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Space Exploration! [to boldly go]
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I don't really see your point. Are you saying that space research is somehow less valuable because they're more likely to find out things about space rather than produce benefits for people here in the process?
As a means for increasing our capacity for population growth, space colonization is an incredibly inefficient notion. Purely for the interests of science, colonization has little relevance; why would we need more than, at most, a tiny manned outpost? Even then, it's hard to imagine the cost/benefit tradeoff being worthwhile, as opposed to continuing to send robots.
The only argument for full-blown space colonization with even a grain of validity is the whole "don't put all your eggs in one basket" thing. Even then, natural events catastrophic enough to exterminate the species seem rare, and our money would likely be better spent detecting and preventing them.
Pi can you please make a short statement of what you're actually trying to argue here?
Building stuff to withstand the pressures of the deep sea is harder than building space-worthy stuff, in space you just have (roughly) atmospheric pressure trying to push out into a vacuum, at the deepest known point at the ocean you have about a thousand times atmospheric pressure trying to push in.
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How about we just start with the surface of the oceans and with the deserts and work from there, okay?
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Also a nuclear powered 'rocket' would have far less chance of exploding than a chemical one. On that note a coal plant releases 100 times more radiation into the atmosphere than the three mile island incident.
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For those concerned; rocket scientists don't solve problems like starvation, world peace, energy crisis - they get people into space. The money going in to NASA is well invested and small compared to other areas your government throw money at. The space program has proved in the past to reap big long term benefits.
Therefore I find it completely and utterly ridiculous that "WE GOT ENOUGH PROBLEMS ON EARTH RIGHT NOW WHY SHOULD WE FEED THE SPACE PROGRAM!?" always shoots out of someone's mouth. It's plain stupidity, stop it.
What if they don't want to?
I recall reading in one of Sagan's books that the study of Venus' atmosphere lead to the discovery that CFCs were ruining the Earth.
Back when Bush announced this whole Moon-Mars thing I laughed. It was a joke then; its simply too expensive. And with the current economic conditions this is only emphasised. Stick to unmanned for now is my feeling on this.
I feel the exact opposite. Manned exploration has huge benefits that robotic missions do not. For one, Joe Q Public doesn't really give a shit that the Mars Rovers have been out there for years doing superb work, even though most of us do. He also doesn't care about the ISS or Skylab or the probes we send to far off planets. Not really.
With the anniversary of the Moon landing in the public eye right now, what we have been seeing a lot of (and by we I mean the media) is that people care about exploration in the purest sense. Sure, a manned mission to Mars would be costly, more costly than anything ever done before. And it would have little scientific merit above the dozen unmanned missions you could send for the same price. But space exploration today is basically NASA and then no-one else. Heck even the ESA is small time, and the Russians mostly service the ISS. It's also facing a huge budget crisis. Shit be costly, yo'.
To me, putting a man on Mars by, say, 2040 or whenever - would do more good for scientific advancement, economic stability and world society than a million robots could ever achieve. No-one cares about machines. I'd wager that if NASA came out and said, with real conviction, that they would be putting human feet on Mars with a timeline and a set plan, they would have increased funding, increased publicity and more stability following what I consider a 40 year stopgap shuttle program. I mean shit, they spent 100 billion on the ISS and now they want to destroy it in 2016?
I can think of better ways to spend 100 billion.
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The Apollo program was a massive undertaking, with large risks, but a strong impetus to ignore the risks and launch a bunch of fighter-jocks into space.
This is the period of time where we thought that nuclear aircraft were fine, and changing the caldera of a nuclear reactor could be performed at night since "nobody was around"...
Now we're talking about sending a bunch of scientists into space, where our risk tolerance is such that we can't launch a shuttle in sub-perfect conditions, and once it's in space we need to inspect it with cameras to make sure nothing happened to it... Windows of opportunity for Lunar launches are short, and Mars launches even shorter. Our tolerance for risk so low, and our pension for cost-overruns so high that a mission like this may be far harder to develop and plan than the original moon missions and will cost several magnitudes more for basically the same thing.
