Yep, gotta handle all that space traffic. Yessiree Bob! No more waiting in line, no more congestion in the TSA security line, no more risk of getting bumped off your spaceflight. Yeah, times have changed, what with all the commercial space flight going on.
Re:It should read 'stoopid people hath spoken'
on
Terry Childs Found Guilty
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Hear, hear. Just because the guy is a nerd doesn't mean we have to rally 'round him.
Of course, if during the trial everyone's login credentials were exposed (I don't know if they were, I didn't RTFA) that would be pretty goddamn stupid indeed.
Read the parent. Tell us how you can put 10 million people in space for 100 years. You can't. You would have to invoke the old super-powerful future technology trick repeatedly and on a grand scale. Grow up. This is reality, not Battlestar Galactica.
You do not provide a valid reason for the attempt. You do not "have to start somewhere" to carry out a pointless project. The technological advances will be few and far between. If you want technological advances, fund them directly. Don't make up a pie-in-the-sky fantasy and hope that something randomly useful comes out.
No, not equally useless, one is practical and the other is not. You are creating one of the usual straw men. Assuming for the sake of argument that they can do the same things, manned space flight does it far more slowly (much longer project lead times), far more expensively (need to support delicate human life), and far less ambitiously (anything beyond low earth orbit is beyond prohibitively expensive). Let's see, which one would be a better way to express our penchant for exploration, curiosity, and scientific investigation? It is a no-brainer, pure and simple.
With all due respect, "getting off this rock" is a fantasy. Consider this: How much money, time, and resources would it cost to move 10 million people (a miniscule fraction of the earth's population) "off this rock" in a manner that they could survive for 100 years (a miniscule fraction of humanity's longevity up until now)? Put them 1) in earth orbit, 2) on the moon, or 3) on mars. Have them be 1) totally dependent on earth for their consumables and other resources, 2) dependent on earth only for half, and 3) completely self sustained. At the end of the 100 year period they should be completely self-sustained in any scenario you choose.
Please don't make extensive use of the old "we don't know what super-advanced technology there will be" trick to pretend that at some point it will all be really cheap and easy. Historically, that has never happened. Powerful new industrial technologies have always been expensive, and this particular case will be no exception. Creating large scale habitation is also always expensive in direct proportion to the inhospitability of the environment and its distance from vital resources.
What else can they do? It's just a bunch of folks floating around with clipboards doing what machines could do better, faster, and cheaper. It reminds me of those minimum wage workers who stand around on street corners waving signs, a job done just as well by a wooden post.
NASA emphasizes the utter uselessness of the ISS by asking people what interesting things can be done with it. This after spending billions of dollars and over a decade of work. This money should have been spent exclusively on robotic probes. There is no compelling case here for manned exploration.
I know, I know, the "get off this rock" crowd will now inundate us with their magical-religious space adventure cult emotional arguments.
Jesus H. Christ! How many times do I have to tell you! It's clean, not dirty! It's the cleanest of them all! Cleaner than coal! Cleaner than gas! Cleaner than oil! Cleaner than those stupid degenerate bisexual latte-drinking atheistic hippie socialist wind generators! Get it through your god-damned head already!
I think none of these additional arguments hold water either. You go on vacation and derive satisfaction. You do not derive satisfaction from knowing that a chosen few at NASA go on vacation. Unmanned probes are just as valuable and fulfilling in practice as the knowledge that some NASA employee is doing the work (at far greater expense). I can't emphasize enough that manned space flight inhibits space exploration and man's innate desire to explore. It is a wasteful money sink that prevents wider, grander exploration.
Are manned space missions practical? No. Neither are movies, or operas, or vacations, or nice cars, or getting your wife flowers,
I assume you are an engineer whose sense of practicality is very different from that of the broad population. These things are eminently practical, fulfilling, and consequential aspects of life. Entertainment is a valued activity, as is keeping your spouse happy and nurturing your relationship. Art is not some wispy undefinable abstraction, the arts are ingrained in our everyday life. I don't just mean academic fine arts, I mean all of the arts. They are pervasive. They make and cost people money. They have very practical commercial consequences, and no doubt your dwelling expresses your own sense of aesthetics. Your questions "Would we want to live completely practically? I wouldn't. How about you?" are null. They are based on false premises.
Finally, the "get off this rock" issue is the worst of them all. That will never happen, certainly not within the next millenium, and I would conjecture that it will never ever happen. The cost of moving more than a trivial number of people to some desolate, unsustainable off-planet outpost will never be overcome. I challenge you to calculate what it would cost to move 10 million people (about 0.15% of the current world population) to some off-planet location to save them from cataclysm, and support them for 100 years. It is a ridiculous concept. Forget about moving and sustaining a significant fraction of the population. If you propose a small seed colony to save humanity, we return to your initial analogy. I don't give a rat's ass if a tiny number of people survive for a few years more than the rest of us in a cataclysm. It is a meaningless false hope.
