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Neil DeGrasse Tyson Urges America To Challenge China To a Space Race
An anonymous reader writes: According to a Tuesday story in the UK edition of the International Business Times, Neil deGrasse Tyson, the celebrity astrophysicist and media personality, advocates a space race between the United States and China. The idea is that such a race would spur innovation and cause industry to grow. The Apollo race to the moon caused a similar explosive period of scientific research and engineering development. You might prefer the Sydney Morning Herald piece on which the IB Times article is based.
How about collaboration, a team can do more than single entity
Nothing brings a species together like breaking the moon into lots of tiny bits and dropping them on the planet we live on.
We actually cant afford not to. How much longer do you think this planet will be able to support the exponential growth of the human population? Clean water, land, food, they are all going to start costing more soon, and maybe have to be rationed. Just because we may not see it does not mean we should put it off for our descendants to deal with when we know it is coming and we are a major contributor of it. If we could stop starting wars and cut the military we could easily afford it.
When you cant win, ad hominem.
If you are competing to be #1 there are two strategies.
Make sure you perform better than the rest.
Make sure the rest performs worse than you do.
If your goal is to be #1, the easier strategy will be the one taken.
If say the US is more focus on just advancing then being #1 then our efforts will be to build up other countries, and at the same time we will grow much further.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
If he hasn't noticed China is already racing ahead. We've rested on our laurels for too long.
If a space race would spur innovation through rivalry, why stop there? A full cold war would really get the rivalry juices flowing... Rah, Rah, go Team America and defeat the communist yellow man. [/sarcasm]
This idea is very childish. The heated passion of rivalry does not make for good policy and planning decisions. As great as Apollo was for tangible technology spin offs, from a space policy perspective it was disaster. It did long term damage and did much to keep man in low orbit for following 50 years or longer. Another "space race" would just be a repeat of one step forward, two steps back that epitomized Apollo. Instead, if we are to venture into space, lets do it soberly and with calculation required to actually start long-term exploration and colonization efforts. Or, at least step out of the way and encourage those who want to explore and colonize space in an adult manner.
If you can't afford kids, don't have them in the first place.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
off-planet
To Pluto?
Have gnu, will travel.
China asked to join in on the ISS and we vetoed it. China said that they would launch their own space station. This is scheduled for 2020. We have already started a space race and are quite simply, waiting for the Chinese to catch up. They just got to a person into space in 2003 and landed something on the moon in 2007. Their proposed time table has them returning moon rock to earth in 2017, launching a space station in 2020, and a moon walk in 2024. So arguably, in a little less than ten years from now, they will have caught up with where the US was around almost two decades ago. Still, China proposes lots of things and fails to come through on them. If they actually get a space station launched and the ISS is retired with no replacement in the works, then I expect that the US will pay attention and start running again rather than walking.
Personally, I expect Musk to have his own space station up sooner.
How much longer do you think this planet will be able to support the exponential growth of the human population?
If present population trends continue, including both the first and second derivatives, the population will peak at about 9.5 billion between 2050 or 2060, and then begin to decline.
Clean water, land, food, they are all going to start costing more soon
In nominal terms, they will, but not as a proportion of people's total income. So they will cost more, but be more affordable. Resource consumption has increasingly become decoupled from economic growth, as technology improves efficiency.
If we could stop starting wars and cut the military we could easily afford it.
A more realistic option would be to fund space travel by selling ice cream made from unicorn milk.
The original space race was a lot more about nuclear weapons fears and saber rattling than I think Neil appreciates. It may have been publicly perceived as a fun thing, but behind the scenes it was about military paranoia and a Cold War that came all-too-close to becoming VERY hot.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
I still find the Apollo Program amazing and audacious considering the technology of the time. Now a race would be just a question of political will and funding, not nearly as exciting.
love is just extroverted narcissism
For example, China and the US could have a bet -- loser's premier/president has to sing the national anthem of the other on international television. Or they could bet a really nice dinner in Paris. Or maybe they could bet, I dunno, world domination and possession of all lunar resources in perpetuity. I know which one The Brain would pick...
Even when the experts all agree, they may well be mistaken. --- Bertrand Russell.
Tired of this guy and his cocky attitude. Go away please.
Respectfully, I call complete and total bullshit on this.
