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Why We Need to Expand into Space
Zilla360
21st Century. |She/Her|Trans* Woman In Aviators Firing A Bazooka. ⚛️Registered User regular
21st Century. |She/Her|Trans* Woman In Aviators Firing A Bazooka. ⚛️Registered User regular
http://www.cosmosmagazine.com/node/1477
Despite all the problems we have, should getting off this pale blue dot be the primary goal for humans as a species?
To decide whether it makes sense to spend resources on manned space travel, you should look at why mankind has explored and colonized new lands in the past.
Natural resources - Early man followed the food. There were edible plants and animals outside of Africa, so if you were hungry where you were born it made sense to go elsewhere for food. Civilized man sought spices, minerals, and lumber. It was lucrative to send out a ship and bring those back. Do the same economics apply to manned space travel?
Religious freedom - America was settled in part by people seeking freedom from religious or economic oppression in the Old World. Do you expect space colonies to escape from the burdens of Earthbound society?
Reduction of overpopulation - Colonization of America didn't do much to decrease the population of Europe. The number of emigrants was small compared to the existing population. For space travel, the number would be miniscule. You'd need to launch a thousand spaceships a day with a thousand passengers each to actually decrease the population of Earth. If overpopulation exists and a fertile underpopulated land is available then it's a good deal for those who make the journey. But it won't help those who stay behind, and we have found no hospitable planets outside our own.
Exploration - Curiosity and pursuit of knowledge are worthwhile reasons for exploration. Men went to the North Pole and the Moon because that was the only way to learn about them. With modern technology we could send a thousand robotic probes across the solar system for the cost of one manned trip to Mars.
Adventure - People still climb mountains just for the sense of adventure. You can build a rocket or buy a ticket on Spaceship One if that's worthwhile to you. But you shouldn't expect the government to fund your trip to the Moon any more than it would pay for your trip to Kilimanjaro.
Preservation of the species - If you're worried about a natural disaster, you could send a few dozen people to live in a deep mine or on the bottom of the ocean. They'll be just as safe as on the Moon or Mars. Plus they'll have protection from extreme temperatures and solar radiation. The journey would be a lot cheaper and less hazardous.
To maintain the spark of life - Life is interesting. It's a pity when some branch of Earth's diversity of life perishes. The universe would be a boring place without life (although there'd be nobody left to miss it). If we're the only life then that's good justification to spread it. But are we alone? Does other life exist? Is it common? Is it like us? Those are questions worth answering. Those are missions I'd be happy working for. Are those missions that would be helped or hindered by focusing on manned space travel?
Despite all the problems we have, should getting off this pale blue dot be the primary goal for humans as a species?
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And I guess maybe this helium-3 stuff is supposed to be there and is pretty cool, but I dunno.
I think it has to do with the fact we dont really need to go to space yet. We dont have an overpopulation problem, regardless of what the Chinese say. its going to be hundreds of years before we run out of natural resources, and even longer when the sun dies out and we have to move to a new solar system.
But just to show we can, we should set up a lunar colony. Id move in a heartbeat. :P
Its also worth pointing out that we (the US) haven't lost anyone in space. Its getting there and back that's a bitch.
Build a space elevator instead.
It would be awesome.
Do we have any sort of mass driver system powerful enough to launch a spacecraft yet? That seems to be the next big step. Railgun that shit into orbit.
Probably as much as any other group of people leaving for another region have. The US (for example) is far from perfect, but I feel that it has done a lot of things right, and improved on the governments of the Old World. I think that the people colonizing another planet could probably again improve upon this. It seems that its easier to improve by starting anew than fixing the old, unfortunately. True, but just like any other species, we grow as much as our resources allow, then if we grow too much, we die off till we reach an equilibrium.
I'd have to agree with this one. Until we find a convincing reason that humans need to be on a planet (say some valuable metal needs to be mined, and requires human monitoring) A space station that is manned is probably all we need (easier to launch space ships from) as far as human exploration goes. Propulsion systems and the like, can be tested without humans aboard. Cheaper and safer that way, with little loss of knowledge gained.
I pretty much agree.
Its probably much more efficient and beneficial to focus on not blowing ourselves up, than to live in space for this reason.
I think this, while cool to find E.T., is such a remote possibility that we can find intelligent life and be able to communicate with it, even assuming we can travel faster than light someday, is so, so remote, it shouldn't be factored into any calculations of what we do in space. (Ok, maybe just a little bit.)
Slightly off topic, but an interesting listen about space, exploration, and some interesting stories about space
radio lab show
Pretty much. If costs came down you'd see a massive expansion into space right quick. Especially if you could lift large-ish, pre-fab things that don't require space carpenters. It would be awesome if the ISS was actually meant to be a bigass shipyard for building future space stations and such without all the issues you get in a space suit.
Actually, what I really want is for someone to try smelting and other high temperature stuff in space, especially in a vacuum.