What drives manned space exploration in real life? Certainly not any of the reasons you propose. Political hucksters and other corrupt individuals and organizations would have you think so, but they are lying. The driving force is money, the transfer of taxpayer dollars to the well-connected, well-lobbied defense industry. Manned projects are vastly larger and more profitable than unmanned projects. It is that simple. The rest is deceitful sci fi space adventure magical-religious claptrap for the gullible masses.
I'm not arguing that robots are better than humans, just that the missions can be made far cheaper, more ambitious, and wider in scope than with manned exploration.
To argue that humans' greater versatility justifies the colossal additional expense is like saying that going on a road trip with a full blown hospital emergency room team plus mobile surgical unit is much more versatile than a $50 first aid kit. You would be correct, of course, but so what? It is not a reasonable option.
No, not confused or incoherent, goalposts not moved. I stand behind all of my statements. I don't really get your drift, though. Seems gratuitously hostile and without any specific point.
Re-read your post and note that your arguments' links to manned exploration are tenuous at best. I am all in favor of robust unmanned space exploration. Most or all of the benefits, exploration, inspiration, etc. mentioned by people in this thread can come from it with no particular need for manned space exploration.
I was being charitable and granting that through the Apollo program, there was some justification for manned space flight, mainly because computers were so pathetic back then. That circumstance is no longer true.
Except that historically no useful science has been done by manned space exploration. All of the great achievements, all of the knowledge we have of our solar system and the cosmos, all of it has come from unmanned space exploration. See my other posts in this vein.
I don't know if you are doing it deliberately, but your arguments disappear in the absence of humans. No humans => no advantage whatsoever to shape robotic equipment like humans. It becomes a costly, wasteful constraint. I do not favor sending non-humanoid robots to help humans in space, I favor discontinuing manned space exploration in its entirety.
There is no compelling reason to support manned space exploration. Anything that can be done in space by a person can be done at far lower expense, with far greater scope, ambition and achievement, and over a much longer period of time with robotic equipment. Manned space missions drastically hinder the exploration of space by sucking up enormous resources to provide a habitable environment and enormous human-safe ferrying vehicles. The International Space Station (ISS) is of no compelling use whatsoever, it is a hugely expensive low earth orbit ferris wheel, a glorified amusement park ride for a privileged few. Unmanned equipment can do anything to be done on the ISS better, more cheaply, and for a much longer time.
Manned space exploration is a gimmick whose sole use is the transfer of taxpayer dollars to corrupt defense industrialists, nothing more. It is sold to a hapless, gullible public by equally corrupt politicians and ex-astronauts. It is nothing but childish dreaming by sci fi space adventure magical religious cultists.
No, it doesn't. You will always need to design some amount of mission-specific equipment. In any case, most industrial robotic design today relies on generalizable platforms with diverse plug-in modules. This is a non-issue.
There is not, however, "an entire technology base" in space geared around the humanoid form. The vast majority of compelling space exploration and scientific achievements in space have been done with unmanned equipment that did not waste resources on achieving humanoid form factors or work-alikes. There is no compelling role for manned space exploration in the foreseeable future.
If you're advocating that we abandon manned spaceflight, I have to disagree. Unmanned missions are valuable, but I still think we need people in space.
Given that manned space exploration is colossally more expensive than unmanned, the burden is on you to justify why it should be done at all, and why the far cheaper and far more ambitious unmanned alternatives need to be displaced for it. The budget is finite, and cannot accommodate everything.
Why humanoid? Is NASA now just one more bullshit agency providing Roman Circus to the plebes? What is the point of making it humanoid instead of cheap, efficient, and optimized for the expected tasks and missions? This is just another ploy to funnel money to corrupt aerospace contractors. Why not do space exploration with intelligently designed unmanned projects instead of this crap?
The sci fi space adventure magical-religious cult is blind to the true driving force of manned space exploration: political corruption to channel vast wealth to the defense industry, even at the cost of incurring more debt. Let's not even get to the practical impossibility of moving more than a trivial number of people to an enormously expensive outpost in some desolate, unsustainable location. They just shut their eyes and pretend it will be just like on Battlestar Galactica or Star Wars.
The main point of space is that we get off this rock of incredibly limited resources and land to get to another planet to live on/harvest. All that other stuff is just ways to get to that point.
This is just magical-religious sci fi space adventure cultism. It will never happen. You will never get more than a trivial number of people "off this rock," and even then only at tremendous and unjustifiable expense.
