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Space Is Not a Void (slate.com)
An anonymous reader shares an article: When President Kennedy announced the Apollo Program, he famously argued that we should go to the moon because it is hard. Solving the technical challenges of space travel is a kind of civilizational achievement on its own, like resolving an interplanetary Rubik's Cube. The argument worked, perhaps all too well. As soon as we landed on the moon, humanity's expansion into the cosmos slowed and then stopped (not counting robots). If you were to draw a graph charting the farthest distance a human being has ever been from the surface of Earth, the peak was in 1970 with Apollo 13. With the successful moon landings, we solved all of the fundamental challenges involved in launching humans into orbit and bringing them back safely. The people watching those early feats of exploration imagined we would soon be sending astronauts to Mars and beyond, but something has held us back. Not know-how, or even money, but a certain lack of imagination. Getting to space isn't the hard part -- the hard part is figuring out why we're there. Sure, we can celebrate the human spirit and the first person to do this or that, but that kind of achievement never moves beyond the symbolic. It doesn't build industries, establish settlements and scientific research stations, or scale up solutions from expensive one-offs to mass production. Furthermore, as five decades of failing to go farther than our own moon have demonstrated, that kind of symbolism can't even sustain itself, much less energize new activity.
>After all, how will you force others to use your currency as the world's financial ballast (and thus export your inflation for others to deal with) if you spend on space capsules instead of stealth bombers?
Space tech is really good for targeted terrestrial energy delivery. Put a man on the Moon, you can drop a nuke anywhere on the Earth.
The problem is our space tech is already good enough for that. We need to convince our leaders they should be developing the ability to divert asteroids for first strikes that appear to be acts of God and come with completely plausible deniability. And simultaneously develop asteroid deflection capability in the event our enemies are thinking the same thing.
Eye problems, muscle tissue problems, bone marrow problems, radiation, the list goes on. There are many reasons why long distance space travel is not possible at this time. Sound like some Millennial at Slate decided to write a blog post out of complete ignorance for any of the science involved. Humans already figured out that long distance travel is not worth the cost to the health of the travelers at this time and therefore have focused on robots and satellites to do the exploration. A far better investment of tax payer money if you ask me. Leave suicidal trips to private adventurers.
Of course, the New World was quite capable of sustaining life - and even had its own life forms to explore (and cultures to dominate).
What amazes me are the people that say we need to colonize other worlds for when we render this one uninhabitable. Well the worlds we could conceivably reach with our 'proven space travel technology' are far less inhabitable than this one will be - even after we're through with it. That doesn't mean we should stop looking for interesting targets and developing new technologies that may someday make practical space travel possible. But to argue that it's possible now - just because we know how to send a projectile with a short-term human-supportable environment to the moon - is absurd.
Posted from my Android phone. Oh, I can change this? There, that's better...
America is rich beyond belief. The US government is not trying hard enough to get access to those funds. For some reason, spending vast sums on the MI complex propping up non-US territories for access to resources is seen as a better strategy than developing your own access to uncontested resources in space.