Even if mankind had the capability to warp off to some other star system capable of supporting life, how many humans would make the journey? Hundreds? Thousands? Consider the energy requirements to lift a significant portion of humanity out of earths gravity well. How many rockets are required to lift just the people into low earth orbit? The reduced headcount of those people who would leave earth would do NOTHING to curb the current population growth! So the remainder of humanity on this planet would still suffer the same fate you predicted if we didn't find another planet. And while we're going through this mental exercise, here's another one for you: What type of person is going to be capable of chartering a flight off this rock? The wealthy, that's who. So in a way, earth will be renamed to "Detroit" where the rich can afford to move away and leave a rotting infrastructure for those unable to escape. Meanwhile New Earth will be populated only by the families and friends of the ultra wealthy, with no reason to look back. Ironically, for all the religious hate that goes on around /. religion has a better chance of saving all of humanity than science does... at least if we're talking about leaving this planet for a better place.
WE are the invading insectoid aliens who have depleted all of the resources of our planet and are invading other planets... there's a reason science fiction has written those kinds of invaders as the villain... because they're assholes.
This is the future that your scenario brings.
Which has more power: the hammer, or the anvil?
This planet will have to support us, whether we spend money on a "space race" or not. Even if we had reliable technology to get to some other planet, we would still be stuck here, and by "we" I mean billions of people. The required energy to leave our gravity well is prohibitive for anything but exploration. There will be no mass exodus from planet Earth. We're stuck here, whether you like it or not. "Gravitational anomalies" sent through time and entire space stations with farmland and houses launched from Earth are science fiction, emphasis on fiction. In science and technology, there is such a thing as being too early: Note that the race to the moon was "possible" when Kennedy said "we choose to go to the moon". That space race was a matter of developing existing technology to achieve a reachable goal. On the other hand, the goal of migrating humanity from this planet to some other planet (or space stations or whatever) is thoroughly out of reach, and not just for the tiny matter of technical problems that stand in our way. There was an interesting comment in the India heatwave story, which concluded that it would take 5000 planes full of water to supply just 2 liters to 5 million people each. Now imagine that you're not trying to bring 2 liters of water to 5 million people, but trying to send 5 billion people to space. Nope, not gonna happen. Whether we race to space or not, for almost everybody born on this planet, this is also the planet on which they're going to die. We absolutely have to learn to make do with what we have down here.
We battled the soviets because they were a national security threat.
The chinese and americans make too much money off each other to go to war with each other.
Look, Neil... on slashdot of course we all want to go to space. We're a tech community and we like all that space shit.
But a lot of people don't. I had a high school teacher that had a big sticker on his wall that said "no space cadets"... and he was talking about the space program and how he thought it was a waste of money. He wanted to spend it all on social programs.
that is just the general public. What we need to do is take it out of the politician's hands. the government is if anything backsliding on space. The future is private space exploration. it is going to be different than what the government was doing but if they can actually figure out how to make money up there then there will be an explosion of development that will never stop.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
You didn't look very hard, did you?
http://www.haydenplanetarium.o...
I count 13 papers.
Would you care to share your publication record for comparison? It might help your credibility since your level of troll is at grade schooler levels at the moment.
Manned missions are expensive, risky, and provide very little of value for the money other than knowledge of space's impact on the human body.
Manned missions also take money away from robotic missions, which have proven to be far more scientifically valuable per dollar spent. I'd rather see a Titan boat probe and a Europa submarine probe than a manned near-orbit asteroid sampling mission.
I believe other technologies have to catch up to make humans-in-space practical, such as automated dwelling construction and mining, and automation of space-based manufacturing and repair. It requires a lot of labor to make a self-sustaining colony, and space-suits make such impractical and risky. We need better helper robots first. Otherwise, we are just spinning our wheels. These problems will NOT be solved by yet more manned missions alone.
Robotic probes are highly effective and efficient, while humans-in-space is currently very clunky, wasteful, risky, and expensive at this point in time. We are doing it wrong. Let other tech catch up first.
Table-ized A.I.
steal money from WIC
Yeah, its a shame. My 7 year old was just looking at her paycheck from the sneaker factory and complaining about how much the government takes out.
Have gnu, will travel.
One of the things that people seem to not realize is that, even though they are trade partners, there is another Cold War going on. It's not the nuclear kind, but it's definitely there in the form of Chinese state policy vs. the US's policy. China is willing to pour any amount of money into infrastructure and other projects to keep its economy growing...look at all the spending that is happening post-2008. (Google "ghost cities".) China is also able to do whatever it wants regardless of public opinion, which is directly opposed to the US way of doing anything. For example, they are literally picking up and moving millions of people from the countryside into the cities they have built to improve service delivery...try that here and see how far you get. These things, combined with a population advantage, guarantee China's success long-term absent any other forces.
