just having a crew in a space station doesn't count unless it can support itself and you have a large enough population and mixed gender. Otherwise you miss this one.
Get me off this crazy planet. Other humans are making the environment (work, atmosphere, etc) unpleasant for me. Will bartend in zero-g for food.
Zhrodague.net - I do projects and stuff too.
I'm not going to live forever - why should it bother me if humanity doesn't either? Why should I make investments that I know I won't see any returns on?
It looks like reasons 2 and 3 are kinda the same, or very similar.
In my day, you had to get bitten by a mutant spider or become accidentally exposed to uranium to become a mutant. Do you have any idea how short lived mutant spiders are???
...
Everything handed to you on a gold plate, I tell ya
The glorious potential of space porn!
...Survival. So that humans can continue to make stupid, trivial, self-justifying, meaningless lists like this one.
Where the hell is the classical geek answer?
Because.
Because I can, possibly the greatest reason known.
If something catastrophic happened to the earth -- I think it would be meant to be. What's with this human desire to always survive? ..Plus, what kind of existence would living in space be? Even sci-fi does not even make it look truly desireable. .:bleaked
Dude are you the type that's scared of his/her own shadow? Do you hate the dark? Can't stand being left alone?
Because this "hurry up, we must rush to colony space our very survival relies upon it" mentality is nothing but wasted energy...relax. Take a deep breath.
Because you know what -- there's nothing we can do to stop our eventually annihilation AND we don't know WHEN it'll happen.
It could happen tomorrow, next month, next year...or it could happen 100 million years from now...we don't know.
When its our time to be wiped away from existence, nothing will stop that -- including moving off the planet.
We its our time...its our time.
So enjoy it while we have it and stop being so damn paranoid.
The more 'news' I see the more I want to get away from the rest of the people on Earth
0. H0rny alien bab3s
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
In the heart of any exploration, any advance of human genius, there was always some personal itch needed to be scratched.
"oh, we can get to India faster" or "oh, we can fly mail to South America in 3 days" or "oh, we can throw explosives further", all this comes later as part of the speech aimed at the venture capitalists, etc. The foundation, the basic desire is always just because it is there. The practical needs come later.
It will be much safer on the Moon.
If we colonize Mars, I'll be the first to volunteer. Just send me a few virgins and it will be the next L.A. in no time!
In general, the article seemed a bit fluffy. For example, the robot versus people argument didn't mention that sending up a robot to do a specific task is often one or two orders of magnitude cheaper than people. Robotic capabilities keep getting better while plain old non-genetically modified humans remain the same.
I'm not sure that people must colonize space immediately. For me, it's like playing those old sim games. Do you spend limited research dollars on building 1960's style moon bases, or keep pressing on and shooting for nanotech before you move off the planet? If you can hold on long enough before colonization, you can move far more people and reach self-sufficiency much sooner.
Humans must be in space before the Pigs In Space take it over.
It's a perfectly valid point! Everybody wants to "Space", but unless there's money to be made, the Big Men With Dollars aren't going to look in your direction. Which means you either need to talk the government into it - hard enough in good times - or you need an angel investor.
Whichever way you look at it, whichever way it works, finding the mysterious #2 in this case IS our best case to getting into space. Space tourism is risky and expensive, but it's only a start. If we could come up with some good, financial, bottom-line-friendly reasons to get into space, we could get some serious money - and effort - behind it.
So we can find that mysterious Planet of the Apes...
We might have a chance in space in the event a comet hit Earth, but given the poor math done on several "near misses" in the past, they'd probably just move the space station directly into the comet's path... Probably by mixing Metric and English in their equations....
If something bad happens and humans life is wiped out on Earth, it would only be a very Good Thing to have humans/life beyond Earth if I was one of the human beings, otherwise I'd be dead, and who could give a hoot when they are dead?
I stole this
> Between the dwindling rescources available to us
Let's start with limiting the resources used by the biggest user, the US federal government.
Limit what it does and you greatly reduce the amount of energy/resources used.
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Ah, a specimen of the elusive Damogran Frond Crested Eagle right here on /.!
Stop learning! Only you can prevent esoterrorism.
Raise your children as if you were teaching them to raise your grandchildren, because you are.
Every week they have a new pseudo-scientific special on the latest thing that's going to wipe out all life on earth.
Either it's an asteroid, or a super volcano, or the made-up global instant ice-age scenario of "the day after tomorrow", or some sort of supermegavirus.
People see it and think it's 100% inevitable science fact, when it's pretty much just based conjecture and what-if's.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
Always have a backup civilisation/planet/atmosphere in case the first goes down.
Make sure you have enough redundancy in your population to ensure DNA data integrity
I really don't understand this argument: Basically, we should expend an enormous amount of resources on sticking a few people on different planets in our solar system. This will obviously require an enormous amount of resources.. Wouldn't that resource be better spent, say, finding a renewable energy source that doesn't kill life here? Oh, and on sorting out the Third World countries? These space-faring ideas are great romance, but in reality we're not ready. Our time for expansion across space will be after we've sorted out the problems on our planet.
#1: It's fun.
That's why the US led the space race in the 1960s and 1970s. Space is fun. Driving fast, floating around, looking down on the whole earth, boldly going where no human has gone before. 1960s/70s America was the most highly developed fun place ever, and space "exploration" was just part of that. The US has really lost touch with fun since then. Just as other countries have really gotten back into the swing, after their own fun recess. Hopefully the new space race that's brewing will be raising the fun to new heights. And maybe the competition will push the US back into the fun vanguard once again.
BTW, I look forward to counterarguments that point out where other countries have the US beat in the fun race. Let's get it on!
--
make install -not war
until you have to mow it
None of these are sufficient reasons, but what will actually drive exploration is power-- military power. That's what drives the satellite and Space Shuttle business today.
First we need to learn about how to maintain this planet, before we go spoiling others. Ecosystems need attention; we need serious birth control; a cure for malaria and AIDs; ways to feed the poor and educate them-- not more money for space exploration-- it helps none of these.
We need to fix how we relate to each other, then we can go and screw up the rest of the galaxy
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
4. To suck up vast amounts of the space exploration budget, leaving nothing for robotic exploration that actually accomplishes real science?
Assuming that you're correct and man cannot damage the earth to the point of it being uninhabitable, there are certainly plenty of other ways for us to not survive here that the article specifically mentions
Not the least of which is self-annihilation by nuclear or biological weapons (which have proven that they are ready and capable of killing many of us very quickly). The article also mentions natural disasters, which (once again) have proven themselves able to wipe out huge portions of the earth.
We are also aware of certain natural disasters that might be able to wipe out ALL LIFE on this planet pretty much within a day. I won't bother naming any because most educated people should be able to come up with at least 3 good ones, including as least one inevitability.
Seriously, I think its a given that nanotech, quantum physics, protein research, environmental sciences etc are fields that will have a much much larger impact on the wellness and progress of humanity in the next century than speace research, and it is in these areas we should be spending.
I always thought that the best hope for world peace is to find some intelligent alien specie that we can get together to destroy.
This article entierly misses the point. No one argues that humans should not eventually go to space for these reasons and many more. The question is whether it makes sense to send people into space now.
In particular the question boils down to whether the money spend on human space flight now would be better spent on general technological advancement and not wasted on giant solid rocket boosters. This general technilogical advancement would then reduce the cost and increase the utility of going to space. This would be a plan to ultimately colonize space faster <I>in the long run</I> and in no way contradicts the arguments in the article.
In short the question is whether we are ready for human space flight or if we should spend more of our resources laying groundwork. I mean I think we all agree that in the 1950's it would have been a mistake to just try and build a really big v2 and do space exploration in that fasion. Instead we needed to do lots more research and build tools. Perhaps we need to build better launch systems, robotic support systems, life support systems and the like before it really makes sense for humans to be in space.
In particular at the moment it is not economically effective to send humans to space for raw materials. Thus at the moment argument 1 doesn't really apply yet. Also we don't have the technology to establish independent colonies. If the earth was hit with a disaster any space colonies we had now would die without support. This means argument 3 doesn't really apply yet. Finally argument 2 is a good general goal but it has no time component. Sure lets put life in space but lets spend our money now on technology and later use that to more effectively put life in space.
(Yes I admit that human space flight has some spin offs. However, my claim is that these spin offs are not really worth the large price <I>compared to other research opportunities</I> like robots or ground based research)
If you liked this thought maybe you would find my blog nice too:
Because we can.
Humans must and should always explore and study in order to move away the borders that separate the known from the unknown. This is done through research, observation, reproduction and it will ultimately pay in the long run.
The worst mistake we could do would be to expect a nobel-prize discover from every research we do (that's how investors too often kill science).
