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Requiem for the Once-Imagined Future
Carl Bialik from the WSJ writes "The underwhelming Discovery mission has the Wall Street Journal Online's Real Time columnists lamenting the space program's failure to realize the sort of intergalactic exploration they once imagined as kids through the works of Arthur C. Clarke and Robert Heinlein. Considering the Viking landers were digging around Martain soil back in 1976, 'we figured the place would be necklaced with orbiters and cris-crossed by rovers by now. Maybe there'd even be astronauts (or cosmonauts or taikonauts) tracing the courses of unimaginably ancient rivers.' Instead, we get a mission whose highlights were 'a) it came back; and b) an astronaut pulled bits of cloth out from between tiles.' At this rate, the columnists fear the innovations of the future won't be much more exciting: 'Maybe Real Time 2030 will fret about how our college kids do little more than steal full-res holographic porn when they're not getting their financial identities stolen by cyber-jihadists eager to build more backpack nukes.'"
Transhumanism goes far beyond most science-fiction (there are a few transhumanist sci-fi materials coming up now). But the key is to think beyond the human before fun space stuff. We'll be powered by lithium-ions, and thus need no oxygen. As we will be engineered machines, the whole terraforming things will be moot.
Those backpack nukes won't be much of a problem. Tanks for example are quite protected against nukes, and our vastly superior engineered bodies will not have much problems with nukes unless one goes off right by you (get better implanted radar!). Of courses finances will go quickly as we become self reliant machines travelling in space (hard to trade when the speed of light is limiting you). It seems like there is a lot of money going to space schemes. That's good--but transhumanist organizations deserve more as it is a far more pressing goal.
Not saying space science is bad or counterproductive--not at all. But the promise of transhumanism defies the english language to come up with superlatives. There really are no words for it.
Transcend Humanity. Please.
One must consider however that NASA is burdened with political and commercial pressure. However to say that space exploration is hitting a speed bump is quite stupid and incorrect. We are now in the time where personal and commercial space flights are nearing possible. I believe that commercial space flights are where the real adventure is. Sure, they don't have the capabilities that NASA does, however they are advancing their technology, and to have an adventure with one of these companies is a lot easier than becoming a NASA astronaut. If I remember one thing from my childhood, it is watching the movies where the hero jets around in his own space ship, and not having to listen to a governing body as to when and where he could fly.
do.what.promptcmds
We're not paying for space travel, or even space exploration. We're paying for programmes. We get a space programme, then another one, then another one.
When we start paying for results, we'll get space travel and space exploration.
Deleted
Sadly the "kick in the pants" has always been things like a world war or having a well funded arch enemy, like the old US vs. USSR enimity. Adversity breeds inovation. Prosperity breeds complacency. So, be careful what you wish for.
I too grew up on the hard sci-fi, and most of the future has not lived up to my junior high expectations. Now I know that if you want to know what the world will be like in ten years, look back ten years and compare that technology to what you have. Add 5-10%. Adjust interval accordingly.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
I fear that my generation (I'm 28) might be one of those unlucky historical examples of one which didn't get to do jack shit because they were so busy catering to the needs of their wealthy elders while trying to patch up the disasterous debts they left us.
Actually, you didn't do jack shit because you were too busy blogging and trying to reconcile it as something other than vanity.
I'm firmly convinced that had we Instant Messaging and Blogs and computer administrators who fancied themselves designers (and vice versa) fifty years ago, Apollo would still be no more than a Greek god.
I for one do feel somewhat cheated by the lack of real manned space exploration in the last 25 years. I am one of those guys who used to read Heinlein and Clarke back when it was not popular to do so (we're talking about ancient history here). However, I'm still optimistic about the future. While we haven't been sending any people to explore the Moon or Mars (or other destinations), the technology we need for practical human colonies on the Moon or Mars has been developing and is just around the corner (told you I was an optimist). Materials science is coming up with remarkable advances monthly. Computer capability is advancing daily. Robotics, genomics, data mining, space propulsion, etc., etc. Nanotechnology promises to bring about disruptive breakthroughs in all of these areas within 10 years. These days if you don't read about a major breakthrough in some tech area daily, it's a slow news day.
I think it's right for business to get into the business of near Earth space exploration. Real competition between businesses will produce advances. And business competition will be paid for by those who have money, instead of tax dollars that could be better spent solving some of our real problems on this planet. What we need is a framework for that competition (government regulation or the lack of, tax incentives, public discussion, etc.). NASA should concentrate on away-from-Earth space and on developing new technology, or in other words those things that are too risky for business to tackle.
Just for fun, here's a link to one of my favorite (but weird) space launch development efforts.
The NSA: The only part of the US government that actually listens.