The only thing that could tip the balance is ideology-driven races like this. The Apollo program was similar to current Chinese policy -- pour anything and everything into it as long as we win. Same went for all the Cold War spending, because people were convinced we would be destroyed otherwise. You can argue the military buildup was a waste, but look at the employment and technology transfer it enabled. It also hammered home the need to educate scientists and engineers, and real dollars were put behind that (see the 50s-70s buildup of the national labs and state university systems as an example.) In the current US political climate, funding education and fixing roads is evil socialism and money should never be spent on public projects. Focusing people's limited attention spans on an external power might be a good thing.
How do we get technology? Space Race How do we get a space race? Cold War
This is what people don't seem to get. Even getting people to Mars is a much bigger task than just launching a single rocket. The round trip time for a Mars mission is around 2 years. You have to send everything you need along for the ride. All the food that the astronauts need to eat on the ride will need to be brought along with them. I've seen some numbers (can't find the link now), that even a single Mars mission would require 30 launches of supplies from the earth. There's also no ability to bail out like they did with Apollo 13. Once they are on their way there, there is no possibility of turning around. Even when you get there, you have to wait about 6 months for the planets to get into the right alignment for the trip home.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Nope. You can't fix population growth that way. You can end growth on Earth some other way, then allow it elsewhere. Current estimates of world population growth is about 1.14% per year. That's 79.8 million people you need to offload per year. Right now... It'll get worse before we can build somewhere to send them. Depending on the seating layout, you can get about 500 people on a 747. That's about 160,000 flights to move the new population each year, or 437 plane loads per day.
Say we snapped our fingers and terraformed Mars. Say our 747s were space capable. Say they could make the round trip in only 2 years. We would need a fleet of 320,000 craft, all hauling ass continuously, to keep up. I'm bored with trying to find out how many commercial aircraft there are right now, but I found guess between 30 and 40 thousand. Let's use 40. That means we need a fleet of the magic space planes almost 8,000 times the current world fleet of flying people moving machines (many of which are smaller and cheaper than 747s and all of which would be pocket change compared to the space worthy with life support for 500 for a year magic space planes).
And all of this was low balled and for the current population growth rate. On the other hand, the hundreds of chemical rocket launches per day would likely solve the population problem pretty fast...
Perhaps we should try some birth control instead.
ISS is worthless. Proponents of the status quo (democrats) want a program that looks down at our warming, miserable planet. George W. Bush wanted a program to explore space, the Moon, asteroids, Mars. Today's democrats are a far cry from Kennedy. They choose to do things because they are easy.
Bush wanted a plan to explore space, the Moon, asteroids, and Mars when it was a nice speaking point on his state of the Union addresses, but he never even allocated any money to NASA to begin such programs. Year after year, he said we were going to Mars but had nothing but words to back that up. Their budget had a hard time keeping up with inflation. Additionally, if we were really going to Mars, not only would we need the ISS, we'd probably have to build another one to do all additional research needed for a Mars mission that couldn't get done there. Normally, I wouldn't reply to an AC troll who doesn't know what they're talking about, but the above was always a sore point with me.
Well, thanks for elevating the level of discourse in this thread. I now regret I participated.
Pro tip: If you are going to argue on behalf of science, don't sprinkle your dialogue with expletives and ad hominem attacks. It doesn't cause people to think you're cool, they just dismiss you out of hand as a juvenile crank (and that's an insult to juveniles and cranks).
Raise the level of your game and try again. You seem to have potential, at least.
Best wishes.
Something else to passively aggressively show that the US is thinking about separating from Russia and having a possible three way space race, or even giving China some aid.
so says George Jones..... http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics...
Hmm, Apollo 13 "bailed out" by taking advantage of its Earth Return Trajectory (it was launched on a path that would come back here unless there was a burn to put it into Lunar orbit).
Likewise, it's possible to do an Earth Return Trajectory for Mars. It's a two year orbit that comes back here at a time when Earth is at the same point in its orbit. More fuel intensive, but quicker (it'll take about six months to get near Mars).
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
Say our 747s were space capable.
I think you mean DC-8s. :)
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
From the Sidney Morning Herald:
In the search to find the high-paying jobs and industries of the future, Neil deGrasse Tyson has an idea for a novel solution. How about a militarised space race to Mars?
More specifically, the famed American astrophysicist says that if he could just get China's leaders to leak a memo to the West about plans to build military bases on Mars, "the US would freak out and we'd all just build spacecraft and be there in 10 months".
Ignoring the fact that the US and China (and over 100 other countries) have signed the Outer Space Treaty, which prohibits establishing military bases on other planets, just who would you be defending from / attacking from a Mars military base? Martians who want a second War of the Worlds?
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
Let China have space. We're too fucked up in our religious bullshit to deserve space travel.
... so no work outside of media whoring since 2008?