Knowledge grows and grows apparently without any practical use until one day, perhaps after 25 years of lost battles, say, against cancer, a microorganism discovered during a completely unrelated research on some planet (or grown in orbit, for example) gives us the right answer.
And maybe the 25 years of cancer cure research will lead to some other discovers in other fields.
This is pure speculation, of course, but my point should be clear: we must explore, period.
Sort out the Third World? The only way to do that is to embark on a program of regime changes because most of the Third World's problems come from totally and completely broken governments (who then blame the Evil West). But, oh, we tried that recently and the whole world hates us for it. Oh well...
"To work, to live, and to survive" is the "kindergarten" answer to this question. A more adult answer would be:
3. Insight/Inspiration 2. To Learn, 1. Resources
-- Betting on the survival of the media industry is a serious risk. I advise investing elsewhere.
No, there is no easy answer for our abuse and pollution of the only place we can be. We're just going to have to clean this place up.
...that a very Bad Thing happening to humans here on Earth would be a very Good Thing in the long run...and who would want to mess that up by fostering another "nest" of overbred, self-exalted monkeys somewhere else?
It takes just a moment and an action to destroy. It takes some time and thought to create.
I always feel a bit misanthropic when I hear this argument...exactly why is it that Man must survive an extinction level event? I'm sure we'd all like to believe that we're too important to lose, but are we really?
What is it that Man has done that is truly universal? It seems like we've done plenty of stuff that is universal to Man, but to all living things everywhere in the universe? That sounds staggeringly arrogant to me. How do we even know what qualities make something universal in this sense?
That kind of argument can potentially keep humans out of space forever. Theoretically, there will always be superior technology on the horizon, and if we always decide to wait for it, then we'll never get anywhere.
Also, there is the distinct possibility that the decision for humans to travel to space would actually act as a catalyst for innovation. After all, necessity is the mother of invention.
Mens et Manus
This article entierly misses the point. No one argues that humans should not eventually go to space for these reasons and many more. The question is whether it makes sense to send people into space now.
In particular the question boils down to whether the money spend on human space flight now would be better spent on general technological advancement and not wasted on giant solid rocket boosters. This general technilogical advancement would then reduce the cost and increase the utility of going to space. This would be a plan to ultimately colonize space faster in the long run and in no way contradicts the arguments in the article.
In short the question is whether we are ready for human space flight or if we should spend more of our resources laying groundwork. I mean I think we all agree that in the 1950's it would have been a mistake to just try and build a really big v2 and do space exploration in that fasion. Instead we needed to do lots more research and build tools. Perhaps we need to build better launch systems, robotic support systems, life support systems and the like before it really makes sense for humans to be in space.
In particular at the moment it is not economically effective to send humans to space for raw materials. Thus at the moment argument 1 doesn't really apply yet. Also we don't have the technology to establish independent colonies. If the earth was hit with a disaster any space colonies we had now would die without support. This means argument 3 doesn't really apply yet. Finally argument 2 is a good general goal but it has no time component. Sure lets put life in space but lets spend our money now on technology and later use that to more effectively put life in space.
(Yes I admit that human space flight has some spin offs. However, my claim is that these spin offs are not really worth the large price compared to other research opportunities like robots or ground based research)
If you liked this thought maybe you would find my blog nice too:
Space travel is not the answer to disaster-preparedness. It amazes me how naive people are about our actual rate of progress in these discussions...what gives you any indication we are ready to go anywhere else on a full-time basis in the next century?
#1 To Survive would only be a "Very Good Thing" if humans weren't the most incredibly sucky species on the planet. If exploring space will ensure human survival then that's a strong argument for not doing it.
You never really know how close to the edge you can go until you fall off.
...unless someone invents a machine that can piss on rocks.
If there is a disaster event we will have no choice but to procreate our way out of it if enough people survive, just like the last ice age.
We started as a small group, probably someplace in Africa, and now we are everywhere on the planet. Even in the worst places, where there really is no reason to go. We will go because we can't stop.
What keeps me going is my inertia.
You are totally wrong. The best reason to go into space is to procreate with those hot hot Mimbari chicks.
1. Power -- as in war machines 2. Prestige -- as in power 3. Sex -- once a couple gets a semi-private moment I used to argue against the idea that the Soviets and Americans had studied sex in space, but now believe it must have been done. With doomsday imaginations spinning on both sides, it makes sense that they would send up a couple to, you know, find stuff out. "Space tourism" sure sounds like "come on up and get it on" to me.
Because it would be really fucking cool!
KFG
Seriously, I would be perfectly happy living on a hollowed out asteroid, communicating only with my peer groups back on Earth, Moon, and Mars, and out of reach of politicians and lawyers.
It would of course require being permanently on the move and anonymous, otherwise they catch up with you wherever you are. And blasting them into atoms isn't the solution, it just brings more your way.
I'm not saying that we won't get there eventually but what is the big rush all of a sudden? The vast majority of our problems here on earth do not arise from a sudden increase in solar flares, meteor bombardment, volcanic eruption, and so on. Those phenomena have been consistently with us throughout our history.
Our substantial and urgent problems are all caused by too many people trying to take too many resources. Are these problems too obvious to be interesting? An effective way to solve them would be to have fewer people using resources more modestly.
It's not clear that proposals to send a very few people into space at an enormous cost in resources would be effective for any practical purpose, let alone in comparison to the alternatives and specific purposes at hand. So my advice would be for us to grow up and get our priorities straight, or we'll all die a miserable death of resource exhaustion long before our species is ready to go to space.
By all means, let's work on the Space Elevator and other projects, but slowly, thoughtfully, and with due regard for our preeminent responsibility to this planet.
Parity: What to do when the weekend comes.
Lets pollute the Universe!! Yiiiiihaaaa!!!
'To survive' means that putting humans/life beyond Earth is a very Good Thing in case a very Bad Thing happens to humans/life on Earth.
Hmmph. If the entire planet Earth died, that would be cool, because that means Jamie Zawinsski would be dead.
Join the Culture the moment I meet them!
I think, therefore I am...I think.
The one thing that concerns me about this is that most Very Bad Things we have to fear are the same reasons spreading our species could be a Very Bad Thing.
1. Alchohol and Space Travel are probably not a good mix...therefore ruling out 95% of the population. 2. Traveling huge distances for long periods of time and still receiving spam in your inbox would be enough to break anybody. 3. Michael Jackson's face would not be able to withstand zero gravity.
It takes just a moment and an action to destroy. It takes some time and thought to create.
I think you are on track here, however, I think "economic activity" might be a better description for the motivation that profit. Not every business venture makes a profit. Putting people into space is likely to cost a great deal, but it will also excite imaginations and increase economic activity. This will increase the economic pie. Undoubtedly, some people will make profits, their profits will help sustain the efforts. The motivation for the society to support humans is space is economic activity. The motivations for individuals will range from the desire to discover to making profitable investments.
Still, the author does put a nice economic sounding spin to his argument.
Risk management catchphrases:
Supply and demand:
This all sounds well and good but I think the author might give "cost-effectiveness" a look.
Cost-effectiveness is "a comparison between the relative expenditure (costs) and outcome (effects) associated with two or more courses of outcome."
The US administration contends that the Koyoto agreement is too costly to implement. How about increasing the value of our current investment (earth) by decreasing the probability that something might go wrong (global warming).
Surely it is more cost-effective to limit Co2 emissions that to burn away and aim for Mars in 2030?
Also, if life is so valuble due to its rarity, why jump the gun and send astronauts out to do what robots can do just as well (and they can for now)? Investing in artificial intelligence has a higher probability of returning an eventual profit that investing in life support. We're more likely to be able to use AI in various indurstries than we are of making earth inhabitable in the near future.
When we've got the AI technology right, we'll send robots out to colonize and will therefore have to do less research into life support.
Treo + Kaffi = Traffi
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Already there, called "The Uranus Experiment."
Not quite anti-gravity, or even really microgravity. Instead, it was filmed on a Vomit-Comet-like airplane. Penn Gillette wrote about it, in his article about his rental of the same plane.
Haven't seen it, yet. Maybe one of these days...
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
I see space colonization as a must. A good enterprise (especially the Great Human Enterprise) should always have a usable back-up at an offsite location.
Wood Shavings!
- Godai
The desires expressed to go away from earth are not practical. What if something happens to ruin earth? You'd have to ruin earth's environment to make it less habitable than your romantic far-off space destination. A couple of atom bombs and a tsunami now and then don't come close to making the mess that is gracious living on the moon or mars or alpha centauri.
If outer space was such a great place to live, people would already be going there and building country homes and golf courses.