The things that "transhumanists" describe simply will not be possible? It has nothing to do with technology: it's resources. We're seeing oil prices soar right now. With oil and other basic resources that we need for a modern society quickly dwindling: breathable air, drinkable water, etc. society as we know it will collapse long before most of these pie-in-the-sky ideals are reached.
Actually, there is plenty of energy. The sun pumps out far more than we need. We just aren't very good yet at capturing even the little bit that falls on our own planet, not to mention the bulk of it that is radiated off to space. This is very much a matter of technology. As for drinkable water and breathable air, those have actually been improving, and there is potential for technological improvements there as well.
So, how many editorials has the WSJ published crying about the expense and wasteful nature of Nasa and the space program? Now that we're running launches on a shoestring (also known as the "Quicker, cheaper, faster" policy)things are bound to be slower, less spectacular and more dangerous.
My answer? Say fuck off to these semi literate journalists who cant remeber past their last bowel movement. I'm tired of listening to these op-ed managers put a timetable on science and invention. They act like cost overruns at NASA are big news. These are the same people who vote down school budgets and then act surprised by large class sizes.
Stupidity, my dear editorialist, DOES invalidate your opinion.
Have you read it recently? It promotes creationism, is virulently antiscience or antilifescience and has never seen a space program it couldn't poke fun at. It's being written by people too fundamentalist to get a job at the National Review.
Seriously, the WSJ Op-Ed is just this side of insane white mullah
Oh come on. Whine whine whine. What kind of world did our parents and grandparents inherit from their parents ? A world devastated by two disastrous world wars (and for Europe and large parts of Asia that not only meant financially devastated and devastated by the loss of a large percentage of young men but total destruction of large parts of the infrastructure, housing etc. plus the killing). A world of the cold war, of wide-spread political unrest.
Don't kid yourself, we are still living in one of the most prosperous ages the Western hemisphere has ever known. If our parents had blamed everything on their parents we would still sit on a large heap of rubble roasting dead rats on fires made in scrap metal from broken tanks.
What about witnessing the birth of the Internet, the first ever global web between people on Earth? A revolution doesn't need to be a spectacular effort, it can be a technology that changes society as a whole.
theefer
The Science Channel was rerunning old Science TV shows, one of which was "The 21st Century" with Walter Cronkite from the late 1960s.
One thing he mentions repeatedly is we will have men on Mars by 1985. That was a whole 15 years in the future.
So just hold yer horses... Oh
It is facinating to see what our time looked like from there. We had just landed on the moon so why would Mars be so hard? The living room of the future is a hoot. It had a wall-sized flat big screen TV with high fidelity stereo sound. TVs for stock quotes, another for the weather, this one let's you talk to the office. They all had knobs almost bigger than today's MP3 players.
We did have men on the moon. We could imagine the rest.
The sad thing is for the last 30 years kids only had a low-performance space truck and a make-work place for it go to think about - all it managed by those who now have to think about how every decision will sound in testimony before a congressional committee.
Those kids got a raw deal. We're all getting a raw deal.
Ever dream you could fly? Get up from the Flight Sim. I Fly
To all the people who keep citing Orion: Medusa has been determined to be better in almost every respect (lighter, can be made smaller, more efficient, less radiation exposure, smoother acceleration, etc - it uses a large sail ahead of the craft instead of a pusher plate behind it). Note that Orion/Medusa doesn't get you off the surface of Earth, or even out of LEO. See problems with the Orion project.
I think a revolutionary step would be if we could create very *dense* power generation (inertial electrostatic confinement fusion could possibly pull this off, if we could get it to work).
I ran some numbers on a test MPDT thruster. The thruster weighed 20kg and could consume 7.1 MW of power to produce 90N at 3,100 sec (3 mg/s of argon at 34000 amps). That's 0.45g, for a *lab model*, and not necessarily being run at its limits. It's not hard to picture that with lighter material and process refinement getting several G's of acceleration on an engine of that size (or even more if it scales up better than linearly). The problem is, the *engine* weighs 20kg. Its power source would weigh many tons with current tech.
It is conceivable that if we could have very dense power generation, we could directly lift off Earth with MPDT thrust. Sadly, we're not even close to that power density present-day.
Next to my desk we have an Ire Extinguisher. Our boss is really assertive, so we like the idea of having it.
And who raised the kids in such an attention-starved environment that they write to a handful (or more) of online entities just so they can feel some satisfaction and relevance in their lives? Seriously -- all the "deficiencies" of the younger generations that boomers bitch about now are a direct result of the self-centered, self-indulgent, self-everything lifestyle you guys fought so hard for back in the 60's. Now that it's biting you back, seems you don't want it anymore. Too late.
