Not only was he speaking of mars, but he appears to have inadvertently debunked the notion of a self sustaining Mars colony. i.e it would take a population of 1 million for Mars to be self sustaining.
None of which implies there are a million people who want to go to Mars - let alone the moon, let alone the million people per persons sent who are needed to fund the mission (and thus support it).
This is the basic problem. Enthusiasts think "I want to go" and think that this translates to broad popular support. It doesn't. Nobody (except maybe the richest of the rich) can afford to fund their own expedition. These means that other potential astronauts need to rely on a support base to fund them. But where is this support base? Let's say you want to send 5 people. Round it off to 5 Billion. This means your mission needs to find 5 million people prepared to donate $1000 to send someone else to the moon.
The pretext of this article seems to put the cart in front of the horse. A module to support human life on the Moon is a solution to a problem that doesn't exist. We don't need such a module, because we don't need, or even want humans to go back to the Moon. Yes, there might be a few people who dream about it, much as there are people with dreams of re-energising the horse and buggy market, or travelling by steam train.
Nostalgia is fun, but frankly I think this moon travel nostalgia is a bit misdirected.
If you love the Apollo missions so much, just recreate the whole thing including the Saturn V rocket, LIM and command module with dodgy toilet and analog computers. Don't try for re-enactments with new hardware, that doesn't make sense on any level. Like a horse and buggy, but with the horse replaced by an atv you drive via two sets of reins. A bit ridiculous.
Obama had nothing to do with his own prize -- it was a slap in the face to Bush.
Not so much Bush himself but the power behind him, the minds in charge (Rumsfeld/Cheney etc.) and the mindset that, given the chance, allowed that regime with it's power structures and it's outlook to continue in power.
Obama should have refused it because participating in such a political action by foreigners by playing their puppet in a play is beneath the Presidency.
What Obama should have done was hang them. Behead them and place their severed heads on sticks in the public square. Not literally of course, but symbolically - perhaps through a process similar to South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation commission. That is the way the world saw the NeoCons - as evil as apartheid. Something to be confronted, discussed openly and honestly, dismantled completely, and then, and only then, left behind. And perhaps we viewed Obama as a form of apology, an acknowledgement of the wrongs done by the US, of failures of standard and behaviour.
So in a sense, the Nobel Peace Prize was an attempt at something of a detente, a chance to go back to the way things were. A lot of Iraqis died, and some explanation is/was owed as to why, and how such disasters will be avoided in the future. And a form of apology is/was owed. We were right, Bush and his supporters were wrong. Bad behaviour should be followed by an apology, even at the national level.
Instead what we got was a type of Bush-lite. No acknowledgement of the harm done. A change in language, but no obvious behavioural change. No strategy to prevent another disaster of bush/rumsfeld/cheney sized proportions. So you are right: if the Obama we see is the Obama that he intended to be in office, he should never have accepted it.
Protip 1 - coal is not the only CO2 generating fuel.
Protip 2 - your argument has nothing to do with a future point where converting to CO2 neutral technologies stops being necessary.
I'm not making an argument. I'm waiting to be convinced by yours. If your reasoning is so bad that you can only allude to it in passing and are afraid to provide any explicit detail, then this speaks volumes to me.
Tell us again why we would waste our time burning coal in the first place.
How can I tell this to you "again", when I didn't tell this even once?
Here is what you said: the RoI on warming prevention is horrible, compared with other things to spend money on. . As you would be aware (you are, after all "te pro" ), failure to mitigate climate change ("warming prevention") will wipe an estimated 20% off global GDP (Stern et al.). Mitigating climate change costs around 3-4% global GDP (Stern et al.). Conventional wisdom says: Hmm that mitigation makes sense, economically. You could hardly disagree - except you seem to.
Clearly then, when you refer to our ROI, you don't mean monetary investment. This means you must have some other reason to not invest monetarily in preventing climate change, some reason so important it's worth destroying the world economy for.
I never said about digging coal out of the ground. Try again.
It has to be said that your plan lacks a certain level of detail. The detail that seperates this plan from childish fantasy.
Worrying about carbon will not be necessary, contrary to your statement. BTW the plant to make*C* from co2 that i mentioned, could generate the energy dense fuel currently petroleum products give us, but that is not necessary for your earlier statement to be wrong.
