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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."
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.
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)
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