I can pretty clearly remember the moment I lost all respect for NDT. On Bill Maher's "Real Time" he referred to anthropogenic global warming as "settled science." I'm no climate denier, but no honest scientist will try to transplant stare decisis from the field of jurisprudence to scientific inquiry.
Maybe he's just stuck in the virtual set from "Cosmos."
53% of children on WIC? Holy shit, what are we doing wrong if that many parents can't afford children?
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
You're still looking at a very long time to turn around and come back. Apollo 13 was only a 5 day mission, and their oxygen system problems happened 56 hours into the mission. They were only 15 hours from the moon when they encountered problems. Turning around was a relatively simple thing to do in this case. When your turn around point is 5 months away and something goes wrong, you have to have the materials on board to fix it. You don't have the option of just aborting the mission early and coming back home.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Or hawking video collections about introductory astronomy.
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
The round trip time for a Mars mission is around 2 years.....
...with present technology. Didn't we get a bunch of cool new stuff out of the last space race? You know, like present technology? Maybe someone will get the ion drive to work at scale and cut the trip time and resources down by 10. Given the time and resources, humans usually get stuff to work.
Who allocated funds in the budget? You overestimate the worth of the president if you think he wrote the budget. The president gives the overall goals, congress funds them, and the agencies do them.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
Idiot! We don't give foreign aid to the people of China. We give it to the government of China.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
I don't know about that...maybe "Our Chinese factory workers are better than your Chinese factory workers". Chinese intellectual jobs have been taking quite a bit of flack recently for cheating/faking/stealing things instead of actually doing things.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
So did the Russians. We did alright.
Stay sentient. Don't drink bad milk.
There is one massive problem with that idea and that is that this planet has all of the habitable land in the solar system and we don't have a clue how to create habitable land elsewhere.
The US government could easily fund outposts all over the solar system, but separated from habitable land and the natural services that such land provides, like air, potable water, topsoil, nutrients, etc, none of the outposts would survive without continuous supplies from Earth.
Even if we could come up with a magical technology that instantly terraformed all of Mars, that would only give us a few decades of breathing room, assuming exponential population growth. Mars is really small compared to Earth and exponential growth is really fast. If we could somehow magically terraform all asteroids in the solar system then that maybe would buy us another decade or two. In the longer run, barring faster than light travel, the best we could ever hope for is V^3 rate of expansion, since we would be colonizing 3-dimensional space at some constant speed V.
We could challenge them to a dance off.
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
Not as far as I'm concerned. The last space race meant we just build very large things that already existed. We basically built really big rockets. Rockets have been around for centuries. We also used computers for navigating the rockets. But computers advanced on their own without the need for the space race to really push them. We developed some pretty interesting materials and technologies to make the rockets lighter, and to make sure they didn't burn up on re-entry. But we didn't actually come up with any solutions that made it significantly easier to lift mass out of earth's gravity well. It still requires huge amounts of energy (and therefore money) to lift things into space.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
A budget? How quaint.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
One of the big reasons for a manned space program has been so-called technology "spin-offs" resulting from the program, but I think that they pale in comparison to the list of spin-offs that we receive from military technology. Here's a short list off the top of my head:
The Internet (Eisenhower created DARPA, and packet-switching was created as a way to maintain communications during a nuclear attack)
Electronic Computers (Alan Turing's "Bomb", ENIAC for ballistics tables, etc)
Rocketry and Jet Propulsion (The V-2, which is weird because it's a spinoff from war that made it's way to space)
Chemotherapy (Mustard Gas was the basis for the first chemotherapy drug)
RADAR/SONAR (a modern airport would be near-impossible without RADAR)
Nuclear Fission (energy production)
Submarines (another "spin-off" that has moved over to undersea exploration)
Plastic Exposives (used for construction, better than blackpowder)
Encryption (has been around for centuries, probably invented for military purposes)
Synthetic Rubber (such as Ameripol)
GPS is pretty pervasive too
All of these things have had a significant impact on our civilization, and to be honest, we wouldn't have a space program without some of them....It's just horrible that so many millions of people had to die for these things to come about. If a manned space program could provide these sorts of technologies, most people would be on board.......but ask them what the International Space Station has provided, and they would be hard pressed to tell you.
If you post as Anonymous Coward, don't expect a reply.
Materials science has progressed to the point that a space elevator is a matter of "when" and is no longer wild-eyed sci-fi.
Instead, let's challenge China to create the most carbon efficient economy on the planet. That way even the looser wins. Wasting precious time on another space race, while the Earth warms at an exponential rate will only produced losers, no matter who "wins" the space race.
Our current gap is not really in space-specific technology. An "AI race" and/or 3D-printer/replicator-race would probably better serve the goal of living in space than a "space race" that only focuses on space-specific technology. We should focus on the bottlenecks, and those bottlenecks so far appear to NOT be space-specific.
