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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
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!
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!
The glorious potential of space porn!
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.
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.
What if someone decides to have a intergalactic highway running exactly over the planet earth. On the other hand, if we decide to move into space, our ranking from "mostly harmless" will go up for sure:=)
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.
Colonizing other planets will ensure that some of our offspring survive, because even when Earth becomes uninhabitable, we will have another planet to fall back on.
Also, I hope that we are more responsible with pollution and population on other planets. Scientists know the obvious consequences of pollution and overpopulation, so hopefully this will encourage responsibility for the prevention of either problem.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Raise your children as if you were teaching them to raise your grandchildren, because you are.
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
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
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
Most people won't to see their children and their children's children and so on survive.
Then why do members of a family often live close together? According to the logic of the article they should spread to different continents to maximise their chance of survival. And they should not travel together. (Yes, I know that some parents actually do take different planes.)
I really do not care if there are humans in space in case of a catastrophe on earth.
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.
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:
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
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.
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.
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!"
I'm pretty sure they used rockets.
Intron: the portion of DNA which expresses nothing useful.
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
> Human life is precious.
That's why humans need to take risks and explore. Not sit behind a joystick. Life is too precious to waste playing it safe. If that's what you want then fine, but don't destroy the dreams of everyone else who actually wants to risk and experience.
(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
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.
The problem with this comparison was that there were already people living in North America when the Europeans came, so of course a resource war ensued. The Europeans knew that other people lived here, but they didn't care so they came anyway.
In space, there is no indication whatsoever of other life within our limits of observation. We've been looking and listening, and haven't found anything. If we colonize other planets in this system, and mine them and the asteroids for resources, it's highly unlikely that we'll disturb any other intelligent lifeforms (or unintelligent for that matter). Therefore, I don't see any problem with doing so.
Now, there may very well be lifeforms on other planets in other systems that would be disadvantaged by us if we were to visit them, but that's really not something we should worry about, simply because it isn't feasible for us to travel to other star systems with our current technology, or any technology that may be invented for a long time. It simply takes too long to travel between star systems at sub-lightspeed.
-1, Too Reasonable
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing