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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.
I dunno, maybe part of the problem is that progress just outran the global society's ability to adjust at some point -- that definately seems to be the case with a lot of the more disaffected people both in the US and overseas. IMO, the crazed religious zealot in Iran and the crazed Kansas schoolboard member have a lot of root causes in common. Those wackos are extreme examples, granted, but it seems like they're also symptomatic of larger societal problems.
I'm ready to pick up and keep moving, though, and I think a lot of people of my generation are. We never saw a moon landing; it happened before we were born and, frankly, even if we went back it would seem like old hat. "Yeah, Earthrise. Great, never seen that before". We read about this shit in the *history* books, man. But that's not a bad thing: I suspect a lot of us wouldn't find the concept of, say, mining asteroids as exotic as the Boomers would, and maybe that's all we really need. And hey, if that's possible, if that improves our lot, maybe it'll finally be that human advance where, once it starts, it just continues on and on.
Of course, speaking of the Boomers, 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. By the time they start to croak en masse it'll be too late to do anything all that interesting -- we'll be too old and too unimaginative, left only with the shadow of the dreams we once entertained.
Honestly (and sadly), I'm pretty sure that's the direction we're headed in. Happily, however, I also believe it's not too late to change that. That's why I support ideas like the Space Elevator; it's the sort of kick that might get us out of this funk and allow us to overcome the fate of being a generation the just paid too much for their houses.
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
You want to talk about the short commings of the predicted future then forget space where is my ROCKET CAR!
Maybe Real Time 2030 will fret about how our college kids do little more than steal full-res holographic porn
Bah! If it doesn't have full tactile neural input, then I'm not interested.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
I, for one, am heartened by how much the shuttle has come to resemble the Millenium Falcon. At least in the reliability department.
I was promised flying cars by 2000!
Project Orion would have made all these dreams come true. It still can, though we'd probably have to build one of these suckers in space.
Frankly, for travel in the solar system any other form of propulsion is misguided at best and outright stupid at worst!
Simon.
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
When we haven't even done much with the Moon? I say start smaller then work our way up. Establish a base on the moon; grow plants in a contained greenhouse, get some population on the moon, make it a place that can sustain life for some time.
From there, with we'd have better understanding and experience in exploration and cultivation, and thus we could more easily work out our grander visions of Mars exploration.
Tech, life, family, faith: Give me a visit
Lest we forget c.)Took out the trash.
OSGGFG - Open Source Gamers Guide to Free Games
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.
I don't respond to AC's.
Sigh...
It seems that some time ago in my past, I read on the the back of a cereal box that by the time I was grownup I would be driving one of those nifty Jetsons cars that hoover and fly. Do I really have to grow up to get one?
I lost my sig...
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
Urgh, link here
Simon.
Seriously, we need a new power source. As long as we're burning shit to get into space we're never going to be able get anywhere.
Technology, the cause of and solution to all of life's problems.
The future is not what it used to be.
In theory, there's no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is.
all those people in china and india have similar hopes and dreams. While our low population gen X may not realize these dreams i guarantee you other countries will. We'll be pulled to the stars on the backs of third worlders.
http://www.livejournal.com/users/cixel
Sadly, it appears most sci-fi writers and buffs were somewhat lacking in the taste of reality department. Economics, i.e. business potential are more likely to drive space exploration than scientific interest. While we're seeing fledgling efforts, it's still a pretty iffy thing to leave a perfectly good planet behind to build a house on the Moon or Mars.
Seems much of the Sci-fi I've read was more a vehicle for another story, i.e. it's not about the lasers stupid, it's the exploration of man's inhumanity to man, sorta thing.
Looking at how ultimately fragile our space crafts are, and the terrific amount of stored energy it takes to escape the Earth's surface, the one thing that should come home to people who expect Buck Rogers is this isn't as easy as putting pen to paper and scribbling up interplantetary travel.
Sadly, the real drama of what has transpired to get this far isn't as entertaining (although The Right Stuff and Apollo 11 took a stab at it) as Star Wars.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
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
It's not what I expected, but then, what ever is? No, we don't have flying cars or Martian vacations. What we do have is real-time access to vast reams of knowledge for most of the developed world. Communicate with anyone, anywhere. Watch any one of hundreds of thousands of movies with inexpensive devices found in most homes. Get almost any book you would care to read delivered to your home. Fly anywhere in the US - afford ably. Hunger has been eliminated in the developed world. People are healthier, live longer. The list is endless.
Unfortunately, there are large portions of the globe that do not have access to these modern miracles, but it will come... it will come.
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Today, we are obsessed with our own personal wealth. Sure, we think, it would be nice if we could "afford" to do basic research, to spend serious money on exploration -- but no, we can't afford it, because it's more important to be able to buy more fancy cars (or boats or airplanes) than anyone else.
Reading sources from the '50s and '60s, I get the impression that there was much more concern (possibly driven by the race with the Soviets, but who cares?) for the advancement of knowledge for its own sake. People were much more willing to sacrifice a little bit of wealth for the long-term future of the society.
I wish people would think less about whether they can afford the electronic seat cooler in their new Benz and more about what kind of society they want to live in over the long term. And, no, I'm not trying to take away anyone's "freedom" -- I'm just exhorting them to think less shortsightedly.
This just in! As a way to get into space, the space shuttle sucks! Wow, that's amazing. Do you mean that all of those glowing reviews of it I've heard for as long as I can remember (I'm 23) were bull?
Seriously though, a lot of science fiction writers have been warning us about just what is happening. If we focus on "solving all our problems on the ground first" then we'll never move into space properly. The same will happen if we're too pussyfooted to accept the occasional death due to space travel. It's already safer than any major frontier exploration in history. (I'm not saying we should waste astronauts, but that doesn't mean we should quit going into orbit for 2+ years just because a few die either.) If we don't go out and build something semi-permanent beyond Earth (the Moon or the asteroid belt, maybe Mars) pretty soon, we're going to end up screwing things up on Earth badly enough (economic collapse, ecological disaster, evil killer robots, whatever) that we can't go to space. In the long run, having groups of humans separated by a few million miles is probably the best way to keep us from killing each other all the time.
Have you ever wondered How to Take Over
I think this highlights the fundamental difficulty we face in getting elsewhere in the universe, namely the difficulty of getting enough energy to move stuff around. This is not an easy nut to crack, and despite optimistic predictions it is quite possible that it is one that is insoluble. Yes, we have had many scientific breakthroughs throughout human history. Yes, naysayers are frequently proven wrong. But "past success is no indicator of future performance", as the disclaimer says, and I think this is no different.
Until we are able to get bodies of non-trivial mass to speeds that are an integer percentage of light speed we will for all practical purposes be stuck on this zealot-infested rock. Getting men and women into space and having them survive is extremely difficult even for the short periods of time the STS is in orbit. This shows that allowing them to survive for months on end is a nigh-impossible task without some fundamental advances, and there are no areas in physics that we can look to for hope in this regard.
Yes, it's possible we may one day colonize Mars, Kim Stanly Robinson style. But I doubt it. Just because it is wished for and can be imagined does not mean it is physically possible in any real sense.
The only reason we ever made it into space was competition with the Russians. Technology has never been the limitation, only social interest and drive.
It is hard to justify the cost of "the future" when there is still so much turmoil and suffering on the surface of our own planet.
I usually try to avoid politics and social debates, and I'm all for space exploration, but can you really tell me people in the USA or the world should go hungry or go without health care while we spend billions on sending people to space?
no comment
If you substitute "the rich" for "we", you dont sound so crazy:
The rich will be powered by lithium-ions, and thus need no oxygen. As the rich will be engineered machines, the whole terraforming things will be moot.
Come, now. You wouldn't have to go too far back before you'd have said the same thing about refrigeration, anti-biotics, and tiny little devices that you could hold up to your ear and use to talk to other people, almost anywhere in the world. I'm not rich, but I've got things that my great grandparents would have considered essentially magical.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
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!).
I can think of a few downsides to having a metal, indestructable body. For example, the sex probably wouldn't be as good.