You would of course be aware that such a plant will require the same amount of energy to reconstruct those organic molecules as was released when we oxidised them (in an engine, or coal burning power plant)? That the production of fuel actually obeys the laws of thermodynamics?
Presumably, you mean to power your 'fuel regeneration' plant with something. Lets call that generation technology (for the sake of argument) 'S'. So, for x number of years we burn coal to release energy Y. Then, we create a plant which reconstructs the organic molecules through a process which MUST use an amount of energy Z where Z > Y. Laws of thermodynamics. So, we've expended Z. OR we could NOT burn the coal and generate Y directly using technology 'S'.
Tell us again why we would waste our time burning coal in the first place.
What was called magic earlier has happened later. Many times.
Essentially your argument is that sometime in the future it will be cheaper to dig coal out of the ground, burn it for electricity and emit the Carbon Dioxide and simultaneously build a larger, non-emitting power station to suck the atmosphere through a filter, capture the CO2 and break the molecular bond to form C and O2. This, in your mind, will be cheaper than just using the electricity from the second plant directly for our needs.
There is nothing fundamentally infeasible about it either - flying of metal boxes was considered fundamentally infeasible yet it happened.
So is Santa Claus, and unicorns. Flying metal boxes don't actually defy the laws of physics. Santa Claus does. So does breaking the C->O2 bond without energy input.
See the difference?
His personal discovery is of less historical significance as he is not the first member of a historically relavent empire to discover it. But there are several correct usages of 'discover' that don't require no one have knowledge of the thing being discovered.
Ah. So what you are saying is: for a while we thought that the Spanish empire was more "relevant" than the nations that discovered America before the Spanish empire. Hence, Columbus' "discovery" was "relevant" whereas previous discoveries were not. Later we realised that was pretty stupid, because we don't owe any allegiance to some long gone empire and do not tug on our forelocks at the approach of the spaniards anymore. So, as part of that realisation, we also realised that previous discoveries were as relevant to us as the spanish one.
This adage only applied for the brief period where things were written down and later read by others, but the process of writing things down and making things known to others could be centrally controlled. That time is over.
History is no longer written by the "winner".
We no longer accept a version of history that sees WWI as aggression by the animalistic Hun. Nor do we accept a version of history that says "Europeans ROOL!" instead that version is just thought of as a European perspective and one among many perspectives. Written and aural history is no longer thought of as principally a tool to maintain the pre-existing hegemony.
Hence, we no longer regard Columbus as the discoverer of the American continents. This is just american mythology to maintain a hegemony that we (particularly us non-americans) are not interested in. The people who discovered it before Columbus discovered it.
One should hope not - there aren't even any models yet that can predict basic temperature trends on any sort of fine scale.
Which is like saying "there aren't any popsicle skyscrapers". We don't actually need popsicle skyscrapers, nor necessarily models which are operating at a finer scale than the ones we have.
Not that I'm complaining - aside from pushing for clean power, which will be cost effective anyway with the right technologies (sans government prohibitions) - other than protecting the real estate investments of the wealthy, the RoI on warming prevention is horrible,
Well, no. You need to run the numbers on that one again. For one thing there is no point at which converting to CO2 neutral technologies stops being necessary. The earth could warm 5 degrees, an we would still need to convert from the old technologies for exactly the same reason - to prevent further warming. So the choices are; (A) convert now, minimise the amount of warming and hence the economic damage associated with climate change (Stern et al). Or (B) convert later, for exactly the same cost, and don't minimise the amount of warming and thus bear the enormous economic damages associated with climate change. A B, for reasons that should be obvious.
So to explain more fully. I looked at the article and didn't see a mention of any atmospheric model. Which is not a surprise because atmospheric models haven't been used for prediction for years - if ever. GCM models certainly take into account ocean heat absorption and indeed the 90% is the current estimate - oceans are expected to absorb 90% of the warming. The article suggests this estimate is low ( and hence the estimate of s sensitivity is low ) but it could not be an order if magnitude out (as you imply) because there is only a 10% margin.
If tomorrow an astronomer miraculously found an exoplanet that was also provably home to intelligent life, would you say that he didn't discover it because there was already intelligent life there? No?
Yes. Particularly if I was one of those aliens
What if a somewhat uneducated man sailed a yacht around the world from africa and stumbled upon 21st century America? Would it be valid to say that he 'discovered' it, because it was new to him? Why not?
She's a cunt because she expects the men to come to her.
Well, she doesn't need you, you loser.