Slashdot Mirror
Yep, gotta handle all that space traffic. Yessiree Bob! No more waiting in line, no more congestion in the TSA security line, no more risk of getting bumped off your spaceflight. Yeah, times have changed, what with all the commercial space flight going on.
Hear, hear. Just because the guy is a nerd doesn't mean we have to rally 'round him.
Of course, if during the trial everyone's login credentials were exposed (I don't know if they were, I didn't RTFA) that would be pretty goddamn stupid indeed.
Read the parent. Tell us how you can put 10 million people in space for 100 years. You can't. You would have to invoke the old super-powerful future technology trick repeatedly and on a grand scale. Grow up. This is reality, not Battlestar Galactica.
You do not provide a valid reason for the attempt. You do not "have to start somewhere" to carry out a pointless project. The technological advances will be few and far between. If you want technological advances, fund them directly. Don't make up a pie-in-the-sky fantasy and hope that something randomly useful comes out.
No, not equally useless, one is practical and the other is not. You are creating one of the usual straw men. Assuming for the sake of argument that they can do the same things, manned space flight does it far more slowly (much longer project lead times), far more expensively (need to support delicate human life), and far less ambitiously (anything beyond low earth orbit is beyond prohibitively expensive). Let's see, which one would be a better way to express our penchant for exploration, curiosity, and scientific investigation? It is a no-brainer, pure and simple.
In short, yes. Sucks, don't it?
With all due respect, "getting off this rock" is a fantasy. Consider this: How much money, time, and resources would it cost to move 10 million people (a miniscule fraction of the earth's population) "off this rock" in a manner that they could survive for 100 years (a miniscule fraction of humanity's longevity up until now)? Put them 1) in earth orbit, 2) on the moon, or 3) on mars. Have them be 1) totally dependent on earth for their consumables and other resources, 2) dependent on earth only for half, and 3) completely self sustained. At the end of the 100 year period they should be completely self-sustained in any scenario you choose.
Please don't make extensive use of the old "we don't know what super-advanced technology there will be" trick to pretend that at some point it will all be really cheap and easy. Historically, that has never happened. Powerful new industrial technologies have always been expensive, and this particular case will be no exception. Creating large scale habitation is also always expensive in direct proportion to the inhospitability of the environment and its distance from vital resources.
What else can they do? It's just a bunch of folks floating around with clipboards doing what machines could do better, faster, and cheaper. It reminds me of those minimum wage workers who stand around on street corners waving signs, a job done just as well by a wooden post.
NASA emphasizes the utter uselessness of the ISS by asking people what interesting things can be done with it. This after spending billions of dollars and over a decade of work. This money should have been spent exclusively on robotic probes. There is no compelling case here for manned exploration.
I know, I know, the "get off this rock" crowd will now inundate us with their magical-religious space adventure cult emotional arguments.
Jesus H. Christ! How many times do I have to tell you! It's clean, not dirty! It's the cleanest of them all! Cleaner than coal! Cleaner than gas! Cleaner than oil! Cleaner than those stupid degenerate bisexual latte-drinking atheistic hippie socialist wind generators! Get it through your god-damned head already!
I did not provide a definition of religion.
I think none of these additional arguments hold water either. You go on vacation and derive satisfaction. You do not derive satisfaction from knowing that a chosen few at NASA go on vacation. Unmanned probes are just as valuable and fulfilling in practice as the knowledge that some NASA employee is doing the work (at far greater expense). I can't emphasize enough that manned space flight inhibits space exploration and man's innate desire to explore. It is a wasteful money sink that prevents wider, grander exploration.
Are manned space missions practical? No. Neither are movies, or operas, or vacations, or nice cars, or getting your wife flowers,
I assume you are an engineer whose sense of practicality is very different from that of the broad population. These things are eminently practical, fulfilling, and consequential aspects of life. Entertainment is a valued activity, as is keeping your spouse happy and nurturing your relationship. Art is not some wispy undefinable abstraction, the arts are ingrained in our everyday life. I don't just mean academic fine arts, I mean all of the arts. They are pervasive. They make and cost people money. They have very practical commercial consequences, and no doubt your dwelling expresses your own sense of aesthetics. Your questions "Would we want to live completely practically? I wouldn't. How about you?" are null. They are based on false premises.
Finally, the "get off this rock" issue is the worst of them all. That will never happen, certainly not within the next millenium, and I would conjecture that it will never ever happen. The cost of moving more than a trivial number of people to some desolate, unsustainable off-planet outpost will never be overcome. I challenge you to calculate what it would cost to move 10 million people (about 0.15% of the current world population) to some off-planet location to save them from cataclysm, and support them for 100 years. It is a ridiculous concept. Forget about moving and sustaining a significant fraction of the population. If you propose a small seed colony to save humanity, we return to your initial analogy. I don't give a rat's ass if a tiny number of people survive for a few years more than the rest of us in a cataclysm. It is a meaningless false hope.