You want to know why we don't have a space program like the one you're imagining? Because you and the idiot businessmen you write for decided it was too expensive, and pushed your pet politicians to cut funding for it and dump productive space programs in exchange for pork, business pay-offs, tax cuts, and other corrupt practices. Now you've realized that to expand, your economy needs to go into orbit, and that you needed to fund these things 20 years ago for them to be ready now, and are trying to find someone else to blame for the predicament your greed caused, so as not to risk your grossly overinflated salary.
Of course, I doubt you'll learn anything from this, as you and said businessmen have, as a collective, the recall and adaptation ability of the average peanut. But on the off-chance that you do, in fact, remember something, I'd like it to include the phrase:
"Payback's a bitch, ain't it?"
Human space exploration is fun to think about. Migrating tribes colonizing distant planets in other solar systems, and all that. But maybe our early successes have blinded us to the realities. Space is *big*. Human life support systems are expensive (in terms of overall resources including time, not just money).
NASA's current thinking on space seems to be like dreaming about a fairy land, with chocolate rivers and peppermint trees. Just because we can manufacture candy and we can make a place like Disneyland, doesn't mean that fairylands are going to become real.
We are doing cargo cult Star Trek.
And wasting a lot of money on it. Our money would be much better spent on robotic missions, which have a far bigger bang for the buck. And by the time we are ready for a human Mars mission, robots will probably be quite capable of the autonomous thinking and initiative that humans bring to the table. So what purpose is served by spending the extra overhead for human exploration, and doing 1/100th of the science that we could be doing for the same money? None, other than perpetuating a fairyland fantasy.
The problem i see with space exploration is that at this stage it's done entirely for it's own sake. The Cold War sparked the moon landings and our first steps into space, and now that's over there's no competitive ethos to give us any reason to return there. Besides, research and development in these areas cannot continue while companies profit in the inefficiency of current technology. Why are we still using the internal combustion engine, developed over 100 years ago? Simply, because there's profit in the fact that it's hopelessly inefficient. The same applies to space travel, if we give it a competitive or commercial context it will grow, and that's the only reason man went to the moon
Check this link for statistics (with sources) - some 30 million people in the US itself experience some level of hunger.
I've been there; when I was a kid, there was a period of time when my parents had no food in the house, and my mother baked corn meal and water because we had absolutely nothing left. We were the recipients of the local church "feed a needy family" that year, and that wasn't really fun.
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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 stated goal of the mission was to be a test flight to gather data for future flights. while they were there, they restocked the ISS. Im not sure why the heavy criticism post flight.
Sure, there is something to be said maybe about "wasting" a mission like that, but they did exactly what they said they would do, and now its a suprise?
The next flight doesnt have much more of a goal, so why not rip on that instead of the (admittedly low-goaled) extremely successful flight?
Which is why, for what little it's worth, I was disappointed to find that 2004 MN4 was going to miss the Earth in 2038.
Because 35 years is just about the right length of time, not just to develop the technology to deflect the thing, but also to generate a new generation of kids - who won't merely value science and engineering as career paths, but who will see them as essential survival tools for the species.
Instead, we've got a dumbed-down educational system that would make Harrison Bergeron cringe, and the mentality that the only careers worth having are those of criminal/thug, celebrity/whore, or lawyer/lobbyist/politician.
Fuck it. We deserve to have that rock hit us.
NASA seems to have lobbied to stop other launch systems. To keep job security and their empire at maximum size.
All the space money went to the shuttle (and to the brutally expensive space station). It costs literally a couple of orders of magnitude more to send a lbs to orbit than NASA promised. (They promised hundreds of dollars/lbs to orbit.)
All other projects in human history with that kind of failure has been shut down. Often the responsible people were buried alongside, while still breathing.
To protect the shuttle, NASA (and their allies) murdered the Dream; they fscked our (as in humanity's) future. For job security and kickbacks. This can arguably be called a crime against humanity.
If you just shrug and say that it doesn't matter, it will keep happening.