She instead try being an equal where she makes first contact at the same rate that men contact her.
Or, if lonely men want women to continue to use dating sites, they can stop acting as if equality means women should emulate the desperate, creepy behaviours of males without social skills and low self image, and start making online sites a place for mutual satisfaction. Get it? NOTHING you do will make women subservient to your desires. Get over it.
I didn't "find it wasn't". The bottom line on Apollo is that it was a national prestige projection which had scientific research as a lower priority.
That's right. We went into it with little expectation that it would produce a large body of useful science, and that is essentially what happened. Apollo pales in comparison to say Voyager, or Cassini when it comes to the volume of scientific finding per dollar spent. And that is without reference to what can be achieved these days - Rosetta, for instance, will likely produce science of as much or more import than Apollo, for a tiny fraction of the cost. And talk about ballsy! Landing on a comet!
Despite that and various other constraints, such as the short time actually spent on the Moon, they did enough research to shut down all unmanned surface exploration by the entire world for forty years.
Except for, you know, all the exploration that followed: much of it far more informative/more interesting than Apollo.
Humanity only needs food and shelter because it wants to survive. In the same way humanity only needs to colonize space because it wants to survive a global catastrophe such as a major asteroid impact. Geological history is littered with major extinction events. We have not had one for 65 million years and some, like the permian mass extinction, wiped out 96% of all known marine species and 70% of all land species. It even caused a mass extinction of insects.
Please identify the impact in question, - the impact that, had it occurred today, would wipe out humanity.
So technically you are correct, we don't need to colonize space in the same way that we do not need to live...it's just something we generally tend to want and, as a result of evolution, most of us want it pretty strongly.
You don't speak for the rest of us. Please provide a poll indicating the crux of your assertion i.e. that the majority of people consider an asteroid strike as the most serious problem facing humanity.
Yes. Which is to say, the arguments for electric light won us over when we saw it in action, and electric lighting inevitably replaced the technology that preceded it. Just as robotic exploration has now replaced the technology that preceded it (human based exploration).
You are conflating vastly different meanings of "as a species". The species didn't invent the lightbulb, and the species didn't adopt the light bulb. Most of humanity didn't even have a thing to do with the creation of the societies that made invention of the light bulb possible.
It was your illustration.
And your "inevitable" replacement of previous technologies by the light bulb took generations. It was in high volume use long before the majority of humanity ever used one.
Thanks for concisely explaining why some people continue to claim that flesh based space exploration is a viable technology.
Currently, even putting things into Earth orbit take considerable economic effort. That will change just as it has for the past few centuries. Eventually, it'll drop to the point where a group with sufficient economic resources to make it happen will do so.
Sure. In a thousand years people may travel to Mars on pleasure cruises. Not exactly relevant to the present case. Hardly think we should be waiting around for that to happen - especially noting that advances in space travel will also apply just as much to unmanned space travel.
The discoveries (as far as it goes) weren't enough to justify the cost. The purpose of Apollo was to beat the Ruskies to the moon. Rumour has it that Kennedy was presented with a proposal to send a probe to Mars, he rejected it in favour of a manned mission to the moon. Thought it was more showy. Upshot is, any science that happened was merely incidental, and none of it in this century requires or recommends itself to having a human physically present on the moon. Want to place a mirror on the moon? Send a probe. Need a moon rock sample? Land a probe, get a sample, blast off back to earth.
All of which is completely irrelevant to both the capabilities of manned space flight and the capabilities of future groups of people to engage in manned space flight.
Again, you claimed Apollo as an example of the superiority of flesh based exploration. When you find it it wasn't, you claim the example is irrelevant. I find your constant refuting of your own arguments a bit bizarre.
The "incidental science", for example, happened and we can use that as an example of human endeavors in that sort of environment no matter the motives of the time.
Unmanned missions are just as much human endeavour as flesh based space travel. The difference in location of one or two humans (out of billions) could hardly be considered a measure of the significance of an endeavour.
As the questions at the end of your post, they are remarkable only for their lack of ambition. For example, you could have asked instead "Want to establish a colony on the Moon?" which is a bit more involved than just picking up a few more rocks from the Moon. Well, you'll need people for that.
I hardly see a reason to make up fake reasons to justify sending flesh to space. If you have some other motivation (other than your stated position that despite the evidence, somehow humans are more capable in the vacuum and cold of space than robots) then for sure, state that reason and tell us why we should consider it compelling.