Think of how difficult it would be to do space exploration in general without compact computers. Computer technology is not space-specific, but computer technology miniaturization happened to be a giant enabler of space exploration. Dumping tons of money into ONLY space-related stuff would not have been nearly as beneficial (being we've mostly plateaued on the mechanical and chem rocket side of things since the late 1950's.)
Similarly, AI and/or flexible manufacturing automation appear to be areas that help in other industries AND space exploration/colonization. Let's try to launch two birds with one rocket.
Table-ized A.I.
How about collaboration, a team can do more than single entity
Because it won't work. There is a reason we have competitive markets instead of collaborative markets. Collaboration works on a small scale but you need to harness competition to really push the boundaries quickly. Not to say collaboration is a bad thing but it simply will not make things happen. Sad but true.
NdGT makes a very good point that the only technologies that are really expensive (like space travel) that get funded are either in response to existential threats (i.e. nuclear war, etc) or for tangible financial gain. When it comes to space exploration you simply cannot quantify the risks sufficiently to get a return on investment so financial gain is off the table for anything on the frontier of our technology and knowledge. We went to the moon because we were in a (cold) war with the Soviet Union at the time. That underpinned everything we did in the Apollo missions. Once the Soviets cancelled their moon missions, so did we and we haven't been back since.
Does China even have a man rated launcher yet?
There is this thing called Wikipedia that is just chock full of answers to questions like that.
The heated passion of rivalry does not make for good policy and planning decisions.
Sometimes it does and sometimes it does not. What is certain is that competition gets results. Our entire economy is based on it. The ONLY reason we went to the moon was because we were at (cold) war with the Soviets. Take away that driver and the Apollo missions simply would never have happened. Once it was clear the Soviets weren't going to the moon, the Apollo program was folded like a cheap tent and we haven't been back since.
As great as Apollo was for tangible technology spin offs, from a space policy perspective it was disaster. It did long term damage and did much to keep man in low orbit for following 50 years or longer.
I have seen no compelling argument or evidence to support this assertion and you certainly haven't presented either here.
What the hell kind of race do you wait for the opponent to catch up?
If the opponent can never catch up then it isn't a race. A race is a competition by definition. If one side can never win then it was never actually a competition in any meaningful sense of the word.
... thank you."
China is busy going after resources.
The South China Sea is a land grab for oil.
The Moon is a land grab for minerals.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
But a lot of people don't. I had a high school teacher that had a big sticker on his wall that said "no space cadets"... and he was talking about the space program and how he thought it was a waste of money. He wanted to spend it all on social programs.
His mistake is that he thinks we don't already spend the money on social programs. Our government expenditures on social programs outpace our expenditures on NASA something like 50 to 1. It's not even close. Sounds like your "science" teacher was a clueless fool.
What we need to do is take it out of the politician's hands. the government is if anything backsliding on space.
Ok, how do you propose to do that? Private enterprise isn't going to do basic research and exploration - not at a meaningful scale anyway. Exploration of the frontiers of knowledge and basic research is almost entirely government funded. Don't believe me? Take a look at who is behind almost all research grants. (hint, NIH, DARPA, NSF are good places to look)
The future is private space exploration. it is going to be different than what the government was doing but if they can actually figure out how to make money up there then there will be an explosion of development that will never stop.
No it isn't and it never will be. Not at the real frontiers of exploration anyway. I'm an accountant and I can assure you that you cannot make a credible financial business plan for a trip to Mars for example such that it will get financial backing. Why? 1) The risks are unknown and unquantifiable. We simply don't know what we don't know. 2) The financial capital required is huge and there is no reasonable guarantee of a return based on past experience. 3) The only institution that can fund exploration on a large scale without an expectation of a financial return is the government. Once the boundaries have been moved then private enterprise can come in behind (ala SpaceX) and make it more efficient and useful but you simply CANNOT make a credible business plan and get it funded for something like a manned mission to mars. Companies do not fund big things unless they can have some reasonable expectation of a return on their investment.
Or hawking video collections about introductory astronomy.
Do you mean these? http://www.hawking.org.uk/vide...
They are quite good, I must say. :-p
Who is this jerk?
No, no, it's, "Oh yeah, if Neil deGrasse Tyson is so smart, why'd he bite that guy's ear off?"
Populus vult decipi, ergo decipiatur...