All the Puppeteers left already.
Vuja De: That sinking feeling that this is going to happen again. Often occurs in meetings with Product Managers.
Slight oversimplification, but the idea is there.
Oh and by the way, IAARS (I am a rocket scientist).
IWARS.
People, in general, disappoint me. Politicians even more so.
all of this countries executives and see if they make it ... Somehow I doubt that without all of us workers bees they will ... Oh well!
to nuke the planet whith a front seat on the moon!
In Space!!!!
Call me crazy for asking, but can we really take it for granted that colonizing space is a good thing? Both the "to live" and "to survive" arguments seem to be largely predicated on the survival of the species insinct with very little reason to back it up.. The article plays on our fear of self desctruction and to a lesser degree, natural disaster. Why is survival of the species so important beyond what we can do here and now? If we do manage to destroy Earth, do we really deserve the rest of the solar system... or even the galaxy? Personally, I think we should think harder about getting our shit together here before we seriously consider colonizing space. Otherwise, we are doomed to repeat history. Perhaps it is time to make a stand and say "We've got to learn to make it here."
/., but I thought i should bring it up.
I don't think this is going to be a popular sentiment on a forum such as
-matthew
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
They only have to hold out for a few million years until another civilization arises on the Earth to help them out. Piece of pie.
the article really should have focused on... the nearly infinitely-customizable work environments available in space
"Space: Dilbert's Final Frontier"
Because, although your cubicle is already cold and airless, space would be even more so.
And if you thought reading Slashdot all day caused muscle atrophy...
I heard Peter Ward and Don Brownlee pumping their book a couple of years ago on National Public Radio's Science Friday. They propose that NO life will be possible in approximately 500 million year due to the life cyle of the Sun. I only heard the last few minutes of their explanation, but they contend that the organic molecules that life depends on here on Earth will not form under the intense ultraviolet radiation that will be pumped from Sol in a half-billion years. No organic molecules, no life.
Okay so what if they are wrong? If Sol takes the normal life course of any star it will expand and consume the inner terristrial planets, Earth included. That scenario can only be avoided by the only other option stars take: a nova and possible core collapse. That isn't exactly a path that leads to expansion of organic life either.
So we either move out into space or die out as a life form. Humans might not (probably not) exist in those timeframes, but organic life will have to move to survive.
"Rocky Rococo, at your cervix!"
Top three reasons for humans to go into space:
Read my blog.
This weeks is mega-tsunamis, just saw the show yesterday.
Real reason: Job security for space scientists.
Robotic exploration of space is the only kind we should ever do.
Help end the use of Sigs. Tomorrow
Educate us all why we had to go to the moon in the 60s. Also let me know how it is that the rest of the planet that did not go to the moon continues to exist and thrive.
Hey, I just blogged about this! Who copied?
Anyway, my point was that you need a bunch of things for people in space. You need a lot of individuals to think that outer space (which is pretty bleak) is better than Earth. Then you need some organization to think there's some benefit. For example - You buy a ticket away from Earth's radiation and your family live in an underground cave like Total Recall. You buy into a biosphere scheme and accept certain responsibilities for a mostly mechanized, well planned environment. Which was built by some company that's doing such stuff.
*#*#*#*#*#******* I love peanut butter sandwiches!
I'm not tense. I'm just terribly, terribly, alert.
I am picturing the Mars colony having their own Mars tea party, civil war, independance day, and finally both planets creating IPBM's (Inter-Planetary Ballistic Missiles) ushering in a new era of inter-planetary MAD.
You also have to consider the possibility of Marvin the Marshan finding his Uranium PU-36 Explosive Space modulator or the Cylons attacking.
We have to go in space - because Limozeen is:
Homestarrunner Wiki See the toon
Spelling mistakes: My is english spoken not tongue of mother.
Call me a skeptic, but I don't think there any realistic possibility of establishing a self-sustiaining human space colony within any of our lifetimes. The International Space Station has sucked up a huge fraction of NASA's resources as it is. A truly self-sustaining colony would not only have to include the means to regenerate food and water, but also would have to include manufacturing capabilities for extraordinarily complex machinery. Think of starting a new economy on a previously undiscovered continent with unlimited natural resources and energy, but only whatever tools can be carried in a small ship.
I can maybe see us establishing a moon colony that is biologically self-sustaining. However, to establish a moon colony that is itself capable of building new space ships, computers, etc. from scratch is an almost unimaginably larger problem.
Don't interpret this as a cynical comment about capitalism or human greed: this is a basic economic reality. What if we spend trillions just to bring back a few moon rocks or stick some NASA jockeys in a white tent on Mars? Unless there are phenomenal payoffs (in the form knowledge) to such ventures, such scenarios are "failure".
On the other hand, if we are able to mine asteroids for extradorinary materials or terraform Mars, than we might be looking at a scenario called "success".
Personally, I would really like to see humans make it into space, but I'm pessimisitic about the opportunities. I suspect that the next frontiers for humankind lie more along the lines of biology, medicine, and AI: let's engineer immortality and hyper-extend consciousness before we colonize space (unless there's a definite payoff to the latter).
-1, Too Many Layers Of Abstraction
That's just asking to get annihilated by a fleet of Vogon ships.
They wont like seeing their poetry outdone.
OK, maybe my thoughts on this matter are a bit simplistic, but if you consider the Malthusian Catastrophe (sometimes known as the Malthusian Dilemma), it boils down to two things:
While, in theory, some would argue we should adopt economies based upon sustainability rather than growth, I think it's more realistic to say that this will only happen when we have no choice. In the meantime, in our never-ending quest for resources, we can look at those two bullet points and notice that the real limiting factor isn't "resources", but "our planet."
I certainly don't believe we can solve our population problems via space exploration, nor do I think it's likely we're soon going to be in a position to utilize enough space-based resources to make a difference at the bottom of our gravity well. However, we can still spread the human race further and increase our chances of survival (as mentioned in the article) by ensuring that some humans are not dependent on our planet's resources.
But as a last ditch effort to sway those Harvard business school types who really don't understand the long-term benefits we get from space exploration, here's a short list of technologies have been directly a direct result or space research or greatly enhanced by said research:
I've ranted a bit more about this in one of my journals.
It is not my claim that humans ought to survive (I'm not making a claim either way on that one). It is a viewpoint that was assumed by the article.
And, in fact, it was not very presumptious for them to assume that, as survival is a basic instinct in most humans (something that has been naturally selected for many years). I would venture to say that if you do not care at all about survival of our species, than you are the exception rather than the rule. And more interestingly, if caring about survival and procreation is in any way genetic, your type is likely to become more rare as the years go by.
Cowboy Bebop is awesome.
(there goes my good karma:'( )
...then I couldn't care less about the rest of humanity.
Law of the Jungle.
Why do you think they call it the human RACE anyway? becuase we are all competing for survival.... against each other.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
1) I'm tired
2) we require it to function
3) it's my favorite hobby
Why do I give a damn about other humans surving in space if I don't survive?
Just think - with overpopulation and limited resources, moving out into space solves all our problems for FREE!
Oh wait - no it doesn't. Say we even manage to get 1% of the earths population out there off the earth. We'll quickly replace that number on earth alone, despite all the effort (and vast resources) being put forth to sustain the colonies that are to be created off-world. Now we have even fewer resources, for still more population. We'll still be providing the resources for that off-world population (plus a big load of technology) for years to come, easily a few generations, before they can become reasonably self-sufficient.
Even when that point comes, we'll just be back where we started - humans ruining other moons or planets.
Maybe we should get our shit together at home before we spread forth, otherwise we're the same as all of those 'evil aliens' in all our movies that come to steal the earths resources. Didn't you ever wonder why that was such a common plot point?
If we don't, we're just a virus and a plague on this galaxy.
cyn, free software and *nix operating systems enthusiast.
I have read lots of articles and comments regarding space settlements, CEV with the new Vision for Space Exploration. However, all the focus is on the spacecraft but I haven't seen much discussion on launch vehicles. The new Delta IV is a puny, not close to the Saturn V (the biggest yet but only can take 2 or 3 guys to the moon in a spacecraft the size of a Astrovan).
Yes, there are papers on concepts like space elevators but those are quite some time from now.
We need a launch vehicle that can put hundreds of tons into orbit, and to the Moon and beyond. Russians even had a lunar lander but since their N1 rocket took a dump, they never went beyond earth orbit.
So what's the point of all this if there are no large launch vehicles planned?
I don't think colonization of space makes any significant difference to population. To make mass exodus of population feasible you have to assume insanely cheap transport. After all, even to stabilize the population you are talking about transporting millions of people each year. You would have to get transport between Earth and a colony down to the equivalent fare of a plane ticket today.