What drives manned space exploration in real life? Certainly not any of the reasons you propose. Political hucksters and other corrupt individuals and organizations would have you think so, but they are lying. The driving force is money, the transfer of taxpayer dollars to the well-connected, well-lobbied defense industry. Manned projects are vastly larger and more profitable than unmanned projects. It is that simple. The rest is deceitful sci fi space adventure magical-religious claptrap for the gullible masses.
I'm not arguing that robots are better than humans, just that the missions can be made far cheaper, more ambitious, and wider in scope than with manned exploration.
To argue that humans' greater versatility justifies the colossal additional expense is like saying that going on a road trip with a full blown hospital emergency room team plus mobile surgical unit is much more versatile than a $50 first aid kit. You would be correct, of course, but so what? It is not a reasonable option.
No, not confused or incoherent, goalposts not moved. I stand behind all of my statements. I don't really get your drift, though. Seems gratuitously hostile and without any specific point.
Re-read your post and note that your arguments' links to manned exploration are tenuous at best. I am all in favor of robust unmanned space exploration. Most or all of the benefits, exploration, inspiration, etc. mentioned by people in this thread can come from it with no particular need for manned space exploration.
I was being charitable and granting that through the Apollo program, there was some justification for manned space flight, mainly because computers were so pathetic back then. That circumstance is no longer true.
Except that historically no useful science has been done by manned space exploration. All of the great achievements, all of the knowledge we have of our solar system and the cosmos, all of it has come from unmanned space exploration. See my other posts in this vein.
I don't know if you are doing it deliberately, but your arguments disappear in the absence of humans. No humans => no advantage whatsoever to shape robotic equipment like humans. It becomes a costly, wasteful constraint. I do not favor sending non-humanoid robots to help humans in space, I favor discontinuing manned space exploration in its entirety.
There is no compelling reason to support manned space exploration. Anything that can be done in space by a person can be done at far lower expense, with far greater scope, ambition and achievement, and over a much longer period of time with robotic equipment. Manned space missions drastically hinder the exploration of space by sucking up enormous resources to provide a habitable environment and enormous human-safe ferrying vehicles. The International Space Station (ISS) is of no compelling use whatsoever, it is a hugely expensive low earth orbit ferris wheel, a glorified amusement park ride for a privileged few. Unmanned equipment can do anything to be done on the ISS better, more cheaply, and for a much longer time.
Manned space exploration is a gimmick whose sole use is the transfer of taxpayer dollars to corrupt defense industrialists, nothing more. It is sold to a hapless, gullible public by equally corrupt politicians and ex-astronauts. It is nothing but childish dreaming by sci fi space adventure magical religious cultists.
No, it doesn't. You will always need to design some amount of mission-specific equipment. In any case, most industrial robotic design today relies on generalizable platforms with diverse plug-in modules. This is a non-issue.
There is not, however, "an entire technology base" in space geared around the humanoid form. The vast majority of compelling space exploration and scientific achievements in space have been done with unmanned equipment that did not waste resources on achieving humanoid form factors or work-alikes. There is no compelling role for manned space exploration in the foreseeable future.
If you're advocating that we abandon manned spaceflight, I have to disagree. Unmanned missions are valuable, but I still think we need people in space.
Given that manned space exploration is colossally more expensive than unmanned, the burden is on you to justify why it should be done at all, and why the far cheaper and far more ambitious unmanned alternatives need to be displaced for it. The budget is finite, and cannot accommodate everything.
Why humanoid? Is NASA now just one more bullshit agency providing Roman Circus to the plebes? What is the point of making it humanoid instead of cheap, efficient, and optimized for the expected tasks and missions? This is just another ploy to funnel money to corrupt aerospace contractors. Why not do space exploration with intelligently designed unmanned projects instead of this crap?
The sci fi space adventure magical-religious cult is blind to the true driving force of manned space exploration: political corruption to channel vast wealth to the defense industry, even at the cost of incurring more debt. Let's not even get to the practical impossibility of moving more than a trivial number of people to an enormously expensive outpost in some desolate, unsustainable location. They just shut their eyes and pretend it will be just like on Battlestar Galactica or Star Wars.
The main point of space is that we get off this rock of incredibly limited resources and land to get to another planet to live on/harvest. All that other stuff is just ways to get to that point.
This is just magical-religious sci fi space adventure cultism. It will never happen. You will never get more than a trivial number of people "off this rock," and even then only at tremendous and unjustifiable expense.
What job could that be? Professional Anti-Manned-Space-Exploration Activist? Doesn't sound lucrative (or especially interesting).