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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.'"
Are we humans a benefit to the universe, as TFA suggests, or are we a detriment? Each point of view will certainly be represented in the posts that follow. FWIW, I think we are a benefit.
For those who think that we are detrimental to the universe, I suggest that the only logical thing to do is to kill yourself. Now. For the good of the universe.
Quit reading; do it now. Thank you.
Let's face it, the universe doesn't give a shit about humans one way or the other. It will evolve toward its final configuration -- heat death, the Big Rip, the Big Crunch, whatever -- with no regard to any intelligences living within it.
Humanity will also never occupy more than a tiny corner of the universe, as most of it is just too damn far away to be accessible. No matter what we do, our effects will be "local". Thus, we as a species should do what is best for ourselves (and for any other intelligences we may encounter, if we ever do) and our living conditions and not worry about "what the universe thinks", because if it thinks at all, it sure isn't thinking about US.
Mal-2
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
John Sinclair: "No. We have to stay here, and there's a simple reason why. Ask ten different scientists about the environment, population control, genetics - and you'll get ten different answers. But there's one thing every scientist on the planet agrees on: whether it happens in a hundred years, or a thousand years, or a million years, eventually our sun will grow cold, and go out. When that happens, it won't just take us, it'll take Marilyn Monroe, and Lao-tsu, Einstein, Maruputo, Buddy Holly, Aristophanes - all of this. All of this was for nothing, unless we go to the stars."
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.
First off, there's zero evidence that anything would evolve to replace us. Humans have the biggest footprint on the world per member of the species, and there's absolutely no competition for that. Second, many kinds of art aren't tied to human systems at all. 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. If an alien were able to comprehend our language, they may appreciate our logical proofs, or our system of morals (like an adult watching a baby take its first steps or laughing at its naiveties, depending on how altruistic the alien species is).
Or, to be more concise, I disagree.
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.
Ho-ly shit. What the hell is wrong with you people?
Do they raise geeks on shitty, whiny junior high poetry instead of Heinlein and Asimov now?! Damn! Moving forward into space doesn't have fuck to do with GOD or the "meaning of life". It's the next goddamn step. You all of you whiney bitches saying "oh, what's the point... humans are sooo terrible" are just refusing to help because you're to damned selfish. Selfish because you don't think your children, or your neighbors children, or anybody's grandchildren should get the same thrill you did when you first saw the Shuttle take off in grade school. Or the first moon landing. Or the first manned orbit. Or the first mother fucking flint scraper.
What assholes. No wonder you don't want the human race to expand into outer space -- you assume we are all just like you! Fine. Stay in Middle Ages Europe, afraid to fall of edge of the fucking planet. Yeah, it's hard. Life is hard. Get used to it. But ruin it for everyone else -- even in the future -- by not even trying? Pathetic.
I wonder why Carmack or even Branson are so interested? Oh wait, they must be "god freaks" or idiotic enough to believe that we are eternal as a species and there will be no Big Rip, Big Crunch whatever according to 90% of these posts. It sure as hell isn't gonna make them money while they are alive.
THIS is slashdot? If the human race goes out like a punk, I'm blaming all of you.
--
It's about time I earned some negative points. Fuck.
So if I'm understanding correctly, his proposal is that after the Earth is 'full' at some optimal value x, any excess population is then shipped off into space?
Since the world population http://www.ibiblio.org/lunarbin/worldpop has a net increase of about 2 or 3 people per second, or about 200000 people a day, he just needs to figure out how to build enough starships to ship 200000 people offworld every day.
SpaceX believes that $500 per pound to orbit is achieveable http://www.spacex.com/press.php?page=10. Assuming each of those 200000 people weighs an average of 150 lbs (and ignoring things like, oh, I dunno, air, water, food, and habitable space), his proposal would be expending $15,000,000,000 per day, forever, to keep the population of Earth at some optimal number.
Now, I'm all for keeping an open mind about spreading humanity's risk of complete annhilation by spreading to other planets if possible, but to use the argument that this will solve Earth's putative population problem seems...flawed.
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.
Go to a beach and pick of a grain of sand, and that single grain is a more important part of that beach that this planet is of the universe...
And a few little animated molecules on an insignificant speck are somehow so important?
There are possibly millions of other sentient species in the universe. Who's to say we're the most interesting? And who's to say our species is more interesting and unique than, say Tyrannosaurus Rex was?
From the perspective of US, of course we're important. From the perspective of ants, ants are more important. From the perspective of the entire universe, there IS no perspective of the entire universe, it doesn't fucking have one. If we cease to exist, or rather WHEN we cease to exist, it's just another wiggle in the vibrations of the stuff of the universe.
That's not to say the extinction of humans wouldnt be a tragedy, but get over your inability to see past your own perspective and realize that the tragedy would be for US and us alone. It would be a tragedy for humans. It would not be a tragedy for anyone or anything else. For most things, it wouldn't be noticed. For some things, it would be a boon - opening up new niches for life to spread into. Things would replace all the megafauna we've hunted to extinction. To an outside observer, the earth might even look nicer - with a more diverse ecosystem. Unless the outside observer is a car nut.
This space available.
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 knew people on /. were generally pessimistic but the majority of these posts are outright anti-human. For all of you who believe the universe and/or the planet would be better of without our race than stop being a hypocrite and off yourself for the good of the universe. What a bunch of sad weaklings you are; complaining about human exploration and equating our technological advances to meaningless endeavours. Man up Slashdot! Have some fucking pride in your own accomplishments and have some hope for the future. Just because you yourself are a worthless human doesn't mean the rest of us are and deserve to be destroyed. Simply sickening.
Creative Demolition
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
we have also created new and beautiful ways to see the world through art, music, literature and performance
Although I wish it were true, there's actually no absolute value in that. Without humans, these intellectual achievements have no meaning. Meaning only exist in the mind of other humans.
You know, I have an idea for a solution to this whole God/no god debate. It would absolutely answer the question for ALL TIME. It would be completely inarguable whether God exists or what form He/She/It/Bob takes if He/She/It/Bob exists. It would let us know undoubtedly whether there is a Heaven or Hell, a Nirvana (not the band), a Valhalla, a Marble Tulip Juicy Tree. All we'd have to do is ring the planet with nuclear bombs, every nuclear bomb currently in existence or that we could manufacture in time, and set them all off at once. BOOM! Problem solved. Question answered. Then, I'd get to stop reading this pointless and endless debate rehashed OVER AND OVER in every single fucking thread. Really, it'd be a relief. I don't see how anyone can say this is a bad idea. Theists would get to (from their perspective) prove that they're right, and atheists don't have anything to look forward to, anyway. Agnostics would finally just make a damn decision already...Really, I think it's a big win all around. Plus, as a bonus, it would also solve every single problem humanity is currently facing. Win/win/win.
http://xkcd.com/386/
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?
Well, there is the fact that we can't get to them, so if they can get to us, they are far superior to us, at least scientifically/technologically.
You've got some good points challenging some of the unstated premeses of some of the other posters.
I do think that there is an objective reason to believe that a species which was truly alien would like some (not all) classical music more than modern music: it has fewer musical assumptions.
Specifically, Bach's counterpoints make very few assumptions of the listener - you won't have to understand any other art forms to appreciate Bach. Most modern music (Rap, Rock, etc) uses a shared language which has been built up over centuries, and has a whole lot of cultural assumptions built into it. To pick an example, Eminim's song "Stan," which used the Dido song as a backdrop, makes a bunch of assumptions of the listener: we have to understand obsessive fandom, we have to have an appreciation of the irony of using a sweet pop melody to tell a murderous story, and we get all kinds of references to Eminim's earlier work.
