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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.
the hard part is figuring out why we're there.
Good grief, why is that even a hard question? The answer is because it's not well explored, we as a civilization have always explored, and in the end have always ended up benefitting by doing so.
Untold riches await the explorer - either of the mind, or literal material riches.
The hard question is not figuring out why we are there, it's figuring out what the hell the delay is!
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
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)
Why do our achievements with sending robots not count? We're still producing remarkable feats of science and engineering, aren't we? What's so important with sending flesh and blood?
Yes, other-world colonization is a very real goal, but it's not the only one. Scientific exploration is more efficient ( ie: get more done for less ) when you don't have to worry about maintaining a fragile human being as well.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
Not imagination. The moon program brought us solid state, microprocessors and miniaturization the went orders of magnitude better than anything previously produced, velcro, microwave ovens, fuel cells, ground reading radar, methods of inter-body navigation, Tang, Space docking procedures, standardized hatches on spacecraft, better alloys for building air and space craft, Meals Ready to Eat, air scrubbers, and more than anything else, confirmation of the math and physics involved. The space program generated all sorts of industries. In n1961, the technology for putting a person on the moon and returning them safely to the earth didn't exist. by 1969 it did. That took leadership. I haven't seen that kind of leadership since Kennedy. Lots of private contractors got very wealthy off the space program. However, NASA doesn't have the kind of lobbying money available to it that Goldman-Sachs has. What NASA does isn't sexy.