long travel times, sanity, and propulsion
on
Mars Odyssey begins
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· Score: 1
While various sorts of deep-space propulsion techniques are exciting, and perhaps not even too far from completion, it's often not realized that their main impact won't (for a considerable time) be on travel times. Your basic Hohmann orbit trip to Mars takes 1.5-2 years, if you pick the best launch times. To cut this down by a factor of two requires some serious thrust, enough so that the limiting factor in providing it will really be our launch capacity from Earth, not our drive technologies. Drives need propellant. To give a ship the mass of the shuttle orbiter (or even an apollo capsule) a significant thrust for a period of weeks requires an awful lot of propellant with even the most far-out drive designs. Drives not needing propellant tanks (ramjets and solar sails) are still in the never-been-tested stage at this point. What an ion drive, or Vasimir, is really good for is massively improving your in-flight maneuvering drives, which can increase your flexibility and decrease your launch weight quite a bit. But speeding you to your destination, no.
On the up side, Discover magazine is smoking some serious crack. Regardless of the (far from proven) beliefs of modern psychologists, throughout the centuries of the Age of Exploration bad-luck travelers often wound up in much more isolated states for similar periods of time. The history race to the poles, for instance, is replete with groups of a dozen men, iced in near the North Pole for an entire winter. Now, these guys weren't trained and selected astronauts; as often as not, many of them were basically picked up off the docks by a captain looking for foolhardy volunteers. They were far more cut off than any astronaut in the internet era; they didn't have videophone calls, or e-mail, or electronic libraries, or psychologists at mission control. They were starving, getting scurvy, losing limbs. And often, they had no certainty of rescue.
Nevertheless, for them, mutiny and murder were still uncommon. I don't particularly understand what about their cultural backgrounds or individual psychologies allowed them to do this. I am not at all certain that I would be able to do the same. But history makes it very clear that it is not only possible, but not even very hard.
This is actually a pretty regular sort of launch these days. The missile itself is watertight, so there really isn't any need to waterproof the spacecraft. Most of the launchers we use (the largest exception being Ariadne) are modified ICBMs of one sort or another. The Russians are selling off old hardware, that they can no longer maintain, very cheaply; the technical capabilities for, say, launching a comsat into a very specific orbit are limited, but for this mission it'll do.
Space travel in a Jupiter-like environment poses its own set of problems. For us, at least, the radiation associated with Jupiter's massive magnetic field reaches a very dangerous level; we would need some pretty serious shielding to survive there. While it is energy-cheap to move between moons in the system in Hohmann orbits, it is energy-expensive to move between them more quickly, to reach the major planet, or to escape the system to other planets.
More subtle problems may also exist. For instance, heavy elements may be comparatively scarce in such systems. Nor is there any particular reason to think that to the inhabitants of a Ganymede, Europa or Titan look particularly comfortable or appealing; moons of the same planet can be quite radically different.
the amount of space crap that would bombard a planet(and the moons, which we would be looking to inhabit)of that size
A good-sized moon with an atmosphere, like Ganymede, isn't liable to get hit (on the surface, at least) with a heck of a lot more junk, at least late in the system's evolution, than Earth is. Ganymede is not covered in many fresh meteor craters. Nor is Europa, where they're particularly observable. And the frequency of large impacts would need to increase by several orders of magnitude (over Earth's) before it represented a problem nearly as big as, well, lots of other problems....
This may have been modded for funny, but it's an important point! The 'conventional wisdom' that groups will tend to polarize themselves is far from obviously true. A number of points-
-The phenomenon of groups insulating themselves from arguments they disagree with, has really only been observed in fairly extreme cases. It is somewhat disingenuous to pick out the KKK as an example; millions of less cultist racists exist, and it is not obvious that they also screen the information they recieve (other than by psychological confirmation bias.)
-If they do, it's not clear that filtering technologies and one-sided web sites will do much for them that they don't do already. It's quite easy for people to ignore op-ed pages and PBS already; most do. It's quite possible that the internet will make it easier for them to see differing opinions, through its ease of use or just through its sheer chaos. Filtering on the 'Net is actually pretty hard, after all.
-The argument assumes that individual curiosity is a pretty weak force. The Internet makes it much easier to indulge curiosity. I don't think that's negligible.
-People like to argue. Slashdot is a good example. This exposes them to other viewpoints.
-Even the most fanatic, say, pro-life or pro-choice activist can ill-afford to remain completely ignorant of the other side's viewpoint, if only to oppose it more successfully.
-Many people do seem to still be interested in presenting all sides of an issue. Many more people are interested in seeing such presentations. People are not usually utterly unaware of their own biases, and do sometimes try to counteract them. Again, see slashdot.
-Within the confines of what, externally, is often thought of as a group of monolithic opinions, there are often strongly different and disagreeing ideas. These groups nevertheless maintain cohesion for political or social reasons. Take pro-life again. There are lots of folks who are prolifers because of their religion- but many different religions. There are atheist biologists and doctors who are pro-life for what they consider scientific reasons. There are people who are pro-life because of ideas about sexual morality. For that matter (I say this with no offence intended toward pro-lifers; this sort of thing is true of all movements) there are people who are pro-life because of racist or classist ideas, or antintellectual ideas, or because it was good enough for their daddies, or because a pro-life politician did them some other favor. The point is, there are very few opinions in the movement that are agreed upon by all, and thus any member is liable to hear everything he might believe disagreed with nearly as strongly, on a pro-life web site, as on a pro-choice site!