Second, unless you are contemplating involuntary migration, I don't think you would find the millions of volunteers needed every year.
1. Rockets
2. Fuel
3. Willing Astronaut
You're just poo-pooing space colonies because you WANT to be able to go up to the hot chick after a disaster and say, "we have no choice but to procreate our way out of this."
Professor of Astronomy, Author of Spider Star & Star Dragon (Tor)
... for survival of mankind what we must do is put some human colonies outside, but that is not the whole truth. The ones that must go to that far far away and with improbable chances of survival are all politicians (ok, and maybe phone cleaners). After that, our chances of survival are far better.
Reason #4: The Three-Breasted Whore of Eroticon 7
There's a presumption built into this whole discussion that the human race is summum valorem, and must be preserved at all costs.
I counterpropose that human beings are more valuable than the human race.
It just might be the height of arrogance to suppose that we should do everything in our considerable power to colonize space simply for the purpose of perpetuating our own spawn, rather than solving the many problems we face here. The proverbial Martian would be well-justified in wanting to prevent a race intent on committing nuclear suicide from spreading over the Universe!
Of course, if we really are alone in the universe, and in fact nothing but a coincidence (in itself an anti-scientific view), then my argument is false.
"'To survive' means that putting humans/life beyond Earth is a very Good Thing in case a very Bad Thing happens to humans/life on Earth." Bad things? You mean like Bush? O_o Space seems pretty good right now. *dodges nuclear warhead*.
http://www.UnFiction.com http://www.ARGN.com http://www.ImmersionUnlimited.com http://www.Linux-SP.com
First we have to make the cylons before they can attack us.
Come on people, didn't you read Bradbury? When the Earth is destroyed, the only people left on the Martian colony will be one guy and a fat chick. What kind of survival is that?
f u cn rd ths u cn gt a gd jb n cmptr prgmng
We do not need a planet-breaking disaster, one that will wipe out carbon-based life forms will do. The most significant such threat is probably a near-by (within a few hundred lights) gamma-ray burst. The odds of that happening in your life time is very close to zero. The odds of it happening while the earth still supports human life is significant, close to 100%. If we do not exterminate each other before that, there is consequently close to a 100% chance that a wipe-out of all human life on the planet will occur. Prior to that we should have established human colonies at least half a kilolight away. Better start as soon as possible.
From the late, great dean of Science Fiction Robert A. Heinlein:
"The Earth is just too small and fragile a basket for the human race to keep all its eggs in."
the most incredibly sucky species on the planet
Apparently you've never heard of the leech, lamprey, or remora.
All employees must wash hands before seeking equitable relief.
#3 is anti-progressive because offering an alternative to EarthGov will harm it, just like alternatives to state schools will harm them, alternatives to Social Security will harm it, etc.
Oh, and because it might allow a few "narrow minded" people to escape.
-Anonymous Phil
There's a potential route from suborbital all the way to space hotels to lunar trips; that is mostly funding driven (i.e. suborbital profit is likely to lead to increased orbital flights, the technology is not really directly applicable, although it's quite closely related.)
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"Can't anyone see that this is bacteria controlling us?! It cares nothing for our well being, it only wants us to create space ships so it can find its way our of here and infect other systems with itself, spawning all types of bizarre life. Bacteria is smarter than us. It controls us and will simply do its bidding. How can something evolving that fast not be superior? It doesn't "communicate" with us for the same reason we don't communicate with Ants. When it has no use for us, we will simply fade away and it will move on to the next system and repeat this over and over again until it rules the cosmos!
"If you are a dreamer, a wisher, a liar, A hope-er, a pray-er, a magic bean buyer
boy fundies would hate this. space exloration throws incredible monkey wrenches in their gears.
Real reason: Job security for space scientists.
Actually space scientists prefer robotic missions. Most of us do, at least.
It's all fine to sum up the reasons why we should set up a space colony, but it seems to me that it always comes down to cost and incentive: Who's going to cough up the money for this project, and why should they? There are plenty of space enthusiasts who will tell you that more can be learned about what's out there for a lot less if you just stick to using robotic probes and telescopes.
Of course, not colonizing space means that we keep all of our eggs in the same basket, which I agree is a bad thing, but convincing the average Joe of this is not easy. Nobody's going to want to spend that much money to help people live up there when it's obviously cheaper (and not to mention nicer) to live down here. If you ask me, this attitude will only change when enough of us decide that it would be *better* to live up there than down here. First, though, life down here will have to become miserable enough for people to start thinking such crazy thoughts, but it looks to me like we're well on our way to making that happen. So, IMHO, we will eventually leave the nest, but only after we ruin it first.
The fossil record has already shown us a number of cases where colonizing new territory has saved species from extinction.
The best known is probably the horse. This species evolved in North America. 10,000 or so years ago, this continent was hit with an invading super-predator, humans. Shortly thereafter, horses were extinct in North America. But luckily, a small population of horses had already managed to cross the Bering land bridge and colonize Eurasia. Those colonizers managed to for a symbiotic relationship with - irony alert - humans. The Asian humans found their horses useful for much more than food, and the developed a strong, long-lasting partnership. And eventually, the horses used their companion humans to recolonize North America.
Sounds like something that a science-fiction writer might use for a plot. But there are a number of stories like this in the history of life on this planet.
In our case, it's more likely that we'll be wiped out by a micro-organism, possibly of our own making. There are other less likely disasters, any of which could wipe out all humans on Earth. If we want to survive, spreading out to other niches is one important strategy.
Of course, if there are other living things Out There, they may not welcome us.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
Joe Sixpack seems willing to spend quite a bit on
pay-per-view fees and on stadium construction bonds.
How much could we raise from zero-gee boxing matches
onboard the Space Station? Or moonbuggy NASCAR races?
Moon golf? 1/6 gee basketball? etc. etc. etc.
>;k
to drop bombs on other nations and hasten global extinction.
1) Zero G nookie!
Humans are expensive. Humans need food, water, air, protection from solar radiation, exercise, and a healthy social environment. Robots just need batteries. A manned mission to Mars would cost many billions of dollars. For that money, we could send multiple robotic probes to every planet in the solar system and learn far more.
Human life is precious. Spaceflight is dangerous, and some missions will fail. When this happens to robots it's unfortunate, but when it happens to humans it's tragic. One space shuttle full of astronauts is lost and we stop our main space missions for more than two years. Even successful missions can be one-way tickets to a cold grave. Could we have done the Voyager missions with humans aboard? I'm sure some citizens would volunteer for one-way trips, but our society would not allow it.
Sending humans to space is unnecessary for preservation of the species. One frequently cited reason for manned spaceflight is preservation of the species in case something bad (war, disease, or asteroid strike) happens on Earth. But we could preserve seeds of humanity without space travel. Build self-sufficient colonies on the bottom of the ocean or in a deep mine. Sustain them with geothermal or nuclear power. Such colonies could survive any of these disasters. Living below the surface might be hard, but it's still far more hospitable and cheaper than space.
Sending humans to space is ineffective for avoiding overpopulation. The number of humans on Earth has increased by one billion in the past ten years. To maintain a constant population on Earth, we would need to send away 100 million people per year. That is a spacecraft carrying 200 passengers launched every minute of every day.
Robots are tools of the human spirit. Some might complain that robots can't think or feel, so they can never really explore. But that argument is similar to saying that I should walk rather than drive on my summer vacation since cars can't appreciate vacations anyway. Robots are our tools, and it is humans that decide how they should explore and it is humans that reap the knowledge and it is humans that enjoy the wealth and comfort of robotic labor.
I hope that our nations' space programs will spend resources wisely and make good use of robotic exploration.
AlpineR
Because it's there. Because I want to see it. Because I want to explore. For now, I'll live with the remote presence provided via robotics. Eventually, that will not be new enough, real enough. I'll have to go, in person. Touch the soil with my bare hands. See the land with my own eyes...
In an unknown future, some aliens came to earth, and discovered that:
After destroying and devastating the earth, a primitive specimen in the planet, called humans, destroyed all the planet and themselves.
This very primitive specimen liked to eat another animal specimens, and didn't have birth control.
Their superpopulation increased to a huge ammount and destroyed their basic resources, and they began an internal war to get ownership of their remaining scarse resources.
Their population was destroyed by war and some kind of unknown virus that spreaded over the planet, mainly because their population caused a ecological disaster of huge proportions in the planet.
Some documents discovered inside the planet said that another unknown alien people prohibited the humans go to space, because these aliens didn't want the humans destroying all their neighborhood.