Why can't we do both? Are the resources just that slim that Nationally or globally we can't? Yeah its a shitty time right now but still...
The ocean-dwelling idea makes me a bit leery, since we're already destroying the ocean as it is. Planned well, though, and designed with a minimal impact on the ecosystem in mind, ocean-based living could free up a lot of our problems with overpopulation in the coastal regions. I'm not sure if it'd be worth it, though, at least economically speaking.
Yep. When the Apollo program was running weren't like a million people involved in some way with it, via work and jobs?
I mean sure, you could build fancy highways all over the place like Germany did, but spaceships are cooler.
And if the work that the Apollo guys were doing with Fuel Cells and Alternative Energy was allowed to be continued into the '70s and '80s, we very well might have been able to massively reduce our dependence on fossil fuels by this point.
No one in the, "We should stay here and fix stuff camp" seems to have adequately addressed this.
There is a finite amount of money (X), but since a Mars exploration mission could, potentially, be a global effort (if we get past the dong-wavng, of course) it's hard to envision a cost that would be so great that other research would cease.
I mean, with Mars, it's simple (or horribly complex, but you know what I mean) to see how the goal is achieved. Man mission, gradually solve problems, throw money at the issue. There is no Mars mission for cancer or whatever. If there was, we would have launched it a long time ago. There is no simple. "throw money at it" solution to most of our other problems, that I'm aware of. Mar is achievable, at least in a conceptual sense, because we already (sort of) know what we have to do. It is perfectly possible to throw fistfulls of money at HIV or the environment and see zero gain on how to improve those issues. That doesn't mean we shouldn't pursue such research of course, and for precisely that reason, as far as I am aware, that research is still going on.
Now if someone can show me that HIV researchers are running out of money or that environmental research has ground to a halt, I'll eat my words, but I'm not sure throwing all of the money we spend on space at those things will make them get done any faster.
Not to mention the fact that if something happens to the supply team (which seems quite possible spending that long in deep space) everyone on Mars is going to starve.
You send enough supplies to get them set up and self-sustaining.
I'm sure greenhousing would be fairly viable, for instance... especially if there is water there that can be used.
Why go to some old rock when you can enter VR and go anywhere you wish?
That's not to say that I don't support space exploration, in fact I think we need it badly if we are to ensure the continuation of the species. Colonization of other worlds will increase our chances of survival 100 fold, whether it be in the case of an asteroid impact or World War Z.
I think that the idea of having an "American" colony on Mars is a pipe dream, however, as if we are to succeed in space exploration we will need the economic support of the entire planet.
Even if the Americans get there first, they will eventually need the support of other countries to expand and maintain the facility, not to mention continuing colonization on the larger Moons of Jupiter and Saturn.
On the whole, If I happen to live another 60 years I think I will just barely see humankind establish a permanent and accessible civilian research facility on Mars of around 500-1000 people. And to me that is a generous estimate.
People died in their hundreds exploring this country, too. Sending ships across an entire ocean was expensive and fraught with peril like scurvy. But still they were done, and the exploration proved to be entirely beneficial.
Sometimes, humanity needs to dare. Sometimes we need to have dreams to aspire to, and then achieve. A Mars mission would do that.
No competition has made NASA stagnate.
This seems all kinds of problematic to me, though. You'd be going into a very alien environment and if one variable goes wrong you're pretty much fucked, and it would be very difficult to cultivate a wide enough variety of crops for a complete and nutrititous human diet (and in an environment like that you're going to need to stay as healthy as you can) just on what they can fit into a single spaceship.
Of course people who go into space are used to taking greater-than-average risks, but still, there would just be so many ways for it to go wrong. And if something does go wrong not only is everybody dead, but the entire venture was a bust and untold amounts of money and resources have been lost.