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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
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.
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.
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
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
Materials science has progressed to the point that a space elevator is a matter of "when" and is no longer wild-eyed sci-fi.
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.
... 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.
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.