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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.'"
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
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
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.
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.