Actually now that I think about it, I'm not sure that IS true. We had every intent to send humans in 1975. There were plans in 1975. There were plans pre-dating the Apollo mission. So how, exactly have these plans advanced?
Plans to send humans to Mars have not advanced for 30 years. We are no closer than we were in 1975. The reason, when it comes down to it, is that as a species, we are not convinced by the case put forward that we ought to do it. It's not inevitable that we are going to go there. Quite the opposite. Nevertheless I'm not couching your arguments as an attempt to convert me to your cause. There's no burden of proof here.
Were we convinced as a species to develop the light bulb?
Yes. Which is to say, the arguments for electric light won us over when we saw it in action, and electric lighting inevitably replaced the technology that preceded it. Just as robotic exploration has now replaced the technology that preceded it (human based exploration).
The cost of space travel is declining while manufacture continues to improve. Eventually, it'll get to the point where a "species" doesn't need to make the decision in order for manned space travel to Mars to happen.
Sure. In a thousand years people may travel to Mars on pleasure cruises. Not exactly relevant to the present case. Hardly think we should be waiting around for that to happen - especially noting that advances in space travel will also apply just as much to unmanned space travel.
I find it disingenuous to equate human-level exploration with no exploration at all.
But that is a strawman. You disappoint me.
It's your straw man. Be "disappointed" at someone else.
Well, feel free to cite where I implied that human based exploring is not exploration. Hume was an explorer. Cook was an explorer. And just because we have never done any actual exploring in space (and most likely never will, given the undeniable advantages of exploring via unmanned probes) doesn't mean it *couldn't* be done.
When we actually look at a real life manned exploration of another body, we see far more exploration of the Moon over a three year period (with only about 2 man-weeks total of ground time between the dozen astronauts who landed on the Moon) than the world has managed with space probes on Mars over the past 40 years.
Sorry, what are you talking about?
My view is that after a Robert Zubrin style mission (four people to Mars for two years and return), we'll get so much scientific data and hard samples, that it'll obsolete most unmanned surface exploration of Mars for decades, like it did for the US and lunar surface exploration following Apollo.
Apollo was cancelled.
The discoveries (as far as it goes) weren't enough to justify the cost. The purpose of Apollo was to beat the Ruskies to the moon. Rumour has it that Kennedy was presented with a proposal to send a probe to Mars, he rejected it in favour of a manned mission to the moon. Thought it was more showy. Upshot is, any science that happened was merely incidental, and none of it in this century requires or recommends itself to having a human physically present on the moon. Want to place a mirror on the moon? Send a probe. Need a moon rock sample? Land a probe, get a sample, blast off back to earth.
You just made up the part about machine autonomy regressing.
No
What are you talking about?
The last time anybody (outside of the fervid believers on slashdot) suggested that humans were as capable as interplanetary probes at exploring was ten years ago. Those comments were based on technology from 5 years before that. That's what I mean.
Do you seriously contest that, absent the obvious enormous transportation and maintenance costs, humans today are still better than robots at a bunch of these things? That's the point he's making -- the difference is in those massive costs.
Given an amount of money X to be spent on interplanetary exploration, this money will deliver capability Y if spent on robots and Y' on humans. Y > Y'.
If this were not the case then someone, somewhere would be able to describe what it is that humans pn Mars could do that couldn't be done by a robot on Mars, where that thing is something scientific.
Humans aren't unpredictable. Semi-autonomy is not an ideal, usually, it is a compromise.
Incorrect. Astronauts are semi-autonomous. They cannot do whatever they want, the cost of sending people into space to just mess about isn't actually justified. They follow mission parameters, go where they are told, do what they are told to do. Just as a robot does.
And humans are unpredictable. Particularly in situations of high stress and isolation. Not the kind of parameters you want to rely on for an investment worth billions where you can't fire the person in question.
I would say that's less fundamental, in that he was attempting to demonstrate that continued unmanned voyages were the most effective way to improve the cost/benefit of manned missions vs robot missions.
But anyway in this instance the why was clear: because (and you may continue to argue the premise, but you cannot ignore that it is the premise) humans were better than robots at at least some things.
Yes. But not the things necessary for exploring Mars.