On the topic of why we should be out there: Evolution; humans have always been an edge species, living on the borders between two habitats and nicking the best bits from both. Unfortunately, we seem to have run out of useful edges lately and accordingly are beginning to stagnate. Space is the biggest edge anywhere and it borders on so many other interesting places too.
The Final Frontier as the old folks used to say.
Also, there's the psychology of the endeavour to consider; people need heroes. People behave in imitation of their heroes. For a few shining moments in the late sixties, our greatest heroes were men who had never killed anyone for sport, nor destroyed a man's livelihood out of spite, nor smoked enough crack to kill an elephant. Hell, I don't think more than two of them even lied on the application forms. And they were geeks by the end of it too. I for one would like the world to move away from seeing people like Paris Hilton as aspirational targets again.
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We could shoot off probes and other things fast and often.
Yeah, that's right, the space elevator would literally cost $Texas.
That is, unless we find away to make the things consistently and rapidly. And soon.
P.S. Some of those numbers may be exaggerations for dramatic effect. On the other hand, they could easily be underestimates.
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I'd hope so. I mean, Texas really isn't worth all that much...
I'll be fine, just give me a minute, a man's got a limit, I can't get a life if my heart's not in it.
Last I heard we (if taken outside of the US GDP) would have the 8th highest GDP in the world.
We also account for quite a large portion of the US armed forces. (over half but I'm not sure on the exact %)
My essential point still stands; it's not the specific material that's the problem, we have options upon options and none of them are as ridiculous as building a single molecule one hundred and eighty million feet long. The problem is a matter of supply and demand; there isn't nearly enough supply to cover the current demand and the guy that invents the nanotube enzyme will be a very rich man indeed of he can keep a hold of the patent...
Actually, since nanotubes are pure carbon-carbon fullerenes a space elevator built from them would have an additional side 'benefit' that no-one is really paying attention to; sucking up a hell of a lot of carbon that would otherwise have been burnt as fuel. Whether this will be an environmental disaster or not remains unknown...
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They'd rather spend a buncha'million on some ecohabitat out in the desert of idaho to see if 7 people can survive drinking urine and farming turnips than building an actual habitat on a satellite in local orbit. I think it's why the X-Prize is so important.
... well that and because I love watching the founder of id-software show these fuckers how it's done.
Armadillo Aerospace
Between receiving instructions on designing the perfect gaming engines from our alien overlords, they sometimes beam down instructions on how to make jet engines and code to fly an awesome spaceballs like starship.
We don't really know how feasible it is for humans to live on, say, Mars, because low gravity causes a variety of problems on the human body. Muscle breakdown, hormonal problems, problems with reproduction, etc.
Then again, if we were able to build sustainable societies on the moon, I think we'd be able to fix many of our natural problems on Earth.
We have also observed a lot of oddities in mice that have been sent to Earth's orbit.
They have devices to limit the amount of bone mass and muscle mass lost during low or no gravity. I watched an entire Nova on it. Basically they started with a treadmill and a belt with a bunch of bungie cords and then moved on to a stationary bycycle on a boom that spins like a centrifuge when peddled. The problem is how much time is necessary to maintain bone mass. It works fine, but it takes hours a day... of course, not like you got other shit to do cept pee in a tube and eat from another tube for 90% of your day anyway.
I think that we should at the very least be practicing mining operations and engineering ground-based structures on the moon. Even if it's not a permanent habitat we need to figure out just how much shit an artificial enclosure is going to be pelted with. Any problems we're going to have with low gravity I'd rather we had them within our orbit, and not on a planet that can take up to 13 months to get to.
Or build better humans.
Well extremely accellerated muscle atrophy, and loss of bone density can become a problem long before people return to earth. Which is why alot of the people who stay in space report some kind of Asthenia. The human body is very adaptive, but we do start to degrade the longer we spend up there.
Population or disaster protection doesn't do it as motivations, nowhere to put the people at. Resources don't do it, nothing out there we can't get here. Discrimination won't fund spaceships, and there's thousands of various communities here already. Adventurers and explorers won't fund it either. So all we've got is mostly unmanned science on a bit of money. Either the hurdles are going to need to be cut down with new tech or the problems we face need to become hugely more immediate, or nothing's really going to change.
space mining
Its not so much that we can't get it here, its that its so much more abundant out there.
Though I agree that any manned missions beyond the moon are really not going to produce much till we get some serious breakthroughs, especially in the realm of propulsion.
I'm confused. If its worth x billion dollars, obviously there is a market for such materials. Why wouldn't it be worth mining? I'm missing the link why X billion dollars = 0 dollars o_O
Because
A) The tech to bring it down here doesn't exist
C) There's the exact same stuff right here that we're mining right now for plenty of profit
Articles that say stuff like that assume that stuff up there is worth the same down here. But as long as stuff's up there, it's worthless.