Karma: Excellent (My Karma? I wish...:-( )
Something that any one who is concerned that we didn't meet the goals of "golden era" science fiction should consider. Not a single one of those authors envisioned cheap, ubiquitous, and unspecialized computer hardware and software. Not one. The closest was Heinlein and he didn't get very close. See Heinlein's The Rolling Stones or The Moon is a Harsh Mistress.
I grew up on science fiction in the 70s and recognized around 1977 that things were not going to be like in the books. Just because we didn't meet one goal doesn't mean that we should be pessimistic about the future. What the future holds is unpredictable.
Repugnant. Emotional knee-jerk reaction. I suppose it's a sin too.
As for repugnant, I happen to think that staying as human is severly repugnant.
Transcend Humanity. Please.
Vintage science fiction filled peoples' heads with all kinds of dreamy notions of the human race fanning out to the stars and whatnot, but these pie-eyed imaginings had little understanding for the internia of global identity and the hard realities of applied, long-term space travel -- a domain in which hard radiation reigns supreme.
Of course, I'm overshooting the topic at hand (Mars), but this is the undercurrent beneath our greatly protracted exploration of our environment. Complicating the fact is that Mars appears to be an essentially dead planet, in which case it's difficult to get people to pay attention when you want to spend (from their perspective) a billion dollars to study rocks on another planet. There is no real, juicy carrot at the end of the stick.
Meanwhile, our future is mapped by Asimov, Bester, Heinlein, Stephen Baxter, et al... most of whom were scientists. So I find myself amused at their dismissal of the soft sciences, from which I believe they could have drawn some temperament. There's just no way, in my opinion, that the human race is going to spread its wings just because it can. Perhaps I'm overly cynical, but I don't think we'll get our asses of this rock until we've almost completely ruined it. And by then, it may be too late.
Because in our community, we take intelligence for granted. No, we really do. How many times a day do you find yourself extremely aggravated at the sum of stupidity you deal with on a daily basis? That's because you're encountering the general public, which on the whole is a pretty average bunch of people. But it is this group that holds the reins of the future, for better or worse, primarily through the buying decisions they make and how they choose to conserve, either through recycling or not leaving the tap on when they brush their teeth.
These people are slow to gather around a movement. They aren't into science fiction. As long as the Right Now is good enough and doesn't give them too many problems, the seductions of gadgetry and possibility aren't quite strong enough to get them on the bandwagon.
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
From the WSJ columnist:
we get a mission whose highlights were 'a) it came back; and b) an astronaut pulled bits of cloth out from between tiles.'
From NASA:
Several elements will be carried in Discovery's payload bay for delivery to the Station. These include the Multi-Purpose Logistics Module Raffaello, containing racks of supplies, food and water, and the Human Research Facility-2 rack. Also, the External Stowage Platform and a replacement Control Moment Gyroscope will be carried in Discovery's payload bay.
Excuse me for doubting the infinite wisdom of a whiny journalist, but I think I just saw a spaceship take food, water, supplies, and new equipment to a fucking space station. I apologize for not taking that accomplishment for granted. I don't know if I will ever get used to that being a simple, common occurence.
As for the astronaut who made repairs to the spaceship in fucking space, one has to wonder if the same whiny journalist changes the oil in his own car... on Earth.
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
"Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced."
The whole idea was for the shuttles to be used once or twice a week at a cost of $15 - 20M per launch. Instead problems mean we've used them just over a hundred times total at a cost of 1.3 BILLION dollars per launch. Time to pull the plug on this money sewer, it's producing very little science compared to unmanned probes, and doing nothing to colonize other worlds or mine the riches of space. If the money from just two launches were spent on space elevator R&D, we could actually get somewhere....
Use "interplanetary" for Solar System stuff and "interstellar" for travel betwwen stars within a galaxy.
This article touches on the malaise of the post cold war
USA but is missing the larger point. Despite the bravado
of free-marketers to the contrary, big projects that
do not offer immediate financial windfall simply
wither and die in our global capitalistic system. Where
is IGY 'cheap and clean' energy? Why a heath system
that lines pockets and forgets kids?