Slashdot Mirror
This is the basic problem. Enthusiasts think "I want to go" and think that this translates to broad popular support. It doesn't. Nobody (except maybe the richest of the rich) can afford to fund their own expedition. These means that other potential astronauts need to rely on a support base to fund them. But where is this support base? Let's say you want to send 5 people. Round it off to 5 Billion. This means your mission needs to find 5 million people prepared to donate $1000 to send someone else to the moon.
Where are these people?
If we don't need humans for that (enormously complex) undertaking we don't need to send humans to the moon for the sake of taking core samples.
Um, how many humans can survive on the moon, currently?
Well, numerically speaking about the same number as the number of macaques, or elephants, or quolls.
Should we send a macaque, or bunch of macaques instead? Is there a reason to send humans that doesn't apply equally to quolls, echidnas, or rosellas?
Maybe putting the Hab on the moon would show something significant, like ones next breath?
I think we have a pretty good grasp on how the human physiology would react in a vacuum. No need to send humans to the moon to find out,.
Nostalgia is fun, but frankly I think this moon travel nostalgia is a bit misdirected.
If you love the Apollo missions so much, just recreate the whole thing including the Saturn V rocket, LIM and command module with dodgy toilet and analog computers. Don't try for re-enactments with new hardware, that doesn't make sense on any level. Like a horse and buggy, but with the horse replaced by an atv you drive via two sets of reins. A bit ridiculous.
Obama had nothing to do with his own prize -- it was a slap in the face to Bush.
Not so much Bush himself but the power behind him, the minds in charge (Rumsfeld/Cheney etc.) and the mindset that, given the chance, allowed that regime with it's power structures and it's outlook to continue in power.
Obama should have refused it because participating in such a political action by foreigners by playing their puppet in a play is beneath the Presidency.
What Obama should have done was hang them. Behead them and place their severed heads on sticks in the public square. Not literally of course, but symbolically - perhaps through a process similar to South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation commission. That is the way the world saw the NeoCons - as evil as apartheid. Something to be confronted, discussed openly and honestly, dismantled completely, and then, and only then, left behind. And perhaps we viewed Obama as a form of apology, an acknowledgement of the wrongs done by the US, of failures of standard and behaviour.
So in a sense, the Nobel Peace Prize was an attempt at something of a detente, a chance to go back to the way things were. A lot of Iraqis died, and some explanation is/was owed as to why, and how such disasters will be avoided in the future. And a form of apology is/was owed. We were right, Bush and his supporters were wrong. Bad behaviour should be followed by an apology, even at the national level.
Instead what we got was a type of Bush-lite. No acknowledgement of the harm done. A change in language, but no obvious behavioural change. No strategy to prevent another disaster of bush/rumsfeld/cheney sized proportions. So you are right: if the Obama we see is the Obama that he intended to be in office, he should never have accepted it.
Protip 1 - coal is not the only CO2 generating fuel.
Protip 2 - your argument has nothing to do with a future point where converting to CO2 neutral technologies stops being necessary.
I'm not making an argument. I'm waiting to be convinced by yours. If your reasoning is so bad that you can only allude to it in passing and are afraid to provide any explicit detail, then this speaks volumes to me.
Tell us again why we would waste our time burning coal in the first place.
How can I tell this to you "again", when I didn't tell this even once?
Here is what you said: the RoI on warming prevention is horrible, compared with other things to spend money on. . As you would be aware (you are, after all "te pro" ), failure to mitigate climate change ("warming prevention") will wipe an estimated 20% off global GDP (Stern et al.). Mitigating climate change costs around 3-4% global GDP (Stern et al.). Conventional wisdom says: Hmm that mitigation makes sense, economically. You could hardly disagree - except you seem to.
Clearly then, when you refer to our ROI, you don't mean monetary investment. This means you must have some other reason to not invest monetarily in preventing climate change, some reason so important it's worth destroying the world economy for.
I never said about digging coal out of the ground. Try again.
It has to be said that your plan lacks a certain level of detail. The detail that seperates this plan from childish fantasy.
Worrying about carbon will not be necessary, contrary to your statement. BTW the plant to make*C* from co2 that i mentioned, could generate the energy dense fuel currently petroleum products give us, but that is not necessary for your earlier statement to be wrong.
You would of course be aware that such a plant will require the same amount of energy to reconstruct those organic molecules as was released when we oxidised them (in an engine, or coal burning power plant)? That the production of fuel actually obeys the laws of thermodynamics?
Presumably, you mean to power your 'fuel regeneration' plant with something. Lets call that generation technology (for the sake of argument) 'S'. So, for x number of years we burn coal to release energy Y. Then, we create a plant which reconstructs the organic molecules through a process which MUST use an amount of energy Z where Z > Y. Laws of thermodynamics. So, we've expended Z. OR we could NOT burn the coal and generate Y directly using technology 'S'.
Tell us again why we would waste our time burning coal in the first place.
What was called magic earlier has happened later. Many times.
Essentially your argument is that sometime in the future it will be cheaper to dig coal out of the ground, burn it for electricity and emit the Carbon Dioxide and simultaneously build a larger, non-emitting power station to suck the atmosphere through a filter, capture the CO2 and break the molecular bond to form C and O2. This, in your mind, will be cheaper than just using the electricity from the second plant directly for our needs.
There is nothing fundamentally infeasible about it either - flying of metal boxes was considered fundamentally infeasible yet it happened.
So is Santa Claus, and unicorns. Flying metal boxes don't actually defy the laws of physics. Santa Claus does. So does breaking the C->O2 bond without energy input. See the difference?
So in other words "when magic happens". Frankly I don't think we should count on wizard showing up any time soon.
His personal discovery is of less historical significance as he is not the first member of a historically relavent empire to discover it. But there are several correct usages of 'discover' that don't require no one have knowledge of the thing being discovered.
Ah. So what you are saying is: for a while we thought that the Spanish empire was more "relevant" than the nations that discovered America before the Spanish empire. Hence, Columbus' "discovery" was "relevant" whereas previous discoveries were not. Later we realised that was pretty stupid, because we don't owe any allegiance to some long gone empire and do not tug on our forelocks at the approach of the spaniards anymore. So, as part of that realisation, we also realised that previous discoveries were as relevant to us as the spanish one.
Is that what you are saying?
"History is written by the winners."
This adage only applied for the brief period where things were written down and later read by others, but the process of writing things down and making things known to others could be centrally controlled. That time is over.
History is no longer written by the "winner".
We no longer accept a version of history that sees WWI as aggression by the animalistic Hun. Nor do we accept a version of history that says "Europeans ROOL!" instead that version is just thought of as a European perspective and one among many perspectives. Written and aural history is no longer thought of as principally a tool to maintain the pre-existing hegemony. Hence, we no longer regard Columbus as the discoverer of the American continents. This is just american mythology to maintain a hegemony that we (particularly us non-americans) are not interested in. The people who discovered it before Columbus discovered it.
One should hope not - there aren't even any models yet that can predict basic temperature trends on any sort of fine scale.
Which is like saying "there aren't any popsicle skyscrapers". We don't actually need popsicle skyscrapers, nor necessarily models which are operating at a finer scale than the ones we have.
Not that I'm complaining - aside from pushing for clean power, which will be cost effective anyway with the right technologies (sans government prohibitions) - other than protecting the real estate investments of the wealthy, the RoI on warming prevention is horrible,
Well, no. You need to run the numbers on that one again. For one thing there is no point at which converting to CO2 neutral technologies stops being necessary. The earth could warm 5 degrees, an we would still need to convert from the old technologies for exactly the same reason - to prevent further warming. So the choices are; (A) convert now, minimise the amount of warming and hence the economic damage associated with climate change (Stern et al). Or (B) convert later, for exactly the same cost, and don't minimise the amount of warming and thus bear the enormous economic damages associated with climate change. A B, for reasons that should be obvious.
So to explain more fully. I looked at the article and didn't see a mention of any atmospheric model. Which is not a surprise because atmospheric models haven't been used for prediction for years - if ever. GCM models certainly take into account ocean heat absorption and indeed the 90% is the current estimate - oceans are expected to absorb 90% of the warming. The article suggests this estimate is low ( and hence the estimate of s sensitivity is low ) but it could not be an order if magnitude out (as you imply) because there is only a 10% margin.
By europeans. Not by the rest of us.
If tomorrow an astronomer miraculously found an exoplanet that was also provably home to intelligent life, would you say that he didn't discover it because there was already intelligent life there? No?
Yes. Particularly if I was one of those aliens
What if a somewhat uneducated man sailed a yacht around the world from africa and stumbled upon 21st century America? Would it be valid to say that he 'discovered' it, because it was new to him? Why not?
Hardly a problem for me. I don't even own a checkbook. It's not the 1950s anymore
There's your problem. You think women are on the site to meet YOU. They aren't. They are there to meet a man (not a creep).