This sort of thing happens daily already on the internet- on sci.space.policy, there is no proposal or program I have not heard vehemently opposed by someone who is, nevertheless, pro-space.
-Finally, our open-ness, or lack thereof, toward opposing arguments is very much a cultural phenomenon. This culture is shifting in response to the Net, just as it did toward each new medium. Any notion of a static, old-culture response to what we think the new medium's problems will be, is almost guaranteed to be wrong.
Slashdot Mirror
On the up side, Discover magazine is smoking some serious crack. Regardless of the (far from proven) beliefs of modern psychologists, throughout the centuries of the Age of Exploration bad-luck travelers often wound up in much more isolated states for similar periods of time. The history race to the poles, for instance, is replete with groups of a dozen men, iced in near the North Pole for an entire winter. Now, these guys weren't trained and selected astronauts; as often as not, many of them were basically picked up off the docks by a captain looking for foolhardy volunteers. They were far more cut off than any astronaut in the internet era; they didn't have videophone calls, or e-mail, or electronic libraries, or psychologists at mission control. They were starving, getting scurvy, losing limbs. And often, they had no certainty of rescue.
Nevertheless, for them, mutiny and murder were still uncommon. I don't particularly understand what about their cultural backgrounds or individual psychologies allowed them to do this. I am not at all certain that I would be able to do the same. But history makes it very clear that it is not only possible, but not even very hard.
This is actually a pretty regular sort of launch these days. The missile itself is watertight, so there really isn't any need to waterproof the spacecraft. Most of the launchers we use (the largest exception being Ariadne) are modified ICBMs of one sort or another. The Russians are selling off old hardware, that they can no longer maintain, very cheaply; the technical capabilities for, say, launching a comsat into a very specific orbit are limited, but for this mission it'll do.
More subtle problems may also exist. For instance, heavy elements may be comparatively scarce in such systems. Nor is there any particular reason to think that to the inhabitants of a Ganymede, Europa or Titan look particularly comfortable or appealing; moons of the same planet can be quite radically different.
A good-sized moon with an atmosphere, like Ganymede, isn't liable to get hit (on the surface, at least) with a heck of a lot more junk, at least late in the system's evolution, than Earth is. Ganymede is not covered in many fresh meteor craters. Nor is Europa, where they're particularly observable. And the frequency of large impacts would need to increase by several orders of magnitude (over Earth's) before it represented a problem nearly as big as, well, lots of other problems....
This may have been modded for funny, but it's an important point! The 'conventional wisdom' that groups will tend to polarize themselves is far from obviously true. A number of points-
-The phenomenon of groups insulating themselves from arguments they disagree with, has really only been observed in fairly extreme cases. It is somewhat disingenuous to pick out the KKK as an example; millions of less cultist racists exist, and it is not obvious that they also screen the information they recieve (other than by psychological confirmation bias.)
-If they do, it's not clear that filtering technologies and one-sided web sites will do much for them that they don't do already. It's quite easy for people to ignore op-ed pages and PBS already; most do. It's quite possible that the internet will make it easier for them to see differing opinions, through its ease of use or just through its sheer chaos. Filtering on the 'Net is actually pretty hard, after all.
-The argument assumes that individual curiosity is a pretty weak force. The Internet makes it much easier to indulge curiosity. I don't think that's negligible.
-People like to argue. Slashdot is a good example. This exposes them to other viewpoints.
-Even the most fanatic, say, pro-life or pro-choice activist can ill-afford to remain completely ignorant of the other side's viewpoint, if only to oppose it more successfully.
-Many people do seem to still be interested in presenting all sides of an issue. Many more people are interested in seeing such presentations. People are not usually utterly unaware of their own biases, and do sometimes try to counteract them. Again, see slashdot.
-Within the confines of what, externally, is often thought of as a group of monolithic opinions, there are often strongly different and disagreeing ideas. These groups nevertheless maintain cohesion for political or social reasons. Take pro-life again. There are lots of folks who are prolifers because of their religion- but many different religions. There are atheist biologists and doctors who are pro-life for what they consider scientific reasons. There are people who are pro-life because of ideas about sexual morality. For that matter (I say this with no offence intended toward pro-lifers; this sort of thing is true of all movements) there are people who are pro-life because of racist or classist ideas, or antintellectual ideas, or because it was good enough for their daddies, or because a pro-life politician did them some other favor. The point is, there are very few opinions in the movement that are agreed upon by all, and thus any member is liable to hear everything he might believe disagreed with nearly as strongly, on a pro-life web site, as on a pro-choice site!
This sort of thing happens daily already on the internet- on sci.space.policy, there is no proposal or program I have not heard vehemently opposed by someone who is, nevertheless, pro-space.
-Finally, our open-ness, or lack thereof, toward opposing arguments is very much a cultural phenomenon. This culture is shifting in response to the Net, just as it did toward each new medium. Any notion of a static, old-culture response to what we think the new medium's problems will be, is almost guaranteed to be wrong.