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Why We Need to Expand into Space
Zentropa writes "Why do humans need to explore and colonize space? To save the planet and our species, argues an opinion piece in Cosmos, an Aussie science magazine. It makes some good points from an angle you may not have previously considered; for example, it's in the universe's best interest to keep us around. We make things fun. 'So what if humans pass into history? It's not just a tragedy for us, but also one for nature. Without us, there is no one to witness its infinite beauty; no one to marvel at a sunset, revel in a view, or thrill to the breaking of a wave on a beach. As the late astronomer and author Carl Sagan once said, "we are a way for the universe to know itself". But we also deserve to continue because we have created things greater than ourselves. Not only scientific and engineering knowledge, valuable as this is -- we have also created new and beautiful ways to see the world through art, music, literature and performance.'"
I grew up with the space program, and I remember watching the moon landing on tv when I was a little kid. It was pretty much the coolest thing ever. For most of my life, I've been a big space supporter.
I'm not any more.
We do a lot of cool stuff in space -- the Hubble is a great example. But I think it's mostly a military program. The program is thick with screcy, and so much of it seems to be part of this strangelovian plan to militarize everything.
If we were actually going to do that cool stuff in a transparent way, I'd be all for it. But we're not. We're going to lob satellites into orbit to support networked weapons systems, and to spy on people, and all the rest.
The cool stuff is mostly bait and switch to get us to accept the ugly stuff without examination or complaint.
Expanding into space is not a trivial thing. To paraphrase Douglas Adams: "Interstellar distances do not fit into the human imagination." Not only does it take a long time to get anywhere, but when you get there you are unlikely to have enough resources left to survive there or even get back home. So if biological organisms are too resource intensive (food, air, etc) for the timescales involved and it is not feasible to store/produce/mine resources to sustain them along the way then we must consider alternate forms of intelligence to handle the logistics of human space settlement. When, not if, we develop machine intelligence then those having much simpler resource needs - ideally just electricity - the intelligence could travel between the stars exploring and seeding planets as it goes and generally carrying on the human lineage for millenniums to come. If we as a species decide that our form should be replicated to the stars then we can include on our ships the human genetic code stored and when a suitable world in chanced upon reproduce the genetic code back into a human (grow them in a tank) and raise the humans on-board until maturity teaching them out of human knowledge also stored on the ship (robot nannies for the first generation). Once you get up to large scales such as galaxies and clusters the facts of how long and resource intensive it is to operate on those scales almost requires something like what I've written above.
Shh.
I've always been sorta partial to Lee Smolin's hypothesis that universes can beget universes. The consequence of this assumption is that the parameters of universes, like the constants of nature there, will evolve by natural selection into sets of universes more likely to breed.
It's not totally implausible that having parameters conducive to life and complexity in general would be a good reproduction strategy down the road.
Now, where did i put my bong?
It's been said that math and science are the most likely things to be shared between different, intelligent races. If that's the case, then many alien species may find classical music to be very pleasing in its forms and the interplays of wavelengths. Ratios play into visual mediums in interesting and beautiful ways.
;)
I agree on the science and math. I strongly disagree on the music - sure the ratio of tones might be a universal but there's a lot more to it that - music is tailored to our attention span for a start, things are repeated just enough for us to remember then, just before we get bored, a new theme is introduced. It seems unlikely that anything else would coincidentally have the same thresholds. And who's to say they wouldn't prefer their music at humming bird speeds? Or as a week long contest like a cricket match?!
As for the visual arts - they're even worse because our colour perception is so arbitrary. Whole paintings would likely look brown to an alien!
In short, I disagree back
ccalam - acoustic versions of new songs.
You're right that there's little evidence to believe that something will evolve to replace it. More likely, we'll go extinct and then some other intelligent species might evolve, but given the billions of years evolution that previously took place, not very likely.
But there's two trite assumptions you've made that always annoy the hell out of me, because there's absolutely nothing to support them but a kind of quasi-prejudice. While at first glance, these two assumptions might seem seperate, they have the same root.