She's a cunt because she expects the men to come to her.
Well, she doesn't need you, you loser.
She instead try being an equal where she makes first contact at the same rate that men contact her.
Or, if lonely men want women to continue to use dating sites, they can stop acting as if equality means women should emulate the desperate, creepy behaviours of males without social skills and low self image, and start making online sites a place for mutual satisfaction. Get it? NOTHING you do will make women subservient to your desires. Get over it.
I didn't "find it wasn't". The bottom line on Apollo is that it was a national prestige projection which had scientific research as a lower priority.
That's right. We went into it with little expectation that it would produce a large body of useful science, and that is essentially what happened. Apollo pales in comparison to say Voyager, or Cassini when it comes to the volume of scientific finding per dollar spent. And that is without reference to what can be achieved these days - Rosetta, for instance, will likely produce science of as much or more import than Apollo, for a tiny fraction of the cost. And talk about ballsy! Landing on a comet!
Despite that and various other constraints, such as the short time actually spent on the Moon, they did enough research to shut down all unmanned surface exploration by the entire world for forty years.
Except for, you know, all the exploration that followed: much of it far more informative/more interesting than Apollo.
Humanity only needs food and shelter because it wants to survive. In the same way humanity only needs to colonize space because it wants to survive a global catastrophe such as a major asteroid impact. Geological history is littered with major extinction events. We have not had one for 65 million years and some, like the permian mass extinction, wiped out 96% of all known marine species and 70% of all land species. It even caused a mass extinction of insects.
Please identify the impact in question, - the impact that, had it occurred today, would wipe out humanity.
So technically you are correct, we don't need to colonize space in the same way that we do not need to live...it's just something we generally tend to want and, as a result of evolution, most of us want it pretty strongly.
You don't speak for the rest of us. Please provide a poll indicating the crux of your assertion i.e. that the majority of people consider an asteroid strike as the most serious problem facing humanity.
Yes. Which is to say, the arguments for electric light won us over when we saw it in action, and electric lighting inevitably replaced the technology that preceded it. Just as robotic exploration has now replaced the technology that preceded it (human based exploration).
You are conflating vastly different meanings of "as a species". The species didn't invent the lightbulb, and the species didn't adopt the light bulb. Most of humanity didn't even have a thing to do with the creation of the societies that made invention of the light bulb possible.
It was your illustration.
And your "inevitable" replacement of previous technologies by the light bulb took generations. It was in high volume use long before the majority of humanity ever used one.
Thanks for concisely explaining why some people continue to claim that flesh based space exploration is a viable technology.
Currently, even putting things into Earth orbit take considerable economic effort. That will change just as it has for the past few centuries. Eventually, it'll drop to the point where a group with sufficient economic resources to make it happen will do so.
Sure. In a thousand years people may travel to Mars on pleasure cruises. Not exactly relevant to the present case. Hardly think we should be waiting around for that to happen - especially noting that advances in space travel will also apply just as much to unmanned space travel.
The discoveries (as far as it goes) weren't enough to justify the cost. The purpose of Apollo was to beat the Ruskies to the moon. Rumour has it that Kennedy was presented with a proposal to send a probe to Mars, he rejected it in favour of a manned mission to the moon. Thought it was more showy. Upshot is, any science that happened was merely incidental, and none of it in this century requires or recommends itself to having a human physically present on the moon. Want to place a mirror on the moon? Send a probe. Need a moon rock sample? Land a probe, get a sample, blast off back to earth.
All of which is completely irrelevant to both the capabilities of manned space flight and the capabilities of future groups of people to engage in manned space flight.
Again, you claimed Apollo as an example of the superiority of flesh based exploration. When you find it it wasn't, you claim the example is irrelevant. I find your constant refuting of your own arguments a bit bizarre.
The "incidental science", for example, happened and we can use that as an example of human endeavors in that sort of environment no matter the motives of the time.
Unmanned missions are just as much human endeavour as flesh based space travel. The difference in location of one or two humans (out of billions) could hardly be considered a measure of the significance of an endeavour.
As the questions at the end of your post, they are remarkable only for their lack of ambition. For example, you could have asked instead "Want to establish a colony on the Moon?" which is a bit more involved than just picking up a few more rocks from the Moon. Well, you'll need people for that.