These aliens only prohibited the humans to destroy other planets, but didn't go inside the planet or attacked the Earth planet.
The humans didn't have the competence to live in a very rich planet, destroying all the planet resources and destroying themselves.
You two have become masters of irony by using your experience playing the computer game masters of orion to infer the difficulties and consequences of space colonization and then labeling the article "utter fantasy".
1. Unlimited energy
2. Unlimited raw materials
That seems to me to be such a greater proposition than "to work" or "to live". Imagine tne entire world entering an economic prosperity that doesn't end for fifty thousand years... That's think kind of thing you get by utilizing the resources of our solar systel, let alone outer space.
The eternal dilemma of the CC is that they seek to help the poor and that is their biggest source of worshipers. But as soon as the poor are not so poor anymore they run off (or their kids do) and become Protestants.
That is why the CC is against birth control, they need a constant supply of poor people.
CowboyNeal Space Porn. What? This wasn't a /. poll?
Oooops!
"I worked hard for it. I deserve it. And I have it," Campbell said. "It's all mine."
It's to join the 200 mile high club!
Got sushi? The Sushi FAQ
I have always thought that turning women into incubators and men into simple sperm banks for procreation was far more dehumaninzing, than admitting that humans like to enjoy each others company in whatever form it takes.
I don't think I'd mind so much -- cleaning the bar might be as easy as closing up the shop, and opening it up to space. *Poof!* no more mess! Prolly the most fun way to get back at those who don't tip well.
Maybe instead of zero-g bartender, I could be a zero-G marijuana farmer -- bud from outer space!
Zhrodague.net - I do projects and stuff too.
Why does it seem like such a case for survival now?
What about the thirst for knowledge and understanding of or galaxy/universe? Why should we totally ignorant to the environment around us making excuses (religion) for our existance?
I guess it's got to go along the line of using 'Fear' of Death/Mortality to motivate people (i.e. governments) to pursue goals. This seems like quite a selfish and dangerous path to follow. Fear like faith is a very malleable personality trait.
"Off Topic!"
"I'll give off topic, It's 4am in the morning... and no, I didn't RTFA!"
oh that's great. we come, screw the whole planet and now that it's becoming unmannable we simply give up on our earth and go to space to screw another one.
Space colonies are a good idea whatsoever. I would personall love to put on third of OUR useless bastards (including anyone who became president in any country in the past 100 years -perhaps i pardon mandela) in a ship, convince them something really bad is gonna happen to earth (like being eaten by a giant goat) and then send them to shipwreck in somebody else's backyard.
Why don't some of those clamoring for space travel go ahead and pony up their money and pay for the thing. Why make everyone pay for your thirst for knowledge. Some people have trouble enough getting by month to month. It is the height of hubris to then say to them "We are going to take some of your money to go to other planets." Let the (relatively) rich geeks pay for their own toys.
Logic ... merely enables one to be wrong with authority. -- Doctor Who
A trained expert if there are any..
How many Humans would it take to have a gene pool big enough to avoid inbreeding?
Based oon the (somewhat patchy) fossil record, the average run for a hominid species is about 30000 years. While we ight not make a dent in the Martian ecology in a century or two, it seems likely given the pace of technological improvement that we could terraform Mars in 10000 years. We'd still have time as a species to enjoy th fruit of our efforts, I think.
We won't make good progress if we insist on results in our lifetimes. Heck, even building a good cathedral takes longer.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Maybe they DID have a space program and they'll be back to wipe us all out once we try to bust out of their wildlife reserve?
I find it interesting just how many future histories (the Star Trek backstory and Clarke's Odyssey sequence spring to mind first) have mankind 'growing out of' war and tribal/national conflict. Some show it as a natural wising-up, others as the result of some internal (nuclear holocaust) or external (alien intervention) catastrophe. But it implies that a humanity still susceptible to war and conflict couldn't successfully maintain extraterrestrial colonies.
After all, we often find life fragile and risky here, where the temperature, pressure, gravity, atmosphere, and availability of water stay pretty close to optimal. We could colonise many more Earth habitats (e.g. desolate regions of land, cities floating on or below the sea) much easier than those in space or on other planets -- and yet we don't. Or can't. Surely similar arguments apply to those first?
Ceterum censeo subscriptionem esse delendam.
The human species surviving in space? Unlikely.
In the improbable event that a child could be born in a zero/low gravity environment, the child would end up growing several feet taller than it would have on Earth - creating a panorama of new health problems. Severely weakened muscular and skeletal development would mean the child would never be able to walk or breathe on Earth. So how exactly would that preserve the human race?
Unless we can create cheap, maintainable gravity, long-term space habitation (5+ years) is impossible.
#1. Jack & Kelly Osbourne
#2. Kirstie Ally
#3. Anybody who is in any way affiliated with the new Burger King commercials.
Turk: Let's play Steak. J.D.: What? Turk: Steak. The 1st person to finish their steak is the winner of Steak. -Scrubs
Here's some more funny math.
Let's assume for the sake of argument that with enough technology we could support 100 times as many people living on Earth as we have today whithout consuming resources faster than they are renewed.
At a 2% growth rate, how long till we reach the limit? About 235 years. Think about that a minute - we're about 10000 years old as a technological species.
Lets say the solar system has about 100 times as much in the way of resources as the Earth to tap. That buys us another 235 years.
If we harvest all the resources of all the star systems within 50 light years (about 2000)? That buys us about another 385 years (this puts us only at 2860 AD).
However, no matter how hard we work to colonize, eventually even a 2% growth rate would be our doom. Within another 130 years, we'd need all the resources of all the stars within 250 light years (about 260k) - our sphere of colonization would have to grow at 2/3 the speed of light to accomplish this. Shortly after 3000 AD, we would have to grow our sphere or colonization faster than the speed of light to keep up a 2% growth rate.
It's interesting to reflect how quickly we could exhaust all of the resources we could possibly reach.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
While it may well be wise to colonise the rest of the solar system to avoid extinction, it may not be necessary to send humans into space for exploration purposes... ...IF we develop an instantaneous communication technology.
This is because we could then explore space telepresently and vastly more economically.
If we put 50% of the U.S. annual defense budget into space research, we'd have a manned Lunar colony in 15 years and cities on Mars in 35 years.
Hell; we may have cities on Mars in 35 years anyways (since Molecular Nanotechnology will probably be available to us within 20 years).
The fact is our species is on a timer. A catastropic event WILL occur. We are watching a race between this event and our species having a sustainable off-earth environment. it is reasonable to assume that we need to be on an inhabitable planet by then. The nearest star is four light years. The nearest possible inhabited planet is probably as far away as 100 light years.How long will it take the find and travelto a suitable planet? My guess would be 400 years on the low end. Will we make it?
No matter where you go , there you are.
(With apologies to turgid. This doesn't necessarily all apply to you. You're just the trigger. Maybe I just have a case of the Mondays...)
Shut up. You are wrong. We are not all liberals. We are not all conservatives. We aren't all atheists, and we don't all believe in God. There is no moderator's conspiracy, get over it. Sometimes moderators or other posters won't agree with you. Get over it.
Here's some hints on how to get along:
Treat other people with respect, especially when you don't agree with them.
If you are going on a rant let us know so we can take what you say in context, and so we know that you know the difference between a rant and a reasoned argument. Same goes with sarcasm.
If you are taking a stand, back it up with some researched links so we can check it out for ourselves.
Treat everyone as if they are intelligent human beings capable of forming their own opinions, especially if you think the opposite of them.
I know discussing ideas and opinions in this way is not nearly as much fun as beating the dead high horse you rode in on, but it does go a long way to actually getting your point across, which last time I checked is the actual purpose of communication as opposed to exhibitionist mental masturbation.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
when we cant even feed our billion or so human population
Similar to the ships designed in space postulated by Clarke, but with robots and solar/nuclear hybrid power - we launch an entire fleet of them towards all the stars in our galaxy likely to have Class M (sorry for the Trek ref) planets - and embryos frozen.
There is no reasonable cryogenic method to take a human form and shut it down for millions of years. But it's feasible with frozen embryos.
How we grow them from there, I don't know. We'd some way to create test tube babies without implanting them in a host.
The adam and eve of the new solar system are created. If it turns out there is habitable planet in that system - they win. If there isn't, the humans can nuke themselves or something.
I don't know - seems the only way. The distances are just so huge and the time scales so vast, that transporting organic material that far seems impractical.
I used to think sea life would be relatively immune to what nonsense and destruction we humans managed to do on land. However, over the years I've learned that marine ecosystems are far more vulnerable to anthropogenic disturbance than previously thought.
