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Louis Friedman Says Humans Will Never Venture Beyond Mars (scientificamerican.com)
MarkWhittington writes: Dr. Louis Friedman, one of the co-founders of the Planetary Society, is coming out with a new book, "Human Spaceflight: From Mars to the Stars," an excerpt of which was published in Scientific America. Friedman revives and revises a version of the humans vs. robots controversy that has roiled through aerospace circles for decades. Unlike previous advocates of restricting space travel to robots, such as Robert Park and the late James Van Allen, Friedman admits that humans are going to Mars to settle. But there, human space travel will end. Only robots will ever venture further.
“Always listen to experts. They'll tell you what can't be done, and why. Then do it.”
Robert A. Heinlein
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
Options for humans traveling outside of our solar system are what?
Some kind of FTL travel
Immortal crew
Prolonged stasis
Generations of crew
Not looking good for humans at this point.
"Never" is a very long time.
I don't think it is likely that humans will go beyond Mars in my lifetime (say the next 50 years or so), but never? Claiming that is just hubris. There is no way to state this with any degree of surety.
It is not a stretch beyond credibility to assume that humanity may be around for a few thousand years yet. Given all we've done in just the last 200 years, almost anything is possible given another 2000 years.
Riiight... ever heard about Mongolfier brothers?
I think even Dr. Friedman wouldn't argue that his thesis necessarily stays valid after some combinations of multiple breakthroughs, be it in physics, AI / neurobiology, cheap energy, physiology... It's still useful to consider the situation without these breakthroughs because they are fairly unpredictable and planning them will probably.fail.
It's not the fall that kills you. It's the sudden stop at the end. -Douglas Adams
His position is very sensible, and I honestly don't understand all the massive backlash against it.
I guess I can understand some resentment from people who've grown up on Star Trek, at being told it isn't going to play out that way. But seriously now. . . Star Trek was never even hard SF. It was a 1930s pulp sci-fi concept resurrected into a 1960s TV show, and it was fantasy from the beginning. Slashdot is supposed to be news for nerds. Nerds should know this. We should be smarter.
I also wonder how many of you read TFA? Let me help you out: "Some find this to be negative—an absolute statement of limits and thus of giving up. My job here is to prove the opposite: humans exploring the universe with nanotechnology robotics, bio-molecular engineering, and artificial intelligence is something that is exciting and positive, and is based on an optimistic view of the future."
He's not saying we can't explore space with human crews and colonies. He's saying it won't make sense to, because we'll have much better options. Human beings are very costly to keep alive in space, much more than machines -- so we'll send the machines. With uploading, we may *be* the machines.
In fact, I'll go further. I think we should *explore* Mars with manned missions -- because today's robotics technology is too limited, it would take centuries to explore Mars with robots at the pace we're going. But I think we should *settle* Mars with robots. In this case Futurama is probably a better guide than Star Trek. . .
Fry: So let me get this straight. This planet is completely uninhabited?
Bender: No, it's inhabited by robots.
Fry: Oh, kinda like how a warehouse is inhabited by boxes.
Yes. That's Mars.
Bill Boeing said, about 100 years ago: "We are embarked as pioneers upon a new science and industry in which our problems are so new and unusual that it behooves no one to dismiss any novel idea with the statement that ‘it can’t be done!’"
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve your problem, you're not using enough of it. --AC
The way human institutions are currently structured, the species is DE-volving. There's little hope that homo sapiens is going to become healthier, heartier or more intelligent through evolution. All of the evolutionary pressures have been removed by society and technology. Without drastic changes, we are an evolutionary dead end.
I'd like to be wrong but I don't think humanity will venture as far as Mars, or even back to the Moon. Our adventurous spirit is largely extinguished and replaced with navel-gazing solipsism. We prefer weaponry to spacecraft in any case.
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
Over the not to distant future, socialism will shut down the western producing companies (leaving no production) and space travel will stop.
Socialism will be the end of space travel ?
I'm sorry, but what will kill human space travel will be the fanatics who decry that having taxes pay for such things as NASA when such expenditures do not return immediate benefit. Politicians now (in the US at least) consider the next presidential election cycle as being long-term planning. This ongoing unblinking focus on short term gain for long term pain, will be what stops humanity from space travel.
Consider this: Some of the groups that are doing the most in advancing space exploration include the Chinese and a partnership between European countries. Hardly anti-socialists (from an American perspective). Russia Japan India also have space programs, as well.
The only way human beings may move past Mars is through long term, negative profit,science-based programs. The kind of programs that are shut down by dollar focused, shareholder driven, anti-science political leaders we seem to be stuck with these days.
At least in the depths of the Cold War, the one-upmanship lead to positive gains in human space travel.
If only we could fall into a woman's arms without falling into her hands
D'uh. They're too hot to live on. Now those planets spinning around those stars . . .
If only we could fall into a woman's arms without falling into her hands
In other news, a famous authority reported that the idea of a passenger train traveling faster than 25mph is ridiculous, because everyone would die from not being able to breathe.
"Ahh! I see you're in that indeterminate Schrodinger state where - oh, uh
The technologies of the 20th century, much less the 21st (we're already 1/7th of the way through that century), are enough to settle Antarctica. And there are some seriously, seriously overpopulated places on Earth now, and the land values in Manhattan and London are preposterous.
But nobody is even talking about colonizing Antarctica for lebensraum. Not even doing that some decade in the future, ever. Nobody in India is saying "man, when India hits 1.4 billion, we'll just have to move some folks to Antarctica".
Or the Gobi Desert. Or the central plains of the whole of Russia, where some millions of square miles are barely used for anything, not being quite productive enough for grain growing. Only a *little* technology, compared to Mars, would be needed to colonize land areas the size of all of Mars...and are right here at the bottom of a gravity well, with free air(!!).
As Charles Stross says, call me about space colonies when Antarctica is full.
The professor's point is not that humans lack adventurousness or industry; but they don't go doing much more than the one trip and plant-the-flag unless there's profit in it. There's no profit in Antarctica, the Gobi, or the Russian Steppes...and way, way less in Mars, still less beyond it.
It's not even about transportation costs; you could lower those until you could get a tonne to Mars as cheaply as to Antarctica and there would STILL be no space colony unless Mars had something to offer than the Gobi did not.