First you implied that somehow classical music is somehow superior to all other forms of music. Bullshit. Classical music was simply the popular music of the day. There's nothing magical about it. You described classical music as "very pleasing in its forms and the interplays of wavelengths." (Typically one describes audio as frequencies, but whatever.) Well geez, since every musical form has forms and interplay of frequencies. That's what distinguishes music from a steady tone. But your choice of aliens enjoying classical music is very telling. Over the years it has become perceived to be superior to all other forms of music because of the perception that "smart" and "successful" people listen to it. As the antithesis to classical music, rap is typically given. I suspect that the thought of many alien species finding rap music pleasing never entered your mind, because classical music is for winners and rap music is for losers. This is a very persistent view, even though there's no evidence, let alone anectodal evidence, to support it.
This leads me to the second assumption, which I already touched on. The assumption that aliens are somehow super intelligent/powerful. Basically, Klaatu from Day The Earth Stood Still. Why? What's the basis for this very common assumption? Simple. Some want to believe that someone will come down from the sky and solve our problems. That's absurd. Given that we have absolutely no evidence for any intelligent and technologically lifeform existing anywhere in the universe besides us, I would argue, that this leads to an obvious conclusion: that humanity is the most intelligent and technologically advanced lifeform in the universe. It has to be someone, so why not us? Oh. Right. That would be too depressing.
Evolution rewards fitness for the environment. Not intelligence. Not culture. Nothing but who can fuck the most. It's good to remember that in discussions like this.
I'd like to agree with you, but you're wrong. We're antithetical to the continuation of this universe. The good news is that I'm pretty sure any intelligent life would be.
The problem is the universe is too simple for the likes of us. Once you truly understand the nature of spacetime, it's simple to see how to switch between matter, time and energy states. In many ways it looks like the holy grail of power generation. It means virtually unlimited free energy - it's not really free of course, the universe gains entropy when it's altered that way, but it's free enough for us. The only problem with the method is that it scales up easily. I can't see that there's a limit to how far up it can scale.
The hardware required isn't particularly complicated to build - anyone with basic mechanical, plumbing and electrical skills could do it in a week. That means all the energy in the universe would be available to anyone who wanted it, for whatever purpose. The whole of human history has been about increasing the amount of power each individual can wield. Hand held rocks gave way to spears, then arrows, guns, cannons; even whole aircraft became projectiles. With this tool, if somebody wanted to convert an earth-sized chunk of matter to energy, it would be trivial to do so. It wouldn't be much harder to do the same for the whole of our universe.
I had my moment of epiphany about this a few years ago, and I'm seeing signs others know about it too. There are too many intelligent people chasing down what are clearly dead ends to be accidental - particle physicists still bashing (very tiny) rocks together, for example. I suppose eventually someone will have the same epiphany, but decide to exploit it. I don't think we'll last long then.
That's why I think we should fix ourselves first. Getting off the planet's not enough to save us.
As far as your advice goes though, I've decided to stay alive. These are interesting times.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
The two activities overlap significantly - a critical skill we need to learn for surviving in space is how to run a viable ecosystem, whether it's on a closed-system spaceship or a terraformed planet. So far we've only run a few small closed-system terrarium experiments like the Biosphere (which had to cheat and bring in extra oxygen, something that's only easy to do when you're on a working planet) - even non-closed-system spacecraft like the Space Station have been getting weird mold problems we don't know how to manage well. And we've got one experiment running on terraforming a planet (Earth) which is going pretty badly at the present time - we don't even know how the thermostat works yet. So we're going to need to learn to fix planets before we can get off this one, and the best way to learn that is by trying to fix this planet.
Also, the energy requirements for getting lots of people off the planet are amazingly high; we're decades away from building even space elevators, much less mass-production rockets, and since we don't know how to run portable ecosystems yet, it doesn't make sense to give high priority to the transport parts; we can let Moore's Law crank for another century or two just fine.
There are one or maybe two exceptions to that - satellites studying and observing the Earth are really useful in learning how to fix the planet, and we can launch those with our current low technology. Unlike other parts of the space program, which have given us powdered orange drink and better military missiles by diverting scientists and engineers from making better commercial aircraft or more efficient automobiles, the satellite part of the space program may have been a big win. Also, power satellites *might* be useful as an alternative to carbon-fuel or nuclear energy, and it might make sense to work on them early, but that'll take a lot of earth-based design to show whether it might be feasible.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
You're absolutely right that it costs a lot of money to get stuff off Earth. Thing about space is, there's so much resources up there for the taking that just about anyone who manages to "mine" just one asteroid, or crater on the Moon, or the atmosphere of a gas giant, is going to be rich beyond the ability of Earth's markets to measure.