Space exploration and space colonization are akin
to cathedrals in the sky. While important in terms of
mass pride they make poor investments (Zubrin's
economic case for Mars is laughable). Bush's
repurposing of NASA is an obvious good idea but is
ultimately doomed unless monies appear (even if
private contractors do the work). Space will ultimately
be colonized by creative imitators, political radicals
or religious dissidents. The USA and Europe no longer
look to the sky.
The first Mars colony will belong to the Scientologists
for the Mormons have taken Utah.
---537
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
but can you really tell me people in the USA or the world should go hungry or go without health care while we spend billions on sending people to space?
Hmmm. Yes.
In the sense that people going hungry is a result of behaviors that hundreds of billions of dollars won't (and, even as we spend them, can't) fix. Throwing money at social problems doesn't always fix them, and sometimes makes them worse (see the comparitive self-sufficiency of kids born to other kids completely hooked on welfare, etc.). These are generally cultural issues, and it's simply going to take time. Twice the money in schools today won't make parents born 20 years ago any better at raising children right this minute. Those kids aren't going to be hungry at any time during their lives unless it's because they're not participating in the wider economy, and keeping that economy growing, efficient (through technology and its shrewd use), and reaching into new areas, is the best way to make that happen.
Yes, there are going to be circumstances beyond each of some individuals' control, and you can be born to parents that simply don't care whether or not you grow up into a someone who can feed herself. But to the extent that we do put resources into helping out people in those situations, we're not excluding doing the more magnificent things of which we, as a species and especially as an adventuresome culture, are capable.
I usually try to avoid politics and social debates
And, given the breathtakingly adolescent tone saturating most of those conversations (especially on slashdot) I can hardly blame you, but none of the cool nerdy stuff we love happens in a vacuum. Without weaving it into the wider cultural landscape (and the resources therein), the cool nerdy stuff would barely escape a handful of college labs. So fans of all things nerdly need to truly understand the larger societal and politcal contexts in which technology gets funded, used, praised, villified, and considered (too often) mutually exclusive with warmer, fuzzier "humanities" issues.
If you haven't noticed, though, I'd consider the progress of technology on all fronts to be the single greatest contributor to the conditions in which the potentially "hungry" live in the US. By conditions, I mean, as opposed to, say, that of those poor bastards in Niger, literally dropping dead from lack of food. In the US, you pretty much cannot drop dead from lack of food unless you want to, or are so addled/sick that you can't grasp what's being offered to you. Every city in the country at least has a place to obtain a meal for those that ask, and it's only through even grander technological feats that we polish the efficiencies and productivity that make that largess possible.
Besides, it's not like the money spent on space programs is actually packed up in boxes and launched into space. It mostly pays people, all of whom themselves buy houses, hire carpenters, rent videos, take the occasional vacation. Certainly some of their effort, put solely into making, say, an MRI machine so cheap and safe that we wouldn't think twice about using it on everyone with a sniffle, insurance or not, might lower the cost of health care a touch. But for that to happen meaningfully, we've got to take the lawyers out of healthcare first. It's not the lack of healthcare for a family that's really horrible, it's the fact that a lawsuit over someone else's test regimine, or the insistence on the use of fantastically costly drugs can burn up more "healthcare dollars" for one family than basic good care for 50 families would otherwise cost.
Of course, if everyone who owns a Bentley were to sell them, buy a Scion, and use the extra cash to buy 40 Scions for other people, there'd be less complaining about car ownership, either. But we're not a culture that prohibits the Bentley-ables from celebrating their prowess at basketball, charisma as an actor, insight at founding Google, or willingness to risk a lot on commercial space ventures, and nor should we be.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
But the answer to your question is:
The ones that found a working business model. (I.e. the ones that managed to give diseases to the native population so 90% died -- and found something to steal.)
The scandinavians of the period could organize large projects, given likely gains. And so could probably most large groups of people in Europe do for at least a couple of thousands of years.
Karma: Excellent (My Karma? I wish...:-( )
A related shuttle = useless post from a blog I found yesterday. Yes, the shuttle exists only to serve the ISS - which does no real science, and is merely there as a place for the shuttle to go. "They're a co-dependant waste of money". I agree. http://www.thewils.net/dave/blog/archives/000288.h tml
The Space Age ended in 1972, when we left the moon for good. We live in the Digital Age now. The future's changed.