"Force shits upon Reason's back." - Poor Richard's Almanac
Neil deGrasse Tyson is the guy who claimed that Columbus was "government financed":
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
In fact, he is wrong on numerous accounts. First of all, these voyages were not all that expensive, probably less than $100 million in modern dollars; they were less than 10% of what Spain paid that year to get the Moors out of Spain. And Queen Isabella was a totalitarian ruler who effectively invested her private money in this venture, and she very much wanted a return. Furthermore, the expedition to the new world was insured by private insurers, so it was actually the private sector taking the risk; much of the expense of such exploration was, in fact, for insurance. Finally, about half of the money for the expedition actually came from other private investors.
So, when deGrasse Tyson advocates that we should engage in a government-funded space race with the Chinese, he is guided by numerous wrong assumptions. deGrasse Tyson always sounds like he is very authoritative (it's the voice and the delivery), but his actual knowledge of economics and history seems to be poor. And don't kid yourself, the guy is lobbying in his own interest, because once private space exploration takes off, people like him will become irrelevant.
When he says that it is wrong that "if we had given the money we spent on NASA to the private sector, we would be on the moon and on Mars more cheaply", he is, however, absolutely right. He is right because it makes little difference whether government pays its cronies in the private sector directly or through NASA; the error in both cases is that government takes the money and reallocates it in ways that are driven by lobbying and politics, not efficiency and results.
What we need is an Olympics for technology. The US will be embarrassed into accelerating development to not fall on its face in front of the world.
How about a green energy race while we're at it?
So all those inventions and innovations you listed weren't TRUE inventions and innovations (i.e. cool new stuff) because they had precursors and other applications were found for them? What are you going to say next, no one is TRULY from Scotland? Teleporter or GTFO?
The human population isn't growing exponentially anymore. In fact, it's going to stabilize at around 11 billion.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
No, actually the opposite is true: we'll be taking land out of production and it will be idle.
Actually, wars and other violence has been steadily decreasing.
However, the biggest drain on our economy is opportunity costs from governmental restrictions and interference in free markets.
The whole idea rests on some questionable pop history. Much of what people claim to be the product of the "space race" was developed far earlier for military or commercial uses. Velcro, for example, commonly cited as NASA breakthrough was actually patented in Switzerland in 1948. If we're going to pour resources into something, instead of doing a pointless vanity project like a moon landing let's do something useful this time. Nuclear fusion, for example, or diabetes research.
"No thanks. They steal."
And for all that good American technology that we refuse to develop for ourselves, wouldn't the whole world be better off if we just gave it to them?
We don't need to go to some other star system; ours is just fine and full of resources. We could settle the asteroid belt and beyond, and then take things from there.
How expensive is it to get to the asteroid belt? Not very. Once space travel is common and the engineering has been done (even without new technologies), the main cost is fuel. We can bound fuel cost from above by looking at old, inefficient missions like Apollo. Apollo burned about 2 million kg of propellant to get to the moon, which isn't all that different from getting to the asteroid belt. At about $0.30/kg retail price for natural gas, that makes the fuel cost for each crew member $200000 at US retail natural gas prices in current dollars. A flight to the asteroid belt would actually likely be cheaper than that.
This back of the envelope calculation is, of course, very rough, but it shows that costs for space travel are roughly what middle class and above could afford. For example, $200k is probably a typical house in the G7, so about half of the G7, or about 400 million people could probably muster the economic resources for emigrating to the asteroid belt.
There has been no instance of settlement to relieve surplus population on Earth either. The number of Italians living overseas may exceed the number who stayed home, but Italy and each of its "colonies" had to manage the population/resources question anew in each place.
Ultimately we will settle the solar system for maintainability, to assure that no imaginable calamity could wipe out all humans.
You have full, unfiltered sunshine 24/7. You don't need to bring along anything other than water and algae.
http://earthzine.org/2014/08/2...
It's because we have GMO in our potato chips. Whenever we eat one, a union public school teacher loses her wings.
Bravo! If this be trolling, then I too wear the banner proudly.
If we are to go on having News For Nerds to discuss, we need to defend science and its applications from the yahoos out there.
Silly jokes aside, TFA said nothing and made no implications that increased spending on science and space would come out of any welfare programs. The idea that any potentially available tax funds automatically 'belong' to any one program and any allocation otherwise constitutes 'theft' is bizarre. Even muggers are willing to acknowledge that the money in my wallet is still mine up to the point that they relieve me of it and run. So your selfish attitude places the common criminal's morals above yours.
Have gnu, will travel.
You do know that the Japanese has been bitterly complaining about how their financial aid to China were "repackaged" as Chinese and given to even more backward countries...?
ELOI, ELOI, LAMA SABACHTHANI!?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
13 publications is not many. In many fields, it's far less than even an average postdoc would have.
I think we'll have colonies in the next couple hundred years at the longest. But the thing is exponential growth. Space travel might get cheaper but the amount of power needed to launch a spacecraft means we won't move people off the planet fast enough that the population actually shrinks.