The off-worlders will be so rich they can buy the services of anyone they need. And if they see a need to bring them into space, then they will. Seems a lot more likely that the whole Earth will be seen as a cheap source of labor, much as third world countries are seen by first world countries today. I think the term "first worlder" might become derogatory this century.
How we know is more important than what we know.
I highly doubt the Universe cares about us since it mainly consists of empty space and unless the matter and/or energy of the universe become sentient this will continue until the whole Universe dies. The interesting thing is some matter has become sentient and can look at the Universe with wonder and an inquiring mind. This is our species and at the moment we are only aware of one intelligent life form in our entire Universe, however the Universe is incomprehensibly huge and we would have to be arrogant to the point of stupidity to believe we are the only intelligent species.
Our species is fortunate to live in "interesting times" since there is so much to discover about the Universe and even if we could live for millions of years we would still be scratching the surface. This should not be viewed as a defeat but as a challenge which gives us a reason to live, learn and appreciate the wonder of it all. Unfortunately there are many people who view the very thought of even venturing into space as a waste of resources since they think we should get our own house in order first.
From my personal view the people who call space research a waste are consigning our species to oblivion since eventually we are going to run out of resources and that will result in suffering and death on a grand scale. To them this is "God's" will so when you hear or read this there is nothing you can say that will sway them. These are the same people who would quite happily burn a scientist or visionary at the stake because they did not agree with their narrow minded point of view. Fortunately these people are not in control but give them a chance and they would bring the human race back to the "Dark Ages" and what is frightening is they honestly believe they are doing the right thing.
There ain't no such thing as proprietary standards only proprietary formats. Standards are by definition open.
Ok, let's get it straight. Homeless "have places to live"?...People with cars and TVs can only get food in soup kitchens?
Let us brush up on logic, shall we? Homeless doesn't always equal poor, and poor doesn't always equal homeless.
Let's move on.
It sounds like you haven't actually worked with poor people who have it good in US.
Sounds like it from what? I have BEEN the poor in the US who had it good. I was below the 'poverty line' (that means poor), and I had a place to live, air conditioning, my own bed, television, car, radio...clothes, food, etc. Of course, it wasn't as nice as I wanted and there wasn't as much of it as I wanted, but if wishes were fishes... the whole world would smell terrible.
If you did, I think you would find that they would love to get a (better) job, but everything that doesn't require a master's degree has been outsourced.
That's odd, I somehow got (several) better jobs, in increasing rank, with NO college degree whatsoever. Of course, it took work. It wasn't fun. It wasn't always the best job.
They would love to live a decent life, but their children get killed in random shootings in the only areas where they can afford rent.
Well, now we're getting in to other issues. Why do their children get shot? Is it because the majority of them want nothing more than to go to school and be left alone? Are most of the shootings random or stray bullets? Also please note that MUCH of the government-assisted housing is in such areas. I thought those programs HELPED people! Yet many times, they simply keep them tethered to horrible places.
They have to raise their 3 children without a father who ran away and doesn't have money for child support.
My father left when I was 3 years old. My mother never received a dime from him, in child support or anything else. Yet we never took any government money, either, because my mom taught us that charity is a crutch and that you can make do without it. So we did. Yet she also taught us to volunteer, not just because it's the right thing to do, but to show us what our lives would have been like if she had not worked herself ragged. I appreciate the sacrifices my mom made SO MUCH more than I did when I was little.
They are met with condescending attitude even from people such as yourself who claim to be charitable.
Actually, people who have been 'in the trenches' are MUCH more likely to be cynical than those that stay in their secluded lives and think that everyone who gets government money actually NEEDS it. Or that everyone who goes to soup kitchens is homeless. Or that everyone who begs for money is poor. Don't believe me? Go spend ONE WEEKEND at a soup kitchen. Then let me know how you feel.