Now a full 20% of marine species are approaching extinction and upwards of 80% of fishing stocks are depleted worldwide. It turns out that most life in the ocean is closely linked to geochemical cycles that involve continental sediments or are confined to continental margins. Even those that survive can be made unusable for food (due to bioaccumulation of pollutants such as Mercury).
Coral reefs, which form the largest marine ecosystems in terms of species are extremely vulnerable, primarily from sedimentation, pollution, and global warming with the vast majority of coral reefs now under tremendous pressures and in substantial decline worldwide (even the Great Barrier Reef in Australia the single largest protected ecosystem on the planet is in decline and may likely be lost within a few hundred years at current rates of decline even without a nuclear exchange. Heavy sedimentation from nuclear fallout would probably lead to about 70-80% extinction rates in marine habitats. One must remember that the bulk of extinctions in the fossil record are of marine species preserved in sedimentary formations. Also the vast open oceans are relatively impoverished of species and biomass as nutrients are severely limited. In a sense they are the marine equivalents of deserts.
The best thing to do is to tell your grandchildren to hold on to their asses and not to worry as George Bush and his team of environmental crusaders is riding to the rescue! Its called faith based environmentalism. You just pray like hell that every thing will be ok, while expanding the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere and perturbing natural habitats as quickly as possible for financial reward (pioneers and other well-connected contributors only, sorry).
Soooo ... mankind killing itself off would make overfishing worse how again? You make a strong argument, but the conclusion is the reverse of what you think it is.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
The story links to other sites' top reasons for going into space and Space.com's list inevitably includes mining.
In the same paragraph the article states "water is the most precious substance you can find in space" and "everywhere we look there is water." Well which is it? Is it rare or ubiquitous? It can't be both.
I remain unconvinced that space mining will ever make much sense. It's all but certain that molecular nanotechnology will revolutionize materials science in the first half of this century, obviating any conceivable need for space mining and eventually, perhaps, even some earth mining.
Insert witty sig here.
Or worse, they may choose to leave and sterilize earth on departure.
AID's is progressing well, but will not complete it's work in a suitable time frame. Bird Flu is on hold, but that virus in Angola looks the quite promising.
Remember, Humans are Stupid, so always work to maximise the effect of that advantage.
We all heard the reasoning for abolishing space-exploration (particulary human-based) before, and I think the major flaw in all these 'arguments' why we shouldn't go into space is that they always set economic factors as a premise.
;-)
;-) freightening, because it is 'virus-like', but the treat to conquer new grounds is not a tell-tale sign of a virus, but of life in general.
;-), we, humans, could be seen as merely the spermcells of Earth, and are the means to propagate itself so that the galaxy will eventually contain myriads of earths.
But, although economic viability is important to create a mass-usuage of space(travel), I fail to see why it should be the only possible motive to start exploring space. It's a pretty narrowminded, materialistic and typical capitalistic view on things. It's the same view that makes progress on medication for very rare diseases, or for diseases that are prevalent in continents that are poor, so slow: corporations can't see how they are ever going to get profit out of it, so they all turn their backs on it.
If ppl (including states) are only going to do something when they are sure of an immediate profitable return, the world has become a sad place. (And we should leave it the sooner
Arguments based on such a viewpoint fail to recognise other incentives apart from economical ones.
The reason why we shouldn't (only) rely on robots? You can explore, but you can not colonise with robots. The will to explore is deeply entrenched in the human race, but with a reason: it has survival advantages.
A species that doesn't colonise new territory and adapt, will perish. I think it's paramount that humans always keep their adventurage spirit and keep exploring and expanding, because the moment we will go "ah, let's sit back in our sofa's and let our robots/droids do it", we're basically finished, even when not being aware of it at that moment.
Some think this is (matrix-like
And frankly, the exploration of earth (or its ecology) is hardly that of a virus killing it's host, though the ultra-greens may often portray it that way. Earths' ecology ALWAYS changes; species appear and dissapear, and those that are most suited (and have spread the most around the globe) have the most chance of surviving.
The fact that a lot of current change is done by humans, may give it an air of artificiality, but to that idea I don't subscribe. Humans are still biological identies, and as such, need an ecology to survive in. 'Nature' or 'the world' does not care what particular ecology it sustains; as long as there is biological life, it exists, period.
Your premise that being self-aware is not a reason to colonise the solar system and then the galaxy is based on...what? I would claim it DOES (though it would not excuse us from being responsable - to alien life - while colonising).
If alien life is not omni-present on the planet, but only in small niches, I think it's worth considering to protect those niches, or create articial enclosures to preserve it - but still go on with the colonisation. Things would only be different if it's a planetwide alien ecology, or if there is alien sentient life involved.
As for your argument that it does not benefit the host; allow me to contradict. The mere fact that we would colonise other planets and introduce earths' ecology there, would augment the chances of earths' 'nature' to survive...therefor, it would benefit from our actions.
Infact, viewed from the point of 'Nature' (if it had a viewpoint, that is
In any case: economics (and also the ratio of costs/science output) is less good with human spacetravel then robotic ones. Contrary to some zealots, I do not dispute that. But the counterargument that, therefor, it'sbetter to send robots is weak, because, well, this is ALWAYS going to be true. Even when the costs of technological hard&software go down a thousandfold, it STILL will be much cheaper to send robots then humans.
--- "To pee or not to pee, that is the question." ---
Religion is only the ritualized trappings that humans use to deal with the fear of their own death. It is successful only because some figured out it was a great business model in which you could fool the unthinking into believing that by giving up something tangible they might get a bigger payoff in the "aferlife". Religion expended as many others discovered that religion grants them the opportunity to indulge in what might be termed the "politics of castigation", where in its earliest form several apes used the opportunity to throw stones at other apes for "immoral or heretical" acts.
Space won't be religion free until humans can clone themeselves like bacteria. Ever wondered why there is so much controversy surrounding the "morality" and "ethics" of cloning? It is a mortal threat to religion. If people could use their intellect to do "god like things" like create life, where would that leave the business model?
All the nonsense about preserving the species is just that. Except for kin-selection there is no group selection, as there is simply no molecular evolutionary mechanism to select for it. If we go to space it will be for the same reasons it always is, there is perceived personal reward of some kind to be had for the individuals involved. The fate of the rest of the genetic pool is largely irrelevant. Of course, don't think you can't be fooled into thinking otherwise.
Since we are entering a stage of human evolution that will be severely resource limiting relative to that which has come before and because space travel is extremely expensive, not to mention the obvious fact that habitable nearby destinations seem to be few and far between, most space exploration will largely be for military or commercial purposes going forward not for the greater good or other such nonsense, just another means to line the pockets of those who are shrewd investors and those who lust for power, since they are not shrewed investors but find power a convenient means to expropriate the investments of others. How you invest decides what kind of world we will have in the future. Of course, it doesn't say anything about the relative success of such investments. I only have a small part of my portfolio is space exploration.
I could be wrong, as I'm not a fanatic, but didn't the ST backstory involve a Nuclear World War?
Who do I have to blackmail to get some representation around here!?!?!?!?
I don't accept the "we need to colonize space in case something bad happens to Earth" argument. Think about it: it says that we have the ability to turn a lifeless, previously uninhabitable environment into a place where we can continue life. Isn't this "uninhabitable environment" just as bad, or worse, than what Earth would be if something bad happened to it? If we have the technology to colonize space, we could certainly re-colonize Earth in the event of a disaster. Ideally, we will have prepared for it. That is where we should put our effort.
"there are a lot of forces in the universe more destructive than us."
Yes, but there are always a few assholes working feverishly to prove you wrong.
Ever notice that it only took one shithead trying to set his shoes on fire and now you can't get on a plane without taking off your shoes and having some government agent sticking a flashlight up your ass?
Mindless consumption?
No matter how efficient it is, mindless consumption is only effective at depleating resources.
You're right. More people using less resources will probaly still result in more resoures being used. How would you suggest we solve this, killing off people? Or maybe mass steralization, that's always been popular. Why not send people into space?
Would you say that we have had less of an impact on the planet since the 1960's?
Yes, I would, at least of an individual. Modern cars are more fuel efficent than cars in 1960. Electricity is generated more cleanly and manufacturing is less wasteful. On mass yes we do consume more now than we did in the 1960s and with better technology we are able to harvest resources more quickly, however if our individual consumption trends down and we can keep control on the number of individuals (see my above point) then we will start to reduce our impact.
I'm sure the Earth would breath a sigh of relief if we went back to fighting with sharpened sticks and living out of caves.
Okay, you first.Let me get this straight, we are suposed to want to colonize space to save the species from self-destruction... and somehow this is magically going to help prevent it? If we want to reduce our impact on the planet, we need to stick right here and work on it. Not run away into space and hope the technology "trickle down" will fix the problems for the people who are left behind.