I hardly see a reason to make up fake reasons to justify sending flesh to space. If you have some other motivation (other than your stated position that despite the evidence, somehow humans are more capable in the vacuum and cold of space than robots) then for sure, state that reason and tell us why we should consider it compelling.
Actually now that I think about it, I'm not sure that IS true. We had every intent to send humans in 1975. There were plans in 1975. There were plans pre-dating the Apollo mission. So how, exactly have these plans advanced?
Very true.
Plans to send humans to Mars have not advanced for 30 years. We are no closer than we were in 1975. The reason, when it comes down to it, is that as a species, we are not convinced by the case put forward that we ought to do it. It's not inevitable that we are going to go there. Quite the opposite. Nevertheless I'm not couching your arguments as an attempt to convert me to your cause. There's no burden of proof here.
Were we convinced as a species to develop the light bulb?
Yes. Which is to say, the arguments for electric light won us over when we saw it in action, and electric lighting inevitably replaced the technology that preceded it. Just as robotic exploration has now replaced the technology that preceded it (human based exploration).
The cost of space travel is declining while manufacture continues to improve. Eventually, it'll get to the point where a "species" doesn't need to make the decision in order for manned space travel to Mars to happen.
Sure. In a thousand years people may travel to Mars on pleasure cruises. Not exactly relevant to the present case. Hardly think we should be waiting around for that to happen - especially noting that advances in space travel will also apply just as much to unmanned space travel.
I find it disingenuous to equate human-level exploration with no exploration at all.
But that is a strawman. You disappoint me.
It's your straw man. Be "disappointed" at someone else.
Well, feel free to cite where I implied that human based exploring is not exploration. Hume was an explorer. Cook was an explorer. And just because we have never done any actual exploring in space (and most likely never will, given the undeniable advantages of exploring via unmanned probes) doesn't mean it *couldn't* be done.
When we actually look at a real life manned exploration of another body, we see far more exploration of the Moon over a three year period (with only about 2 man-weeks total of ground time between the dozen astronauts who landed on the Moon) than the world has managed with space probes on Mars over the past 40 years.
Sorry, what are you talking about?
My view is that after a Robert Zubrin style mission (four people to Mars for two years and return), we'll get so much scientific data and hard samples, that it'll obsolete most unmanned surface exploration of Mars for decades, like it did for the US and lunar surface exploration following Apollo.
Apollo was cancelled.
The discoveries (as far as it goes) weren't enough to justify the cost. The purpose of Apollo was to beat the Ruskies to the moon. Rumour has it that Kennedy was presented with a proposal to send a probe to Mars, he rejected it in favour of a manned mission to the moon. Thought it was more showy. Upshot is, any science that happened was merely incidental, and none of it in this century requires or recommends itself to having a human physically present on the moon. Want to place a mirror on the moon? Send a probe. Need a moon rock sample? Land a probe, get a sample, blast off back to earth.
You just made up the part about machine autonomy regressing.
No
What are you talking about?
The last time anybody (outside of the fervid believers on slashdot) suggested that humans were as capable as interplanetary probes at exploring was ten years ago. Those comments were based on technology from 5 years before that. That's what I mean.
Do you seriously contest that, absent the obvious enormous transportation and maintenance costs, humans today are still better than robots at a bunch of these things? That's the point he's making -- the difference is in those massive costs.
Given an amount of money X to be spent on interplanetary exploration, this money will deliver capability Y if spent on robots and Y' on humans. Y > Y'.
If this were not the case then someone, somewhere would be able to describe what it is that humans pn Mars could do that couldn't be done by a robot on Mars, where that thing is something scientific.
Humans aren't unpredictable. Semi-autonomy is not an ideal, usually, it is a compromise.
Incorrect. Astronauts are semi-autonomous. They cannot do whatever they want, the cost of sending people into space to just mess about isn't actually justified. They follow mission parameters, go where they are told, do what they are told to do. Just as a robot does. And humans are unpredictable. Particularly in situations of high stress and isolation. Not the kind of parameters you want to rely on for an investment worth billions where you can't fire the person in question.
I would say that's less fundamental, in that he was attempting to demonstrate that continued unmanned voyages were the most effective way to improve the cost/benefit of manned missions vs robot missions.
But anyway in this instance the why was clear: because (and you may continue to argue the premise, but you cannot ignore that it is the premise) humans were better than robots at at least some things.
Yes. But not the things necessary for exploring Mars.