As long as we're talking about the shuttle, here, it's interesting to remember that it was the Nixon administration that essentially cooked the numbers to make the shuttle program seem cost-effective, and that got the thing through congress. Meanwhile the Dems, Walter Mondale prominent among them, regarded the shuttle program as wasteful high-tech socialism. (Can you say "enormous federal boondoggle"?
With respect to the particular program, Mondale's argument had a big measure of truth. The "productive" space program in terms of science is pretty clearly the low(er)-cost uncrewed probes now, isn't it? On the other hand the engineering involved in crewed exploration has a different set of challenges, and the ISS and the shuttle are more about those.
Maybe we think the shuttle's an example of the sort of corrupt, pork-laden process you're talking about. "Military industrial complex" and all that. (Please, where is Mr. Eisenhower when we need him?) But the lines involved aren't nearly as clean as our more doctrinaire partisans would think. The Republicans were all for the enormous spending program, and the Democrats were extremely skeptical about whether it was cost-effective.
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
Walter Mondale was a staunch critic of the space program in general. He wanted to kill the Apollo program after the Apollo 1 fire. His ultimate goal was that the money spent on NASA should be directed into social services http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Mondale
He was probably right about the shuttle, but his bias against NASA was well known which ultimately weakened his position rather than strengthening it. (IMHO)
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.
If we base our desires on sci-fi, we might as well base them on the Jetsons..I mean, they had flying cars that became briefcases, a huge computerized workforce, robots, trips to other planets, etc.
... "things". Meanwhile, the reality, when it arrives, is that Susan and Joe MarsPioneer are screaming at each other about her infidelity and his drinking and threatening divorce while Buddy is downloading pr0n and Sis is hanging out with a bad crowd by airlock #2.
Sci-fi creates a world that suits the creator, and if done well, draws the user in. But the creator would never finish the thing if s/he had to also talk about how the plumbing works. The fact is there are so many details left out that even Blade Runner, in all its anti-glory, is idealized (how exactly did Decker *pay* for his noodles?)
Take Star Trek: only the Ferengi talked about money, but apart from hoarding it, it didn't seem like it got used a lot. I seem to recall some talk of "credits", whatever those are, but the real *believable* sci fi has Riker wondering how he's going to pay for that special trip he and Troi have been thinking about, especially based on a military salary.
"The devil's in the details"...well, they got that one right. The problem is that we dream of a details-free world where men and women live in harmony on Mars doing
Space exploration doesn't sound so appealing anymore.
The problem is that there is no business case for space.
Which is actually untrue. There is a great business case for geosynchronous communications satellites, and new ones are going up all the time, having gone from C-band to Ku-band and now to Ka-band with small spot-beam "cells" for enhanced frequency re-use that will deliver many more channels of HD video.
But outside of geosynchronous satellites, there isn't much business to be done. I suspect that sub-orbital and LEO space tourism will come about slowly, but that market will remain tight for quite a while due to a limited pool of of risk-taking rich people.
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!
the highest priority for this mission was seeing whether or not anybody died and everything else was secondary to that.
No, I believe that's why the media (WSJ, included) covered this particular mission so closely and the general population was more interested in the mission and results than usual. Another loss so soon would be a media circus and would take NASA PR decades to recover from.
We've lost two shuttles... out of 114 missions. Both were horrible tragedies and we would never accept a 1.75% catastrophic failure rate in a consumer vehicle, but we're talking about space flight. The flights had become so routine to most people that the media coverage was non-existent between the disasters. On top of that, the astronauts are all extremely bright people and I doubt they would accept a mission if anyone involved believed the main purpose was just to see if they could make it back.
there wasn't even any real science involved
We used to do the scientific work on the shuttle because there was no other location. Now, we do the scientific work on the space station and the shuttle supports it. I would still rate that as being "involved" in the science, even if the connection isn't immediately apparent.
... that the world could successfully rally to protect the planet from an asteroid in 35 years.