I will take exception with what you had to say:
The United States suffered *none* of the disaster that was World War II with regard to our infrastructure and general populace. In fact, our economy got such a kick out of the production the war spurred that it put the US into what many people consider its Golden Age: the 1950s.
Eastern Europe was *devastated* by World War II, and was under the control of the Soviet Union for much of the Cold War. The result being that the area never truly recovered from the war and only now under the European Union is seeing any progress. Western Europe was also badly damaged, but had many important advantages: it had the United States to bolster its regrowth, and the population loss wasn't as great as in the East. Europe is still second fiddle to the United States economically, and will probably never regain its former position in the world with the rising economies of the Far East.
The United States basically lucked out of WWII (though I don't say that with any intention of diminishing the accomplishment or the sacrifice), and relative to the rest of the world, we got off very easy. The political unrest in the aftermath of the Cold War, by the way, is what *we* are dealing with today in the form terrorism -- you can't fight secret wars on the backs of poor people without engendering serious animosity. The threat of nuclear annihilation was actually *more* unlikely during the Cold War than it is today -- terrorist groups might not hesitate to spark a nuclear war or use a nuclear weapon, as they have very little to lose relative to the former Soviet empire.
The Sun is proof that we can't even do fire properly.
Conservation isn't the answer because of that unlimited energy assumption. We need budget energy like we do cash reserves. If say we only got, pulling a number out of my ass here, 10K watts a month we would learn to live within that budget.
For the most part, supply and demand takes care of that, so we don't really need a separate energy budget. As energy gets scarcer, the price rises and we use less of it in order to stay within our financial budget. When the electric bill starts to hurt, you start remembering to turn off your lights.
The main problem is that technological development is sufficiently slow that it tends to lag behind need. By the time the price of oil and gas is high enough to encourage investment in development of alternative energy sources, we can't wait another ten or twenty years for the technology to mature. So we have to be investing in basic energy research all along, and building the infrastructure a bit before it is really cost-effective.
Slightly off topic, but I notice this rock got named Apophis, which I find slightly ironic, considering in one episode of Stargate, the Goa'uld Apophis tried chucking a giant asteroid at Earth to deal with those uppety Humans without makeing a direct strike, drawling the wrath of the Asguard.
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Contrary to the "War drives advancements theory" I think military is exactly what's holding us back. We spend SO much money on our military that we dwarf the ammount spent on space advancements. Maybe if the world got along we could combine our efforts to reach some of these far-fetched goals.
Or, put more succinctly by a better writer than you or I...
"These unhappy agents found what had already been found in abundance on Earth - a nightmare of meaninglessness without end. The bounties of space, of infinite outwardness, were three: empty heroics, low comedy, and pointless death."
--Kurt Vonnegut, "The Sirens of Titan"
No reason not to try, nor expect (figurativevly) the moon and stars...
Bemo
"I guess the moral of the story is, don't paint your airship with rocket fuel." -- Addison Bain
We're getting bogged down by energy requirements. Oil is going through the roof, batteries are barely crawling along in improvements, fuel cells still cost a fortune, and everyone is still afraid of the nuclear boogeyman.
What does that leave? Geothermal? Fat chance of seeing that go wide spread. So that leaves solar.
Why the hell is the moon not coated with solar cells? I mean, seriously. Ok let's say we don't want to change how it looks. The bitch is tidelocked! Just put them on the back! Oh but we'll have to go up there and it'll take forever to build! No it won't. Robots, people! I remember reading in Discover around 1992-93 or so about a new all-electrical process someone had developed for extracting materials from sand. He had a bunch of little robots running around the desert building solar cells out of the raw silicon. The moon's got that in spades, and aluminum for the connections. Yeah the efficiency won't be great but who cares when you have an entire MOON (or even half a moon) of them?
How do we get the robots there? Send some. But it won't be enough! Self-replicating. Is this really such a hard challenge? We're seeing basic steps towards it today. Tell me it would cost more than a major space program like a Mars trip to get it working and on the backside of the moon.
How does the power get back? "Laser". But won't it cook the earth? Not if you lock the depression angle so it can only hit geosynchronous orbit and not cross the earth.
But won't people abuse it and fight over it? Declare the moon array itself public domain. Make all the receiving sattelites privatized to create competition and prevent government death rays. Make all the ground stations government owned to prevent slum-shopping for placements by over-greedy immoral corporations. There, you have a case for competition and a nice construction project for all those 3rd world equator countries with the best views of orbit.
What would that get you for your hundred billion or so invesment? UNLIMITED POWER! We wouldn't NEED oil, or fusion, or anything else with that running. Want to use it to go into space? Point the lasers the other way and use them with sails or to power ion drive systems. We'd be mining the asteroid belt with Mark 2 replicating robots in no time. Then we have unlimited energy AND unlimited resources.
