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.

Comments

Heinlein quote.

[Z00L00K]

“Always listen to experts. They'll tell you what can't be done, and why. Then do it.”
  Robert A. Heinlein

Re:Heinlein quote.

[Viol8]

The problem is experts tell you what can't be done NOW. They rarely speculate about what might be possible in the future.

Re:Heinlein quote.

[fremsley471]

A paradigm doesn't have to make people scrap their core textbooks (such as the big daddy example of the acceptance of continental drift theory). Seemingly small developments can produce enormous change. The creation of vulanised rubber, so allowing pneumatic tyres, saw a paradigm shift in road transport, but it can also be seen as just an incremental shift in technology. The development of the route to the moon through enormous rockets and very complex orbital rendezvous became redundant after the LEM plan was adopted.

This is also an example of where there was significant agreement between The Experts that a similarly qualified, but not so senior, expert was wrong.

Re:Heinlein quote.

[taiwanjohn]

Freeman Dyson gave an interesting talk a couple of years ago, speculating about the next few centuries of exploration and settlement. He envisions colonies in the Kuiper Belt in a couple hundred years, but not much beyond Mars for the next 50 or so. And he anticipates an "island hopping" model of interstellar expansion, similar to the Polynesian settlement of the Pacific. Anyway, it's an interesting talk. (34 min)

Re:Heinlein quote.

[SharpFang]

RTFA is so last century.

RTFS was new until recently.

Now we have RTFT. Read the f***ng title.

Re:Heinlein quote.

[Pseudonymous Powers]

All the islands they hopped along were suitable for human habitation from the moment they landed.

Sure they were, provided that you knew how to: find fresh water, gather building materials, make huts, make boats, make spears, fish, raise pigs, grow taro root, make poi, etc.

In other words, they had a bunch of technology going for them before they could even get there. They then used that technology to survive. Without that technology, those islands would indeed not have been "suitable for human habitation".

There's a different, albeit far more advanced, set of technologies that would allow for the colonization of the solar system. Maybe we don't have everything we need yet. But there's no particular reason to believe we never will.

Smart man

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Smart man

[Kokuyo]

I'm not sure why. It does not seem implausible that a crew for a generational ship could be found.

Re:Smart man

[countach]

There's another option. Some kind of device which spawns new humans when the ship gets to its destination.

Re:Smart man

[Anonymous Coward]

The book Aurora, by Kim Stanley Robinson, makes an interesting argument for why generational ships are perhaps not so great. In a nutshell, it's fine if you want to choose that life - risk and claustrophobia - for yourself and maybe some of your friends.

But can you really make that choice for your children and grandchildren, unto a dozen generations? For better or worse, it's their lives that you're playing dice with: catastrophic environment failure, unpredictable social evolution, who knows. When you're in a generation ship, there's no escape, after all.

Re:Smart man

[Kokuyo]

And this is different on earth? You never know what situation you'll find if you have to flee a place. On the contrary, there is evidence that humans can be better at living together despite differences when there is no alternative.

Offspring can always find a reason to blame the parents if something goes wrong.

Re:Smart man

[Jason Levine]

But can you really make that choice for your children and grandchildren, unto a dozen generations?

As a parent, I make a lot of choices for my kids. Some of these choices will shape the lives of my grandchildren. For example, I choose to live in the US right now. If I and my wife had decided to move to another country, our kids' lives would have been vastly different. I don't see "making that choice for your children and grandchildren" to be that huge. It's what parents do every day. You don't sit back and ask your baby where he'd like to grow up. You pick a place and that's where your child will live. If that place happened to be a generational ship, then the child will grow up knowing that as home.

Re:Smart man

[The Real Dr John]

Everything that has been listed here is straight out of sci-fi movies and books. I am a neuroscientist, and I have a very strong sense from what I know that human cryogenics isn't going to work. The brain of a frog is so completely different from that of a human. It may be possible in the distant future, but I wouldn't bet on it. I really would love to see how you test whether humans can be frozen solid (which is what it would take) and be thawed out and be just fine, you know, like a frog or a carp. Frogs and carp evolved to be able to freeze solid, humans did not. Cryogenics is not about "suspended animation", it is about freezing living material solid at -80 or lower. I am not volunteering, but other /.ers are welcome to give it a go.

"Never" is a very long time

[ibwolf]

"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.

Re:"Never" is a very long time

[azcoyote]

Including self-destruction

Yep. In fact, self-destruction is more likely than us spreading out beyond Mars. Of course we might travel beyond Mars, but at this point I think that we have enough scientific reason to think that colonizing beyond Mars is so unlikely as to be functionally impossible. There are a host of reasons, but to name a few: (1) faster-than-light travel is theoretically impossible (and only possible in mere speculations), (2) near-FTL travel is a mere dream, (3) the human body can hardly take long-term space travel as it is, (4) we allow ourselves to be guided more by politics and profit than by any "higher" goals, so we will never unite our resources on such a project unless it promises major returns in these areas, etc.

We can (and probably should) always fantasize about new technologies, etc., but there are real limits to our abilities and we do run up against them. Of course through genetic engineering, etc., we could fashion a new kind of human that might be better equipped for the challenges of interstellar colonization, but given the potential limitations of life (we can only dream and watch Star Trek to imagine a biological being that is really adapted for the conditions of space), it is at least unlikely enough that we will colonize farther than Mars that I think the word "never" is not far-fetched.

Re:"Never" is a very long time

[Rei]

Besides, if your goal is terraforming, a solar shade doesn't really cut it - you have to get rid of the huge amounts of CO2. My favorite proposal is a solar chimney - basically a giant funnel-shaped greenhouse floating on Venus. The gas accelerates faster and faster the further it rises into the funnel - and due to the megascale-engineering scale, suffers (proportionally) almost no slowdown from the surface drag. Hence, if large enough, velocities of tens of thousands of meters per second could be reached - well beyond escape velocity and even potentially to intercept trajectories with other worlds (giving them Venus's CO2 for their own terraforming needs). A vortex-inducing funnel could centrifuge out the gases so that by shaping the exit nozzle one could preferably lose heavy gases and keep the lighter ones. The structure - being of insignificant mass compared to the mass of the rising gases - could be self-lofted, like a parachute in an updraft. Actuated vents could provide thrust for stationkeeping and aim. One could even build other such funnels elsewhere, such as on Jupiter to export hydrogen back to Venus for the Bosch reaction.

Still doesn't help with rotation, though.

Another possibility which would be very difficult, but not require megascale engineering, would be breeding bacteria to sequester carbon. This has sometimes been dismissed due to a lack of nutrients in the Venusian atmosphere, but this may be a bit shortsighted. In addition to carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, water, and sulfur, there's small amounts of chlorine (in the form of hydrochloric acid) and phosphorus (in the form of phosphoric acid) in the cloudtops. Other nutrients can prove trickier to get, but there is a potential source: the Venera probes found what appears to be volcanic ash in the atmosphere, identifying for example the signature of iron during their descent.

While some of what they would need to function would be quite rare, technically everything that life needs appears likely to be able to be found in venus's clouds at temperatures that life can survive in. So perhaps one could engineer free-drifting longlived microorganisms that would use cloud droplets around ash condensation nuclei to breed - perhaps some sort of sporulating species.

Re:150 years ago...

[paskie]

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.

He's Right

[Zobeid]

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.

Re:150 years ago...

[Maritz]

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.

Re:"Never" == "Life span of humankind"

[Punko]

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.