First, as you say, new technology would have to be developed and perfected. Not impossible but it's very difficult to predict the pace of such things. If, in fact, it took 36 years we'd still be screwed. Almost making the deadline [pun intended] wouldn't cut it.
The biggest problem would be mustering the needed level of international cooperation. No doubt the cost of the program would be too much for even the richest nations to go it alone. How many years would go by before enough nations could get together and decide on a plan of action? What would the USA do if 20 years down the road more accurate estimates of the impact point proved that the asteroid was going to impact on the other side of the globe? Would the USA withdraw its participation? I'd like to think not but I've lost much of my faith in American largess. Anyway, balancing an enormous economic drain versus the morality of allowing a serious disaster to occur to someone else (possibly an enemy) would be a serious quandary for any nation.
The problems are certainly surmountable; in theory. The world's track record regarding other crises is spotty at best. How much progress have we made at:
eliminating controllable diseases,
controlling global population growth,
controlling greenhouse gas emissions?
The list goes on and doesn't even address the more important but tougher issues like war and poverty. I'm sure someone will come up with a good example where the world got together and solved a problem but overall history shows little that it's rare and difficult.
So I don't think 35 years is really enough time. I'd say more like 300 years. At least in that much time one could hope for salvation from radically new technological advances such as anti-gravity or really really frickin powerful lasers in space.
-scsg
All other projects that was totally fouled up by NASA like NASP (and even insisting on taking over DC-X and fucking that up, too) was pure incompetence?
While the DC-X may very well have been intentional incompetence (since they really wanted the X-33 to fly), it was still incompetence. Or more precisely, no one was allowed to do their jobs, so nothing got done in a useful way. After all, why was the President dictating how the next craft should be designed? Was he an engineer? A scientist? Someone who would have any *clue* about what such a design as the shuttle would mean?
If President Nixon had listened to his people about what the actual options were for space craft (as opposed to what he wanted them to be), we wouldn't be in this pickle.
(If you didn't give the job to Burt Rutan; then you'd probably also get a moon base for that kind of money.)
Rutan's a pretty smart guy, but please keep the fanboy stuff to a minimum. Things are more complicated than they may seem.
I just wonder what we could have had.
I can tell you exactly what would have happened.
1) Von Braun would have continued the Saturn V program.
2) He would have launched an Orion on the back of a Saturn.
3) We'd have been to Mars by the 1980's.
Does that answer your question?
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
As the saying goes, Necessity is a mother.
In the 60s, we faced a geopolitical adversary that claimed the tide of history was on its side. Demonstrating, as a nation our technological superiority was a way of disproving this. Maybe going to the moon wasn't necessary before, but it when Kennedy threw down the gaunlet, the world was measuring us on our ability to follow through.
We don't have anybody we need to prove anything to anymore. Going to the moon will be a huge leap in credibilty to China; going to Mars is not going to make much difference at all to our national prestige. If you've ever coached an athlete, you'll know the best training resource you can have is a rival. It will take more than a moon shot to get us to look at China as a serious technological rival. It will take the emergence of a China that can extend its will across the globe in the same way we can, and that's going to be more than ten, possibly twenty or more years out.
In short, what I'm saying is forget about the US doing any kind of high cost, high profile space exploration anytime in the next couple of decades. There'll be talk about it, but talk is cheap.
I'm not against manned space flight. And I commend the president for increasing federal R&D to the highest levels since the early 90s. But there's no money for anything that looks like a start for a real Mars effort any time in the next five years, and I don't see why this would change in the five or ten years after that. What I'm against is sacrificing real goals we might actually be willing to pursue for the fiction of pursing more glamorous sounding ones. The worse case is that we continue what we've been doing with the shuttle program -- funding enough to keep our manned space flight program treading water, but not enough to make real progress.
Better to phase out the manned program as our ISS commitments wind down, than to spend just enough money to maintain a stagnant program. Stagnation is a waste of time, and dangerous. Long term human space exploration would be better served by actual scientific and technological progress, even if it is less dramatic than biting our nails watching astronauts flying inadequate spacecraft.
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