What a weird idea that working to prevent a problem might actually help solve that problem.
Innovation comes about when people are trying to solve a problem. There is some technical innovation in relation to reducing the amount of resources we use, as I stated above, but at the end of the day in a lot of cases it's still cheaper to polute than not. What really produces inovation is usually war or as I said nation/civilzation wide projects such as the space race and these both have an opprotunity to make a profit.
We can't uninvent the technology we have, so our only option is to improve it. A massive space project will help make more improvements than sitting around and waiting for the problem to solve itself.
Why not shift Mars' orbit to be 98 million miles from the sun but 180 degrees shifted from us and then start terraforming.
'Or else pizza is going to order out for you'
Here is a nice web site that discusses "space tourism" : http://www.space.cc/
2) To live; because it may become a NICER place to be
3) To survive; because it may become the ONLY place to be
It does make sense after a double take
A blog I run for the wealth
There is one problem with this scenario. Making any sort of nerve agent would be chemically expensive to the organism, taking up valuable energy it could be using to grow. Evolution would quickly select for strains of the organism that had mutated to NOT produce the nerve agent.
Man I could have sworn we were going to Mars.
The year is 2164, an enormous rock is heading in our direction....
The entire population of the moon will have to be evaquated to the earth or they will all die.
I'll be laughing my ass off poiting fingers at all those people who "just had to live on the moon".
Then ofcause die as the rock hit.
One of the things that they don't usually explain about living in space is that it teaches humans to live within their resources. Our planet is an entirely closed system that will eventually run out of any resource that isn't iron, sunlight, or fed by sunlight.
Unless we figure out patterns of 100% reuse, we will have to survive on continually dwindling resources. The much smaller closed systems that exist in space continually provide us with research that we will need to achieve higher reuse goals.
Wake up - the future is arriving faster than you think.
Anyone know how often Mars gets binged by a decent asteroid? Does it take a smaller asteroid to cause major problems due to the thinner atmosphere not burning it up as much?
Screw you guys, I'm going to Saturn.
We'd better hope that extinction event isn't a starquake that sterilizes everything within 10 light years of the source. Voyager has been flying for almost 30 years and it's what, about half a light day away?
Actually, it's not the rubber that's evil - it is the seperation of the procreative and unitive aspects of sex. God made sex and built it with both components. Us taking away one is turning sex into a recreation and thus dehumanizing our partners by turning them into objects for our own gratification.
Actually if anyone believes in "God", if IT exists It is sadistic, as in the Torah or Old Testement then they also believe "God" created a third sex the eunuch, Jesus said "Some men are incapable of sexual activity from birth; some have been deliberately made so;", Matthew 19:12. Medically, scientifically the eunuch is called an intersexual. There are different types of intersexuals but basically they may have different physical or biological sexual configurations, including some who have both male and female sexual organs.
As for self gratification turning the partner into an object, there are some who seek to satisfy their partner and through that get self gratification. I wouuldn't call that dehumanizing the partner.
FalconShould there be a Law?
Larry Niven, one of my favorite authors, has spoken eloquently on why we should have a space program. For a nice (but subtle) treatment of the pragmatic concepts, read his short story "At the Bottom of a Hole". But he has a better, and shorter, statement on the situation:
"The dinosaurs became extinct because they didn't have a space program."
Says it all, really.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
actually didn't the ST and SW backstories both involve clone wars? Where Kahn came from.
Kerrrrk Kerrrrk
didn't the ST backstory involve a Nuclear World War
Of course it did, that's the point. You can't "grow out" of something you were never IN.
Dude, the way to get to space is the Earth to Space Mass Driver, electromagnetic launch of 100-tonne pods at a soft 30 G's straight to space!
The space tower? Given an unlimited budget, in what timeframe could such an edifice be constructed?
Here's an answer, how about: the timeframe is irrelevant because by then we'd have an electromagnetic launcher or three sending thousands of tonnes a day to orbit and outer space, including to the modular lifting body reentry vehicle automated assembly plants in HEO's numbered 1-100 and other staging orbits, including the lunar transfer orbits, for commerce, travel, and industry, and the space tower/elevator would be moot.
Dude, the single- or multiwalled carbon nanotube fibers, which have yet to be synthesized in lengths of a few centimeters, not to mention a meter or 100 kilometers, are only showing 65, not 170 gigaPascals in tensile strength. Now I have read that a theoretical single strand has 200 GPa tensile strength, and in the labs they are showing 5 GPa, with the near-term possibility of ten. That is to say: the numbers are all over the place and space elevator proponents are generally either high as a kite, motivated by associated grants, or relatively uninformed know-nothing bandwagon faddists.
(Personally, I'm pretty much an ignoramus, but in denial.)
Consider the "space fountain" with the iron pellets in a recirculating loop that uses electromagnetic linear induction motors of a sort to launch the pellets at such a high velocity that even incrementally slowed at each stage they still reach orbital height, with the condition that Earth's rotation doesn't immediately wrench it apart. Then you have an EML launching those pellets at probably greater than V_e, from on the ground. When you figure out how to do that, it's probably a tech transfer from the functional ETSMD.
Just because Arthur C. Clarke described a space elevator does _not_ mean it's realistic.
Once again, I care to reiterate that I am not a NASA engineer, I'm just an ETSMD enthusiast. I've only read four or so hundred science fiction novels. Is that wrong?
Ross F.
If you're talking about colonising planets, then we have Earth, Mars, the Moon that have decent amounts of sunlight and survivable surface temperatures. If you want to go for outer planets/moons there's Pluto, Charon, Titan, Ganymede, Calisto, Europa, Triton and maybe Io (not sure you could live there, it's very hostile).
So, colonising other planets only gets you a ~5 times the livable surface area of Earth. It's a temporary fix.
Slashdot - Mutual Assured Discussion
"Each time someone dies, it is Jules Verne's fault.
He is responsible for the desire for interplanetary voyages, good only for boyscouts or for amateur underwater fishermen. If the faboulous sums wasted on these conquests were spent on biological research, nobody on our planet would die anymore. Therefore I repeat, each time someone dies, it is Jules Verne's fault."
Salvador Dali
(Paraphrasing Larry Niven.)
If Chaos Theory has taught us anything, it's that we must kill all the butterflies.
The producers of capitalism have also brought you such wonderful things as George W. Bush.
I guess you're right: People are just not going to "get more intelligent" anytime soon.
Is wasn't Capitalism, as in Adam Smyth's "On Wealth of Nations" or tinyurl that brought Bush along. More like the Corporate Aristocracy Thomas Jefferson and Alexis de Tocqueville warned people about that is responsible.
"I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of moneyed corporations, which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength and bid defiance to the laws of our country."
FalconThomas Jefferson, 1814
Should there be a Law?
- Humanity can escape earthly cataclysms such as large asteroid impacts by going to outer space
- It is economically attractive to obtain energy and mineral resources from other bodies in our solar system
- Useful science gets done by astronauts during manned space missions
- Mankind was somehow meant to expand beyond earth and populate the rest of the solar system, presumably the rest of our galaxy, and perhaps beyond
There are probably a few I have missed. These ideas are ludicrous. They are a modern day magical-religious cult that substitutes the ancient belief in a glorious afterlife on some spiritual plane with some hazy future in which mankind is travelling through space and setting up colonies in space itself and on other celestial bodies.Oddly enough, I gather that most slashdotters would claim that it is up to me to demonstrate the fallacy of these ideas. It is not necessary to demonstrate that they are feasible, economically or even physically, or that there is any compelling objective reason to send humans to space, or that the "science" that is done during these missions has any value whatsoever. That is understood to be self-evident, an absolute truth. People such as myself are held to be backward-thinking naysayers of the sort that claimed that flight was impossible, or that electric lights, televison, automobiles and so on were also impossible, evil, unnatural, etc.
Think it through, folks. Grab a pencil and paper and calculate costs, masses, time intervals, available resources, and all of the many other issues involved. You won't get far unless you make some rather generous, if zany, assumptions, or assume that some radical new technology will soon appear that can overcome all serious obstacles.
These quasi-religious beliefs, in practice, serve the same purpose as traditional afterlife beliefs: they distract attention from our earthly problems and the wealthy tyrants who are responsible for them. Dream on, proles.
Precisely! Moving off Earth, will avert the almost certain human extinction, when the new Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy movie is released. By all reports, it is certain to offend most sentient species in our universe, prompting an undercurrent in Galaxy politics, which will eventuate in the Earth being demolished by Vogons, to make way for a completely unnecessary hyperspace bypass. The Vogons were jealous anyway, because even they couldn't compete with some of the crap that comes out of Hollywood.