Most artists draw on the shared body of culture to express their art - it's a very rare piece which will seem beautiful to radically different cultures. I would put forth that some early Bach would be more likely to succeed in that than, say, Elvis Presley. Also the lack of lyrics helps: if you listen to Rap, or most Rock without lyrics, it's clearly missing something major - many of the older classical pieces are designed as instrumentals, and thus avoid the language barrier.
Just my $.0196 (adjusted for inflation)
Need Geek Rock? Try The Franchise!
The word is "romanticisation" ("z" optional in some English speaking territories).
you had me at #!
To decide whether it makes sense to spend resources on manned space travel, you should look at why mankind has explored and colonized new lands in the past.
Natural resources - Early man followed the food. There were edible plants and animals outside of Africa, so if you were hungry where you were born it made sense to go elsewhere for food. Civilized man sought spices, minerals, and lumber. It was lucrative to send out a ship and bring those back. Do the same economics apply to manned space travel?
Religious freedom - America was settled in part by people seeking freedom from religious or economic oppression in the Old World. Do you expect space colonies to escape from the burdens of Earthbound society?
Reduction of overpopulation - Colonization of America didn't do much to decrease the population of Europe. The number of emigrants was small compared to the existing population. For space travel, the number would be miniscule. You'd need to launch a thousand spaceships a day with a thousand passengers each to actually decrease the population of Earth. If overpopulation exists and a fertile underpopulated land is available then it's a good deal for those who make the journey. But it won't help those who stay behind, and we have found no hospitable planets outside our own.
Exploration - Curiosity and pursuit of knowledge are worthwhile reasons for exploration. Men went to the North Pole and the Moon because that was the only way to learn about them. With modern technology we could send a thousand robotic probes across the solar system for the cost of one manned trip to Mars.
Adventure - People still climb mountains just for the sense of adventure. You can build a rocket or buy a ticket on Spaceship One if that's worthwhile to you. But you shouldn't expect the government to fund your trip to the Moon any more than it would pay for your trip to Kilimanjaro.
Preservation of the species - If you're worried about a natural disaster, you could send a few dozen people to live in a deep mine or on the bottom of the ocean. They'll be just as safe as on the Moon or Mars. Plus they'll have protection from extreme temperatures and solar radiation. The journey would be a lot cheaper and less hazardous.
To maintain the spark of life - Life is interesting. It's a pity when some branch of Earth's diversity of life perishes. The universe would be a boring place without life (although there'd be nobody left to miss it). If we're the only life then that's good justification to spread it. But are we alone? Does other life exist? Is it common? Is it like us? Those are questions worth answering. Those are missions I'd be happy working for. Are those missions that would be helped or hindered by focusing on manned space travel?
AlpineR
Well, for starters, the article anthropomorphized the universe. It belongs with religous writings, not science.
"Some ask: 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".
Factual errors in the above statement:
There is no evidence that "nature" can "experience" a tragedy. There is no evidence that nature has more consciousness than a sack of rocks.
This presupposes not just a human-centered concept of beauty, but that we, as humans, are the only beings capable of witnessing anything. Never mind that the author posits (point #1) that "nature" can "experience" tragedy; if nature can "experience tragedy", then why would nature need us to be able to experience beauty?
Just because Sagan said it, doesn't make it true. We are undoubtably here, and yet there is no proof that the universe "knows itself" today, except in quasi-religious and religious belief systems that posit a god or other supernatural being.
The best reasons for going into space are because its there, we want to, and we can make good use of it. Not some claptrap about if we pass away its a tragedy for nature, when there's more than ample evidence that, if anything, we ourselves are a tragedy on a daily basis. Go into space, by all means. I'm 100% for that, but go because we can, because we want to, because we're curious, because we can find uses for the stuff we find out there, for the knowledge we'll acquire, for the insights we'll develop, because we want the elbow room, or a room with a spectacular view, or to do something different.
These are real reasons to go. Go because WE WANT TO, not because of some metaphysical bullshit argument. The latter just make it easier to stereotype those who see space as a place to expand as just wild-eyed dreamers. The article does us a disservice. I say put the writer out the next airlock :-)