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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.
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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.
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.
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? -
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
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.
I'm pretty sure they used rockets.
Intron: the portion of DNA which expresses nothing useful.
I want to elaborate on this. I am quite convinced that the survival argument for space travel is fundamentally an excuse used by people whose real reasons are less rational. How else could such a patently nonsensical argument have gained such passionate support among a community of otherwise intelligent and rational people?
The counterargument is as follows: what could anybody or anything possibly do to our planet to make it as hostile an environment as, say, Mars?
Even nuclear war or an asteroid strike would be unlikely to eliminate the oxygen from the atmosphere or change the mean surface temperature by more than, say, 20 or 30 degrees Celsius. Still quite hospitable in the grand scheme of things.
Rather than shipping a self sufficient colony of humans to Mars, at extraordinary difficulty, expense, and risk, why not just build the same colony in a physically and environmentally isolated place on Earth, like some mine shaft somewhere? Heck, build two for redundancy. The engineering and political risk to such a project would be vastly reduced by avoiding the need to shlep everything between gravity wells. Space travel is extraordinary difficult, and as a result, space engineering projects have a remarkably poor success rate. The survival of the species hardly seems like an area where we should choose to take on vast and unnecessary risks.
If our goal were truly to protect the survival of the species, we would start with that premise and consider the technical merits of all the possible solutions. Yet we seem to be entering this debate with a preconception that space colonization is the answer. I believe that the answer is preordained simply because survival of the species never was a goal, and never will be; it is simply a rationalization for our desire to explore a new frontier!
I think nothing illustrates this better than the political absurdity of actually implementing a realistic human survival plan here on Earth. Can you imagine getting Congress to spend a few billion dollars for a self sufficient colony on Earth? It would be laughed out of committee. Even at the height of the Cold War, we were telling schoolchildren to hide under their desks instead of seriously trying to protect our future. And just writing these words, I am starting to sound like a survivalist crackpot!
Why is it so much easier for us to justify an enormously difficult, expensive, and failure prone attempt at survivalism in space when we do it so much better, faster, and cheaper here on Earth?
Martin