Life imitating art? Fuck yeah!
Survival is a long term goal, not a short term one. Finding short term ones to convince people to spend money is a full time occupation for some people :)
One can justify survival like this: We need to get up there and develop the expertise and infrastructure so that if it's *necessary* in the long run, we *can* survive up there, and save as many people as possible.
The longer we wait, the more risk we take. Unfortunately the people who control the purse strings are overwhelmingly engaged in naval contemplation.
This one, in case you're wondering.
Er, and you don't "brake" speed limits, you "break" them.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
-1, Too Reasonable
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Be careful what you ask for, you might just get it.
Trying to remove all religion from society would be like trying to launder mud.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Our robots will survive us and carry on our traditions. They'll rip each other's cpu's out if given half a chance. Besides, eventually they'll hehehehe figure out how to make more of us. Can't hardly figure out WHY. Maybe because it's "out there". U-know. The forbidden fruit and all. Hhmmm. Forbidden fruit? http://tinyurl.com/5c4ll...
You probably don't have to wait another 40-60 million years for another big asteroid to hit to wipe out most of sealife, it will happen far sooner than you expect regardless of our progress on interplanetary/intergallactic travel. Putting money into going to Mars/the Moon/Uranus isn't likely to save mankind from the consequences of relatively more immediate threats to sealife.
The "New World" turned out to be the solution to a host of problems in Europe (not that the native Americans did well, far from it). Religious intolerance? Let 'em sail off to Massachusetts. Cut down all our forests? Plenty over there. Huge masses of poor? Ship them too, and our increasing productivity from industrialization will let us all live better while those ex-peons trade us raw materials for our finished goods. Europe made out really well on the deal.
Not only can people do science a lot better (faster, more flexibly) than robots, the solutions to a host of problems in our current world are at least potentially findable in space. Anything that needs extreme biological isolation is best done well outside of Earth orbit. You can modulate Earth's incoming sunlight a lot better from space. You can capture immense amounts of energy for very little effort in space. You canNOT defend against an Earth-threatening asteroid or comet without getting substantial amounts of hardware into space, and most any large effort takes lead time.
We're something like 30 years past Gerry O'Neil's pioneering space colony research. Our technology has moved on, but our practices are largely mired in the 1970's. On the other hand, our imperatives are changing rapidly: global warming is admitted by all serious climate scientists (note the disclaimer) and oil is becoming both financially and politically dangerous to use the way we do now. Some of the easiest engineering solutions to these problems are potentially done in space. To do serious work there, people are going to have to live at the job site. That makes it time to go.
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
Yeap, that's why we should have a pollution tax. If people, businesses, and corporations were taxed on how much they polluted at current government spending income taxes could be abolished. The problem with this though is that at least in the US it's government that's the biggest polluter. This can be solved though by requiring government to live within the limits set by the Constitution of the USA.
FalconShould there be a Law?
Where on earth (haha) are you getting this 2% growth rate? Population growth rates are nearly zero for most nations even remotely capable of space travel. Europe as a whole is barely at replacement levels and half of the US's growth comes from immigration. Even with the unrestrained levels in many 3rd world shitholes, it's only at 1.7% and falling.
So while your argument is mathematically correct, it's founded on a rather dubious assumption.
Dyolf Knip
You're right. More people using less resources will probaly still result in more resoures being used. How would you suggest we solve this, killing off people? Or maybe mass steralization, that's always been popular. Why not send people into space?
Sterilizing people has already been tried in the US. The BIA, Bureau of Indian Affairs, through the 1970s had doctors sterilize America Indian females. Sometymes this was done either forcibly or without the person's knowledge.
FalconShould there be a Law?
I don't recall where it was but a few years back I read a paper, I think a study, about it and the conclusion was that even if there hadn't been the Civil War or if the South had won it was only a matter of tyme before the slaves were released from bondage because of the economic drain of slavery.
FalconShould there be a Law?
Also let me know how it is that the rest of the planet that did not go to the moon continues to exist and thrive.
"From pacemakers to braces, the medical benefits of space exploration"
From Medical Correspondent Dan Rutz
November 2, 1998
Web posted at: 4:53 p.m. EST (2153 GMT)
"WASHINGTON (CNN) -- What do you think blast-off does to your blood pressure? When Alan Shepard became the first American to fly in space 37 years ago, Project Mercury scientists had to invent an automatic measuring device to find out."
"Today, you can find the device in just about any drugstore for an instant check-up. It is just one of an ever-growing number of medical spin-offs from space."
"Scratch-resistant lenses for eyeglasses are straight from the stars. NASA needed something to protect satellites from getting nicked by space debris."
"Speaking of satellites, how do they spring open after being cramped into a rocket for the ride up? The key is nitinol, a medical alloy with an almost magical ability to spring back into shape from the tightest contortion."
"Nitinol makes wearing dental braces just a little easier."
"'It allows me to engage every tooth in the mouth pretty easily,' said Atlanta orthodontist Moody Williams. 'Put it in and it works for a very long time. It never loses its activity.'"
"NASA's chief historian, Roger Launius, said great ideas from America's greatest adventure are a bonus."
"'The spinoffs are essentially serendipity,' he said. 'The primary mission of the agency is to fly in space.'"
FalconShould there be a Law?
Let's go colonise space/planets/solar system/[you name it]
It seams we, human species are not able to build a long term sustainable system on earth. I don't see (yet) why we could do better in space/planets/solar system/[you name it]. So, to me, this go-to-space frenzy looks like pushing the dust under the carpet.
I also keep in mind an other aspect. We, as human species, are growing exponentially. Let's word it an other way just for the sake of clarity: our growth rate is growing. Doesn't it struck some people that the solution of such a problem is not by augmenting the resources? By doing so, we are barely adding an extra floor for us to fall a little longer. It looks to me a little blind to claim we need more resource. I'd say we need less consumption.
AFAIR, the Stephen Bakster Deep Future book is a good example of this growth scenario. He goes through a sequence of expansion steps until no black hole / neutron stare / ... is left to provide energy. He then draws a picture like living beings sucking energy very slowly off the void and living over zillion years, veeery slowly. After last page, I still had the same silly question: why expand ?
Surviving catastrophic event ? OK, could be a reason. But a fundamental reason is still missing. Just go one step after the survival: so what then? Maybe we could invent a philanthropic reason. Like: sustainable - descent life for all wherever we happen to be. But could that be challangy enough for a bunch-o-geek-on-da-move?
Ciao. Z.
Well, I did call it "funny math". However, human population *has* grown exponentially over time (albiet at a slower rate than 2%), and the resources we will have the ability to reach can only grow polynomially, so eventually that catches up with us. The illustration of that is just made clearer with a more significant growth rate.
To sustain mankind's historical growth rate for even another 1000 years requires some generous science-fiction assumptions, even assuming that life extension doesn't increase that growth rate. Of course, it's very hard to tell what social factors will influence people's reproductive choices if we ever reach the point that people aren't dependant on their children to take care of them in their old age.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Anytime someone tells me that space will never be available to large numbers of people, I remind them that the amount of energy that physics requires to send a person to space is about the same amount of energy it takes to drive a large SUV from New York to LA and back. This sometimes changes their perspective on its potential cost.
Assumptions: 100 kg person to escape velocity, SUV gets 12 mpg, mechanism for putting person in orbit is 30% efficient (about the same as a good SUV engine), energy is not used to lift objects other than the human (unless that energy is included in the efficiency calculation).
Of course, this calculation assumes much better systems than we currently have for putting people in orbit (such as a space elevator, etc.), but it does tell us that the limits are the technology, not the physics. I'm not a big fan of the space elevator not because it isn't a great idea, but because there are already better, cheaper ideas. This also assumes that we have somewhere up there to put the people once they arrive. As there is no lack of building materials up in space, but a serious lack of workers, I don't think this will be a problem either.
In case you haven't noticed, in a lot of cases, the scarcity is artificial.
Think: Why is it we already produce enough food for the world to eat, but people are still starving, and we still pay $1.50 for a loaf?
The scarcity is by design.
The man whose ideas are really leading the neo-cons is Leo Strauss. His idea was that people should always be ruled by a secret elite.
Though I've seen the name having come across it in my readings of politics and economics, I don't know what Leo Strauss' economics/politics is about. As for me, I like, prefer, the two Thomases economic system. Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson.
FalconShould there be a Law?
My estimation of the Catholic Church just went down a few notches and I didn't think that was possible.
This drivel could have been written by the Bush administration http://www.crimeweek.com/cidu/april4a.gif