Slashdot Mirror
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."
Obviously you were not raised Catholic.
As long as you and your SO are married, Catholics are all for "being fruitful and multiplying". Also incase you haven't noticed, the Catholic Church has a different outlook on science than the in the 17th century.
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.
Think a little bigger. If a really really big meteor hits the Earth, we're screwed. The likelyhood that 2 planet-killer meteors will devastate 2 planets that we have colonies within a relatively short amount of time (20 years) is extremely less likely.
Also, your examples of polution, population, and nuclear explosion don't make much sense either. Polution is far less likely on another planet, since fossil fuels are far less likely. We'd probably be using solar or nuclear power instead.
Population makes the least sense, since expanding to other planets is the single most effective way of dealing with this issue. You effectively double your space and eliminate population issues.
Nuclear explosion isn't really a factor either. If you're talking weapons, the likelyhood of them being taken to upstart colonies isn't too likely. Once the colony is established, if one location (Earth or the colony) wipes itself out with nukes, the other is going to think long and hard before using theirs. Having a front-row seat to devastation makes people do everything they can to avoid it happening again (see 9/11 attacks for proof). If you're talking about nuclear power plants, they're getting safer and safer, so I doubt it would be an issue. Besides, nuclear meltdown is a local issue, not a planetary issue.
You have enemies? Good. That means you've stood up for something, sometime in your life. --Winston Churchill
This article is rediculous. First of all, humans in space is a complete joke: there is very little of interest in space. Humans on other planets is another story.
However, while all of us dream of populating other planets, the practicality of doing so with today's technology is absurd. For example, we haven't colonized Antartica. Sure there are a few scientists living on isolated stations, but they are doing research - no intention of making the area habitable. If we can't even colonize all of the continents here on Earth, why bother with other planets. A better example is the bottom of the ocean. Why not colonize the ocean floor? It's less rediculous than colonizing the moon.
On this survival front, no scientist could possibly prove that life is safier anywhere else than on the Earth, where it has been happily plodding along for a few billion years, and so far been unobserved anywhere else.
Someone you trust is one of us.
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:
we'd have to either terraform Mars, or go to a whole other solar system, which isn't cheap
Everywhere in this discussion I'm seeing the same arguement...that a space colony must be located on a planetary surface. Why, after you spent all the time, money, and effort to break free of one gravity well, would you willingly shackle yourself to another???
Establishing colonies on planetary surfces is expensive, for the same reason getting off Earth in the first place is. Building a colony that remains in nice flat space saves a lot of money, and affords portability in the bargain.
____
~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
The problem with your reasoning is that we may not have the resources to do it in a generation or so. If we don't do it now, there is every chance that we never will.
Your arguement is almost like saying that a one year old shouldn't try to walk because they'll be inefficient at it, it will be expensive (energy and time wise), and that they should wait until the technology (their musulature and nervous system) is more developed.
I'm not tense. I'm just terribly, terribly, alert.
A nice big hollowed-out asteroid gives you all the things you mentioned. Although the asteriods in the Belt may be out of reach for the moment, there's no reason we can't establish a colony on the Moon, start ripping up materials and accelerating them to escape velocity with the aid of a railgun-type catapault. 1/6 of earth gravity and no atmosphere means lifting resources off the Moon is way cheaper than lifting the same masses from the Earth, and there's no ecological concerns to stand in your way. Once off the Moon, resources could be collected in one of the Trojan points and used to start construction on a nice big habitat, complete with air and gravity (centrifigual force, anyway).
____
~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
There are many, many different ways that humanity could go extinct; only a handful were listed. Here's one that I've mentioned before that doesn't get much play in the media: a bioengineered apocalypse. Picture that biobricks and modelling software get to the point where it's easy to design a gene to produce a protein or set of proteins to code for any simple molecule. So, you design a gene to produce VX, Sarin, or any other nerve agents. Already, you can buy custom-made genes for a price affordable to almost anyone, and insertion into unicellular organisms is not that difficult. You implant the gene into a common species of phytoplankton, along with an additional gene that gives it a competitive advantage against its wild relatives. You then take a long cruise, dripping a thermos full of the phytoplankton along the entire trip. It colonizes the ocean, riding on oceanic currents, before anyone realizes what is wrong, and then destroys almost everything on the planet with a nervous system.
The first clue would probably be fish kills. Massive fish kills, which would only fuel the bloom by adding more nitrates and other minerals to the water. However, going from "seing fish kills", to not only identifying the chemical cause, but isolating what is producing it and coming up with a way to combat something spread across the entire planet before it kills us, would be quite the challenge.
sed "s/SJW.*$/... never mind. I was about to say something stupid, and also, I'm a troglodyte./Ig"
Yes, I did, right after I read one of Douglas Adams' books in which it was related that an entire empire was lost due to an unsanitized telephone.
Then I came to my senses.
Has it occurred to you that the advances in technology made during the space race benefited all humanity? Granted there are still people squatting in the mud building houses out of sticks and straw and mostly going hungry, but those people were doing that BEFORE space travel. Now, they occasionally get someone bringing them some medication, sometimes some food - and the shit is wrapped in space-age (and later) plastics. I don't want to get off on a rant here, so I guess I'll just stop soon, but have you considered that if there is always going to be this great a disparity, the answer is to provide enough wealth so that everyone can actually have some?
Developing space is highly desirable because it's not hazardous to people living on Earth. Whatever you say about Earth's climate, and the materials lying around on or near its surface, Humans are making it worse in both regards. Even if it's only a tiny nod of the head compared to natural processes, why do we want to do that to ourselves? Putting a lot of our infrastructure in orbit (food and energy production for example, as well as heavy manufacturing, refining, blah blah blah) would allow us to increase production and decrease pollution. Having people up there is sort of a necessary part of building it all, putting it in place, and maintaining it. For some types of problems, you really need a human at this point.
Starting sooner rather than later means that we will proceed faster. The faster we improve our level of technology the more rapidly the lower levels of technology will reach more people, allowing them to crawl up out of the mud, take a shower, and go to work, feed their family, et cetera. Personally I'm merely hoping that somewhere in the world, these people end up building a society that's not predicated upon taking advantage of the weaknesses of the citizenry.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"