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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
Seems to me these are the same reasons for being on Earth...
love is just extroverted narcissism
I/we want to know what's out there.
Give a hand, not a hand-out.
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!
Why store data at multiple locations? Disks can be destroyed in a fire at all locations after all. It's called redundancy, and it works with living beings too. If humans are on multiple planets the race will survive one being destroyed.
A meteor strike that could destroy all life on earth really wouldn't bother(other than economically) a self sufficient colony on mars. That is one example, I am sure many people can come up with others.
I support the 2nd Amendment, the right to keep and arm bears!
its true, any problems they try to escape will just follow us, its human nature. They probably thought that moving to North America would solve the problems they were having in the old world, they just followed us, and everyone developed new problems to deal with anyway
- My question is: Can Slashdot be Slashdotted? -
Where the hell is the classical geek answer?
Because.
Because I can, possibly the greatest reason known.
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'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.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
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.
"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 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.
I must disagree.
When Europeans moved to North America, they did solve some real problems. Granted, we still have problems, but they are different than the ones Europeans had circa 1000 A.D. It's a fairly trivial exercise to show things are much better now.
OK, what can moving into space do for humanity? First, there is the not putting all our eggs in one basket factor. Secondly, we can try new things. Some of our experiments will succeed; some will fail. Successful experiments can be emulated. Our failures can teach us what not to do.
Starting back in the 17th century, the part of North America governed by first England and now the United States and Canada tried doing some new things with regard to government and society. These experiments proved so successful that parent societies in Europe adopted many of the new ideas first tried in North America.
We haven't acheived any sort of utopia, but we have made significant progress.
"Beer is proof God loves us and wants us to be happy." -- B. Franklin
That's why the US led the space race in the 1960s and 1970s. Space is fun.
Really.... I could have sworn it was because it was an excuse to develop a rocket capable of delivering a warhead to Russia. There was this little "cold war" thing going on back then.
Because it would be really fucking cool!
KFG
We weren't ready to go to the moon in the 60's, but we did it. We did it with slide rules.
We did it because we had to.
____
~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
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
It's an effective activity. SARS for example hasn't hit the US. AIDS is ravaging Africa and, while it is in the US it's not as much of a major issue. Earthquakes pummeled Indonesia recently, but North America got of scott free (except for everybody suggesting we give to the tsunami relief fund.) If you spread out and have barriers, natural or otherwise, then disasters that hit one location may not affect the other.
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.
So you want humans to die out? OK...you first.
The worst real estate on earth is better than the best anywhere else in the solar system.
Is it? let's see:
Gravity. Earth has the strongest surface gravity of any accessible real estate in the system. This means that just moving around puts more strain on your system than anywheer else you're likely to be able to live.
Atmosphere. The thick atmosphere means that you can save a little on radiation shielding: you can get away with a few inches of brick or wood instead of a few meters of stone. Still, stone is pretty cheap on any large-body surfaces.
Life support. Most places on earth you need less complex life-support systems than in space, but you can't get away with them altogether except in fairly narrow temperate bands. Plus, you need to be prepared for unexpected and unpredictable changes in temperature, pressure, and humidity... so even your industrial plant and other secondary life-support systems need radiation and chemical sheilding.
No, there's really only one sense in which Earth's surface is more hospitable... the oxygen is too cheap to meter! Other resources, though, are comparably difficult or MUCH more difficult to acquire. You wouldn't believe what Earthlings have to do to get electricity, for example, with that heavy atmosphere blocking most of the radiation from the sun.
Ove the very short term, until there's an ongoing space-based economy, life support will be a big problem. Long term, though, it's a minor issue.
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
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.
You are absolutely right, if there is a species threatening event in the next century, we are not prepared to deal with it. That is precicely why we have to go into space now. In that way we can deal with species threatening events when they arrive.
The problem with the species threatening events is that we do not know when they may happen, but we know that some of them will happen. Major impacts being a minor such threat. Some of them we will have warnings about a long time in advance, such as the inevitable fact that the Sun is going to run out of energy and inflate past the orbit of the earth. Others we will not have much of a warning about at all, such as a significant gamma ray burst in our neighborhood (within a few hundred lights).
With events where we have a warning, there will be (when they approach) a strong demand for evacuation, so we need to be prepared for that. Developing such technology will take millennia (or centuries at least). With the events where we will have no real warning, life on earth will be wiped out. Our safety net in that case is the fact that we have already colonized areas where the burst does not wipe out life.
Both scenarios requires we go into space big time as soon as possible.
I understand what you are trying to say, but I have to ask the question: how do you expect to develop spacefaring technologies without actually going into space? I agree that it would be great if we could focus for a decade or so on developing the technologies here on Earth and have them work in our goals for space, but I don't see how that could happen.
The development cycle needs to be composed of lab work and real world usage. We need to do a lot of developing, but hand-in-hand must go actual usage. Waiting around is not the answer.
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.
The reason we need to put a few people into space now is quite simple: the only way to determine the long term health effects of living in space is to have people living in space! We need to start the long-term research now, so we can better design life support systems for the time in the future when it makes more sense to send people into space.
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
#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
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
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.
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.
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.