Then the real fun starts. Want to end world hunger? Desalinate the ocean and irrigate the entire sahara desert. It'd be cheap. Want to end pollution? Electrochemical reclamation. With virtually free power, post-problem pollution fixes are cheap enough to work. Want to educate everyone? What kind of network can you run when you don't need to worry about electrical losses? Want to cure cancer? There's some promising work with antimatter. Build accelerators to produce it, more efficient ones than the general-purpose kind we have now. Don't want them on earth? Put them on the moon too, make a bigass one around the equator, ship the people there on vacation. Want to get rid of that threatening asteroid headed for earth? Zap it with a petawatt or two before it passes Mars and watch the vapor pressure push it away. Maybe into a nice orbit where we can strip mine it.
All that aside, biotech is going to be the next kick ass field. Read Wired in the last couple years? We can just about cure f'ing BLINDNESS! Eat that you boomer fossils! We're going to see fixes for spinal injuries, better transplants, a doubling of life span, improved prosthetics or maybe even regrown parts. Think some religious-based policies will stop that? Maybe in the US, that's just going to open the door for someone else to take the lead. We're going to be 130 and bitching our great grand kids want tails and wings for xmas and how immoral it is and back in our days we just hijacked cars on playstation and hacked virtual sex in, and that was fine for us!
Introducing the new Occam Fusion! Now with sqrt(-1) fewer blades!
In my view, NASA needs to stop thinking as though every mission, manned or not, is a camping trip where every ounce in your pack is critical. One reason why so many Mars probes have failed is because spacecraft are simply not at all robust. The best illustration I can think of for this mentality, and its counterpart, are US and soviet fighter planes.
Most of the US fighters we're familiar with - F-14s, 15s, 16s, 18s were designed with an extremely high maintenance profile in mind, and their designs assume base conditions that are close to sterile, just like NASA. So, for example, an American fighter can't take off of a runway that hasn't been swept! A stray nail on the runway, and your $20 million dollar plane is history. Obviously this assumes that you'll always be able to sweep your runways.
Now contrast that to Migs from the soviet era. With heavily overbuilt and ultra-durable systems - everything from airframe to electronics to engines - Migs can be maintained at a fraction of the cost, run on crappy fuel, and beaten to shit and back and still keep flying. In one Mig (can't remember which) the front air intakes close on takeoff and dorsal vents are used instead so that in real wartime conditions they could take off and land from a bombed out stretch of highway, not just a zamboni-perfect airstrip. One russion pilot I saw interviewed was laughing about how fragile US planes are by comparison. If I remember correctly, he spoke from memory about an instance where the undercarriage on a plane failed to fully deploy and collapsed on landing. A US fighter would have disintegrated, but the Mig (or maybe it was an SU) just skidded, sparks flying, down the runway at 150mph for half a mile. Afterwards, they just picked it up, opened up the landing gear, and put it right back out on the flight pattern!
This is a roundabout way of saying that NASA would be very wise to build launch vehicles and spacecraft in the mold of Migs and Land Rovers instead of F-15s and Rolls Royces. Getting into space is expensive, so forget the penny pinching and do it right, or 1-in-50 of your shuttle launches are going to fail and half of your Mars probes are going to fail. Doing it right in this case means overbuilding everything, and that means building stuff heavy and building it to take a beating.
Spacecraft should look like the gear you find on an oil rig, not something built out of tissue paper in a clean room. And if your spacecraft is 5 times as heavy, and that costs money, so be it. It will work. It won't break. It's goddamn solar panels won't 'fail to deploy' because their little wrist-watch-sized motors freeze up, or whatever.
Well, that's my rant I guess. I just wish NASA would think of missions a little more like the army does. Think of the images from Iraq: you wouldn't send one virtually unique vehicle into hostile territory on a critical mission, and you wouldn't build a single gigantic thing to carry all your bear through the desert, because all your eggs would be in one basket. Instead, you have hundreds of trucks and they all roll out together. You plan on a few breaking down and being written off. You don't plan on bringing them back. You just do what it takes to get the job done, and an 'army' of simple, redundant, tough-as-nails trucks is what it takes...
A-Bomb
Using laser launch vehicles (or microwave) would cut costs and increase reliability dramatically without the huge risk or initial cost of a space elevator. *And* they could be used for ballistic commercial flights (assuming they could be based near population centers). Anywhere in the world in 45 minutes.
We're stuck because we foolishly delegated the future to the government. At the time it sort of made sense, because it cost billions to get off the planet. But now it only costs millions. It's time to take space into our own hands.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!