Why doesn't the US challenge China to a healthcare or human rights race? Something we know will help people now not hopefully help them in the future. If we can't figure out how to take care of each other we don't deserve to colonize other planets.
and: what is the chances you can send say 5 people and not one of them will have a condition that requires hospital attention in 2 years? I love how scientists (and I have a physics degree) love to suggest very expensive projects and they always claim it will save humanity. Heck I worked in a genetics laboratory and everyone would be doing stupid (but interesting) things like figuring out how lizards grow their tails back. When grant time rolled around it was always: we could grow our own organs, we could cure cancer, we could cure paralysis etc. Heck they literally had whole conferences devoted to people studying one particular type of worm. Sure those things could happen but all the scientist's cared about was getting their PhD so they could land a good post doc. Cancer landed on the grant proposal because that was the circus you had to run to impress the granting committees and or tick boxes to be considered for different government sources of funds.
Anyone thinking the guys at big science facilities are completely working for the benefit of humanity and their own fame and fortune doesn't come into play are smoking crack. Science has as much snobbery as any military or private organization I ever worked about. Getting the best funds, grad students, lab equipment, lab location (EMBL, CERN, Harvard etc), getting your papers in the best journals etc.is 90% of the work senior researchers concern themselves with in my experience.
Because I don't pick fights that I can't win.
We should fence off the US and go to sleep for 50 years while China and India have a space race!
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
any more. Maybe we should challenge them to a prayer race instead...
You forgot to include "Tang" in your list of spin off technologies. In reply to most of the posts here the population will be whittled down to a more manageable level after the next big war kicks off. And WW3 is coming and there is not a damn thing anyone can do except build a bigger and more deadly arsenal. And as the resources become more scarce the chance of war will increase.
Absolutely. The original space race was basically a diversion (smokescreen?) of military-industrial funding. For every "velcro" technology developed there were probably a dozen applicable to military applications.
It's too far, and too hard to hit. Send him to the Sun.
Required reading for internet skeptics
Indeed. I didn't expect much, but that's surprising few.
I guess he figured that televangelism was easier and far more profitable than astrophysics.
Required reading for internet skeptics
I would rather compete with the Chinese in a space race than the terrestrial/aquatic competitions we spend outrageous amounts of money on every 2 years. At least space research has beneficial spin-off technologies.
Except he gets his facts completely wrong. For example, Columbus' Voyage was privately financed, and the risk of such voyages was generally privately insured.
You might want to check your facts. It was financed out of the royal treasury and commissioned by the Queen.
The asteroid belt alone is so full of easily reachable resources that there is almost no risk and spectacular gains being made. That's why the private sector is gearing up for private (robotic) space exploration and mining.
"Almost no risk"? Are you kidding me? Anyone who thinks asteroid mining is a viable business within the lifetime of anyone reading this is delusional and/or hasn't thought the economics through. Professionally I am an engineer and I'm also a certified cost accountant. What that means is that I evaluate business costs and risks for a living. Anyone who says there is no risk in asteroid mining has no idea what they are talking about. It might be feasible a long time from now but there will have to be a huge amount of government financed research before it is ever possible that private enterprise will go there.
The financial risk alone is enormous and there is no guarantee of success and basically none of the necessary technology currently exists. A mission like this is hugely expensive (many many $billions if not $trillions) and and good luck getting insurance since the risks are unknown and unquantifiable currently. We do not have ANY equipment capable of mining an asteroid nor any near term reasonable prospect of seeing any - particularly from the private sector. (When Caterpillar starts working on it then you should sit up and take notice) We don't have any equipment capable of refining such minerals in space either so that will have to be developed (along with an adequate and robust power supply) or you'll have to return raw ore to Earth.
As for the "spectacular gains", that requires returning the (hypothetically) mined minerals to Earth which is the only place they currently are useful. Even if you somehow manage to return a huge amount of a valuable mineral to Earth you'll disrupt the market value of that mineral most likely causing prices to drop while your costs (many many $billions) will remain fixed and large. While that doesn't preclude it being a profitable enterprise, it does make evaluating the return complicated. And I'm a certified cost accountant so I know first hand how hard calculating the ROI would be. (borderline impossible FYI)
Worst of all any mined materials have to be returned to Earth in large (heavy) quantities. If you drop a large amount of minerals onto the surface of the Earth from space, congratulations! You have just created a Weapon of Mass Destruction. If you can return an asteroid from orbit you can just as easily drop it (on purpose or on accident) on someone to catastrophic effect. Even the remote risk of someone accidentally doing this means the risk of this technology is enormous.
When reuseable space craft by SpaceX are a reality (likely later this year) there will be no economic need for a space elevator. Its the same reason we will probably never build super high speed rail systems over most of the US. The cost benifit just is not there. When the cost of going to space is reduced to mostly a matter of fule space is very accessable very cheeply. Not much more expensive than a flight in the concord was. The real cost is throwing away the rocket everytime you use it. Build rockets with the reuseability of jet airplanes and presto cost to space is no big deal. No one talks much about building high speed rail across the ocean because an airplan can get you accross very fast for a tiny fraction of the cost of the rail system. Same with space. Build a 30,000 mile elevator to space at $1,000,000,000,000 or a $50,000,000 space ship that burns $300,000 worth of fuel per flight.
We started to the moon because JFK needed a spectacular - but once the cost estimates started coming in, he started seriously considering backing off. We went to the moon because JFK took a bullet to the head allowing LBJ to push it (and the associated pork) as a monument to JFK.
Citation please?
Apollo was essentially cancelled in the budget battles of '65-'67. The Soviets didn't get serious about their lunar programs until around '66-'67. (And most of them weren't cancelled until '72 or so.)
Hmm, let's see. The Soviet programs were cancelled in '72 according to you (actually that's not quite right but it's close enough). When was the last mission to the Moon? Oh that's right, December 1972. Quite a coincidence that...
An informed expert opinion based on thirty years of studying the Apollo program. (Actual studying, not just reading pop histories or getting my urban legends from other equally ignorant people on the 'net.)
Pretty much, yeah it's a coincidence. Either way, your original claim as to the order and connection of events is incorrect.
This is one of the worst cases of armchair rocket science I've ever seen. You obviously failed economics. Space launches are not in infinite supply. So cost would rise with demand. Also, as others have already pointed out, you discuss only the cost of fuel, and as our good friend Elon Musk has pointed out on multiple occasions, fuel is the cheapest part of space travel. Your cost analysis is lacking.... both in the cost, and in the analysis. Try summing up the cost of non-reusable vehicles, supplies, destination habitat, launch support and logistics, and see where that takes us.
Furthermore, lets talk about your 400 million people for a second... how many launches is that? Assuming you could somehow pack 100 people and all required supplies into one launch (a ridiculous assumption at the outset) it would still take 4 million launches to move all those people. You'd have to launch 100 people 100 times a day for 110 years straight to move those people... in which time you'd have 3 or 4 new generations of people wanting to go. Of course, that's just my back-of-the-napkin estimate.
Which has more power: the hammer, or the anvil?
Who cares what that media whore thinks?
Let's see. Right now, we've got about seven billion people. If we get population increases of even 0.1%, that's seven million people we've got to move off-planet each year. If we're talking about 1% or more, that's seventy million or more a year. Something like a space elevator might get them to geosynchronous orbit at a halfway reasonable cost, but the plan is apparently not to jettison them into space, so we need somewhere to put them. The fact is that there is nowhere in the Solar system offplanet that will be easier and/or cheaper to colonize than Antarctica or the continental shelves. There is no way, given any vaguely reasonable technology that has any relation to any science we can reasonably conjecture, that space travel is going to limit population growth.
Fortunately, modern civilization appears to cause population growth to level off, so we'll probably hit top population with only another few billion, and then level off or even decrease slowly.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Oh Neil. Poor sweet, stupid genius. Are we forgetting the original purpose of the space race? It was not some good-natured, friendly competition between two great nations seeking to further the cause of science for the sake of science. It was part of an arms race for global supremacy that resulted in hundreds of millions of people being irradiated by thousands of above ground nuclear bomb tests which only ended because of corruption and economic collapse of one of the nations involved. We are very fortunate that it didn't go sideways and end up with nuclear winter.
Ur where did the root of the technology for Apollo come from? A lot of it came from the German V rocket scientists so was paid for by Hitler. Other tech was brought from the British, who also later also sold it on to the French to create the first Arianne rockets. Of course most of the actual heavy design work on the tech was purely American. Some like the flight computers was ultimately appropriated from the US ICBM programs.
The Russians basically brought or stole most of their later tech from the same sources. They didn't steal so much from the Americans which is why their moon program failed.
Below the speed of light Special Relativity is one of the most accurate theories in physics - above the speed of light..
Glad I didn't have coffee in my mouth when I read this.
I did (wipes screen).
His ignorance covered the whole earth like a blanket, and there was hardly a hole in it anywhere. - Mark Twain
...we need to defend science and its applications from the yahoos out there.
And the googles.
sr
“My Eyes! The googles do nothing!”
His ignorance covered the whole earth like a blanket, and there was hardly a hole in it anywhere. - Mark Twain