One day when your profession is outsourced you will have to literally get a "fucking job" and wonder why someone has to get screwed in the ass to get a car and a TV when possessing a university degree and being willing to work do good hard work with hands.
If this job gets outsourced (why the fear? They can't outsource EVERYTHING, you know), I'll simply go get another job. I've worked manual labor before and it doesn't scare me. They'll never outsource things like construction, because, you know, it would be impossible. Also, I see 'help wanted' signs ALL OVER THE PLACE. It can't be THAT hard to get a job washing dishes. I've certainly never found it impossible to become employed, given that I'm not holding out for some 'perfect job'. So get off your high horse, dickweed. Lecture me about condescension and then claim I'd be reduced to prostitution if I lost my job? Jackass.
http://xkcd.com/386/
Absolutely. I'd even go as far as saying you're out of line when you say 'you're probably right' - well, no, you have no way of asessing that probability. For all we know we could be the single best thing that ever happened to the universe. Hell, one could even argue that all our planet-destroying is hugely beneficial in the grand scheme of things, even if it may damage ourselves. Who are we to judge with our limited mindset?
So yeah, agnosticism is a healthy position. In the absence of strong data I find it the only logical choice. Absolute statements like that of the GP are generally nonsense. Only a Sith deals in absolutes.
Often I hear about how we need to expand into space and bring our environments along with us. I believe this is the wrong way to go. It would be much easier I believe to "Marsform" myself then to terraform Mars. While this may seem far fetched and imaginative, it could prove to be simple. The biggest problems of unprotected humans living on Mars is the temperature and the atmosphere. It is quite cold, and there is very little oxygen. However, there is some oxygen. I think it would be easier to adapt ourselves to deal with the carbon dioxide and the cold then to adapt mars to deal with us. I obviously do not have the technical expertise to tell you how it would be done, but I think it is an alternative we should look into.
Relax dude, we'll either make it off this planet or will die. Really, if we make it off the planet, so then whatever, we'll see some stuff elsewhere. If we don't so whatever, we won't. Obviously we should do everything we can to try things out for fun basically and because we can. But don't forget that you personally and I and all of us here will die before it will be even possible, so with this knowledge comes out the question: Why do you give a shit if 10000000 years from now some humanoid whose species originated on this planet sees a new star somewhere in Crab Nebula? Is it the species pride of some sort? It won't be you. It won't be me, so fuck them, whoever they might be.
You can't handle the truth.
and you care about all those plants and animals why? You think it makes you a better human? Do you DO anything to backup your care or do you just say things? I don't care but don't do anything that is more destructive to the environment than the other guy, but I also wouldn't go out of my way to do anything 'better' for environment than maybe install a higher efficiency furnace to get some money back from the guvmn't that steals my money as taxes.
You can't handle the truth.
So, err, what do you think they're going to do when they're in space? Float around and wait for aide packages from Earth?
You're absolutely right that it costs a lot of money to get stuff off Earth. Thing about space is, there's so much resources up there for the taking that just about anyone who manages to "mine" just one asteroid, or crater on the Moon, or the atmosphere of a gas giant, is going to be rich beyond the ability of Earth's markets to measure.
You bet your ass they'll need help. All kinds of high-tech equipment they can't make or fix themselves must be transported in from earth. This isn't the wild west where you can just walk outside, cut down trees and grow a field. You need air-tight pressure domes (you wanna trust your self-built shack to be airtight?), space suits and a closed ecosystem just not to suffocate, thirst or starve to death. You can't mine enough to hit minimum wage inside a space suit, it'd have to be done by machines, though I suppose they needn't be more expensive than on earth except the cost of getting them there or producing them.
But when it comes down to it - even with the moon's low gravity and Mars is even worse, the transportation costs are hell. What exactly is valuable enough up there to send back? There's He3 if we ever get fusion going, but it's not like it's flowing over with gold and platinum. The moon and Mars are for the most part a big rock which we got plenty of here at home. There's been no life as we know so there's no oil or gas or such cheap fuel, we're probably talking solar panels which won't be cheap, particularly not until we have the mines and facilities to produce batteries locally. All in all it sounds to me like a helluva expensive project at every turn. And even if all the assumptions were true, it's probably much easier to run almost everything from a robot control central either here or on-site than actually going out and mining something.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings