One word: TANG.
That is all.
My stock answer to that question comes from Babylon 5 of all places:
“Tthere’s a simple reason why. Ask ten different scientists about the environment, population control, genetics and you’ll get ten different answers, but there’s one thing every scientist on the planet agrees on. Whether it happens in a hundred years or a thousand years or a million years, eventually our Sun will grow cold and go out. When that happens, it won’t just take us. It’ll take Marilyn Monroe and Lao-Tzu and Einstein and Morobuto and Buddy Holly and Aristophenes … and all of this … all of this was for nothing unless we go to the stars.”
Why do I get the feeling that if some of these people were in charge, The only populated areas of earth would be the fertile cresent and bits of subsaharan Africa?
“Ever thought of seeing if there’s anywhere else to go around here?”
“We have people starving here and you want to go exploring and founding cities elsewhere? We should spend that Money in Egypt/Sumer!”
I’m not so sure about this. If we pick the Moon as a goal, is there a guarantee that we won’t end up with another dead-end mission? The ISS was supposed to be an intermediate goal which will lead to further space exploration, yet it became its own goal with little use for other missions. Also, I don’t see much benefit to going back to the moon. There are much better places to do put a telescope, like one of the Lagrange points. More detailed study of the moon will be valuable to planetary scientists, but I’m sure Mars would be even more valuable. Unless we are sure can afford both lunar and Mars missions, I say just do the Mars mission. Besides, shooting for Mars may get us both missions anyway. Remember, the first US space station was a by-product of the Apollo project.
One thing I’m concerned about is NASA’s launch capabilities. Most of the money seems to be going into updating and maintaining the existing Shuttles and to develop Shuttle payloads. Isn’t it about time they replaced the Shuttle with something that’s cheaper to operate? I’d rather see a next-generation Shuttle project than a Mars project.
If there is a Nuclear War, or if the Earth is hit by a Killer rock, or something like that, I’d prefer that we had a couple self-sufficent colonies out there so that human civilization doesn’t die or be thrown back 10,000 years by it. That there will still be survivors, no matter what happens.
The gung-ho, never-say-die, optimistic attitude is what makes America great.
I say, go for it.
Because it’s there.
Who’s “we”? You need to differentiate between “people who are causing the problems” and “NASA”. Once you do that, I think you would see that the two groups are not the same.
You could DEFINITELY feed a very large (I imagine you meant to say “percentage”) with the Prometheus budget. However, as has been pointed out, one does not need to devote resources to helping the planet at the expense of space exploration. It’s not a matter of “one or the other”.
You could further the technology of emmissionless cars without that money. There’s room for both.
What’s the rush and attraction of easing human suffering? Of making emissionless cars? Of feeding the hungry?
It is what I feel is important - nay, even necessary - for humanity’s long-term survival. Stop being so short-sighted.
It got us one step closer to surviving for another few thousand years. And you’re worried about mere decades? Cripes, man, you have the rare gift of nature to be able to look ahead farther than your next meal… even beyond your own lifetime. Take advantage of that gift, would you?
Oh, I skimmed over the Robert Park comments and missed his statement that “these technologies have come exclusively from the unmanned space program.” This is so wildly misleading, it’s not even funny.
First of all, there have been more unmanned missions than manned missions, so it’s only natural that more spin-off developments would come from there.
Secondly, the manned and unmanned mission technologies are so intertwined with one another that it’s nearly impossible to limit the developments to one area. For example, electronics tend to operate best in the same kind of environment humans like (though electronics can tolerate colder conditions than humans), so the technology needed to cool a space craft is the same for electronics as it is for humans. (Not to mention the insulation materials used for things like the Mars Sojourner rover are the exact same materials which will be needed to keep humans alive on Mars, so one can argue that the Mars Sojourner is “merely” a testbed for proving the technologies necessary for a manned mission to Mars.)
Third, the need to develop minature electronics wouldn’t be so great if humans weren’t along for the ride. It didn’t take a Saturn V rocket to put unmanned probes on the Moon, but it did take a Saturn V rocket to put humans and their electronics on the Moon. Humans need a lot of space to move around, plus they need food, water, and privacy to do things like excrete and think. (Not that they can’t do this with other humans around, but we prefer to be able to do them alone, at least part of the time.) Electronics need none of this, so space isn’t at a premium with an unmanned probe to the extent that it is with humans along for the ride.
Fourth, until we can come up with robots as cute and cuddly as R2-D2 and C-3PO, humans aren’t going to be as entralled with unmanned exploration as they are with bold, human-based explorations, so if people like Robert Park want unmanned exploration to continue, they’re going to have to put up with humans mucking up their beautiful vacuum of space, because we don’t give a shit when the next communication satellite is launched, but we do give a shit when the space shuttle is launched. It may only get 10 seconds on the nightly news (and it probably doesn’t get that much when it’s launched), but it does get airplay.
Finally, the most important thing we get from manned exploration isn’t technological at all. A robot can’t tell us how it feels to stand on the Sea of Tranquility and look up at the Earth. When you hear people talk about the pictures the various space probes send back, there’s a lot of “gee whiz” in their voices, when you hear one of the astronauts talking about being in space, you hear awe and reverence, not “gee whiz.”
Sam wrote:
Originally, I had intented to enjoin the debate as the sole protester and argue that government has no business funding this sort of thing. But then, as I considered the 30:1 avalanche of responses complete with squishy hypotheticals, followed by the complete derailment of your thread, I thought better of it.
Instead, since there isn’t likely to be any meaningful debate on the ethics of this spending, I’d like to see some discussion on the point you bring up and whether we have not already ruined the credibility of finding any life on Mars that we haven’t put there ourselves. You can Google a bunch of articles about this, but here’s one from Space Daily:
If Life Exists On Mars, Our Robotic Probes May Have Brought It There
Isn’t it true that there is no way to be sure that the biological life we discover originated there? Even if it is declared to be like nothing we’ve ever seen, we’ve discovered right here on earth in the past several years life-forms the likes of which we’d never seen before. So, how will we know that we didn’t just piggy-back something there?
I’m sorry, but I must disagree with your use of the word “probably”. Even though that is probably 
how it will eventually be spun, by some.
Excessive extrapolation is bad science! Two planets with life does not mean life is all over the universe.
However, I expect there is already life on Mars. We might not be able to verify that until we land some people there though.
Life on Mars could have happened a very long time ago. A large enough meteorite or comet impact on Earth could have ejected living organisms to Mars, or to other bodies throughout our solar system. Europa gets mentioned sometimes as another possible place to find life. It’s gonna be some mean nasty life imo, if there’s any on Europa, due to the harsh conditions.
On top of that, you have the contamination problem as Lib has pointed out. We have already contaminated the Moon, not that any cares much. We weren’t expecting to find life there anyway.
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Why don’t you explain it to us?
Context and analysis. There may be academic disputes. I don’t see how potential academic disputes diminishes the importance of putting a human being on another planet.
Beagle wrote:
It’s best if I don’t.
Who said it did?
I was addressing Sam’s assertion that “the main reason to go to Mars is to discover if life exists there”. And I’m saying that even if you discover it, you might not be able to tell if it is aboriginal.
I’d highly doubt that we would find life there from our own doings. Considering that Mars is a planet, and therefore a huge body, and that we have only been sending unmanned missions for the last 40 years. I would doubt that if we had sent bacteria or other life to Mars, that it would be anywhere near detectable. Muchless, if it did piggy back, it probably wouldn’t have survived the 6 months in a vacuum, and then the reeentry…
The probability of life being there from us does exist. But I think it’s more likely that it is native to Mars.
If it does exist, and it is from Earth, then that’s living proof of evolution.
Would itbe possible (through genetic engineering) to “seed” Mars with plants developed to live there? Suppose that we could put genes from lichens into grasses, and develop a grass that would thrive at the low temps, lowpressure conditions on the Martian surface. We could just send robot ships with the seeds, and wait untill Mars was colonized by these special plants-wouldn’t that be better than trying to land (and supply) humans under the present harsh conditions on Mars? I have seen schems which posit building greenhouse structures in Martain craters, or canyons, and pressurizing them-how could we ever hope to transport enough materials to mars to carry our such projects?
I say send the plants to Mars, and let them pave the way for us-in 200-300 years, we could have almost earth-like conditions on Mars.
I think things like the Space Elevator that Sam Stone mentioned are precisely the sort of things we should be spending our money on. Lower the cost, increase the efficiency, and the arguments against begin to melt. When space travel becomes more efficient, human Mars exploration will happen naturally. There’s no need to rush.
Saturn by 1970?
Here are some stats on launch failures over the last few years (I happened to be flipping through the Aviation Week & Space Technology 2003 Aerospace Source book as I opened this thread, from which I obtained these figures)
Total world launches 2000-2002: 209 (2001 had 60 ,the lowest since Kennedy was president
Countries listed as being active players: France, China, India, Japan, Russia, US.
Countries at some stage in bringing launch vehicles to market: Italy, Brazil, Ukraine, Israel
Launch failures 2000-2002: 9 (2 American, 2 French, 1 Japanese, 3 Russian, 1 Russian/American) although it should be noted that one of the failures was on an experimental vehicle.
The overall failure rate is therefore 9/209, just above 4%. The issue does not go into historical failure rate by launch platform so this number may in fact not be terribly useful in assessing the safety or adviseability of launching radioactive material into space.
IIRC that the Cassini spacecraft was the center of some controversy as it contained a nuclear power source. It was launched successfully. ALthough the quantity of radioactive material Cassini required to power transmitters/sensors is probably orders of magnitude less than that required to power a large spacecraft to Mars and Back.
I do think it would be cool if we could pull this off, though.
On a different note, I was under the impression that neither the Scorpion’s nor the Thresher’s loss were directly attributable to reactor problems.
So Bush had better lay low, and stay out of Dallas in particular, come November?
Re the mission, I would have to seriously rethink my dislike of Bush if he actually does announce this, and commit the nation to it. This is vision. This is looking outward, unifying his people and, to some extent, the human race as a whole. This is dramatic, and this is our future. To recall a previous poster, this is the sort of grand tomorrow-bound gesture that puts the lie to the neo-Luddite fundamentalists and reveals their empty sermonizing as the self-destructive dead end that it is.
And if we beat the odds, and pull this off, I will weep like a fucking baby when the first spacesuited foot hits the red dust. Hell, I’m getting choked up now, just thinking about it.
Clearly it’s possible we could have contaminated mars, but if we were to find living specimens we’d pack em up and ship em to a Biosafety level 4 lab where we’d breed and study the living hell out of it. On a biochemical level I doubt martian life would be similar to earth. Differences in metabolism for example would greatly support an exterterrestrial origin(This is because some processes like glycolysis, or the triplet-based genetic code are evolutionary conserved in 99.99999999999999999% of all living organisms.)
Anyway, Go Bush! If this goes through and is popular no suceeding president will dare touch this policy.
I’m afraid funding is a big deal. Close to deal killer big… For actually putting humans on Mars, I mean. Someone did a proposal on this some years ago to Congress. They came up with a budget of roughly $500 billion! :eek: That was the end of that.
Hopefully Podkayne can tell us what some current accurate budget numbers might look like…
It seems to me that there is a bit of hype in the article. I doubt Bush will mention sending humans to Mars in his State of the Union address. I hope I’m wrong.
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