What was the total cost of the Space Shuttle program? I’m guessing SpaceX is about to do the same things much more cheaply, just as a for instance.
I don’t know what the eventual value of asteroid resource extraction will be, but it’s not that expensive to try and see what develops. 50 years ago I’m sure there were plenty of people who would gleefully dismiss as a childish fantasy, the whole idea of a WWW where an average person could whip out her iPhone, order something from the other side of the planet, and have it Fedexed to her doorstep. Yet here we are.
Without any clear idea of what the benefit might be, or how to obtain it? Just show up on an asteroid with a shovel and a rake?
But the WWW didn’t result from a plan that amounted to “Let’s do something really, really expensive in hopes that some long time from now something great somehow comes from it.” It was much more along the lines of a whole series of steps that made sense in and of themselves. The success of one step led to dreams of, and then detailed plans for, the next. Specific useful results were obtained all along the way.
Actually, I think it is to a considerable extent. Which is why manned missions to exploit asteroids look unlikely just now: people want some plausible benefit, which they don’t see here.
Oh, I wasn’t really thinking about manned asteroid missions right now. I think robots can try it first.
I do think we need to try living in space. It’s not really that expensive considering everything else we spend millions, billions and trillions on. If it turns out we can, that’s a great thing.
The other side of this is what they’d think when they pass our archaic probe: “Imagine the things they could have done to actually build a foundation of knowledge. Instead, they devote enormous time, effort and money to an obviously useless mission. Were these people actually interested in space exploration, or simply in futile gestures?”
I was thinking about that, like we could build a giant Space Pharos at a Lagrange point, with a huge mirror array behind it, and send them morse code or something like that (or the same with a bigass radio beacon)… But then I figured, how would they know it’s deliberate and not just some weird space anomaly ? Would we think a curiously blinking star out there to be evidence of intelligent life ? Would we have thought so in 4000 B.C. ?
Not necessarily. Statistical aberrations do happen. Once is extraordinary. Twice is a coincidence. Three times [del]is enemy action[/del] and you can start statting/theorycrafting.
Learn by doing. If we had eschewed rocketry for early space flight while waiting for something better, would we be as familiar with its limitations? Should we have scuttled Hubble in favor of developing better optics for some future telescope? Should we have held off on Cassini and Kepler and Spirit and Opportunity until the tech is better for them?
People talk about resources like they’re extremely limited, and that we’re operating at peak output. The only real limitation on our resources is number and use of brains. Once most people have food (requiring about 3% of the population as farmers) and shelter (say 10% are directly and indirectly responsible for that), we’re free to focus on pretty much anything we want. Some things are pretty straightforward (medicine and education), but there are a lot of brains occupied with pretty meaningless trivia. The resources spent on Hollywood alone dwarf any proposed Quixotic space probe. Throw in organized sports, religion, and the minutia of the law, and we’ve already got plenty to apologize to those future judgmental historians about. That’s not to say we should necessarily do away with all those things (well, maybe religion). Just because we can think of more efficient uses of people’s time and energy doesn’t mean we have to remake society into a space-oriented machine. In fact, we could do the future much better if we prioritized science and math education (as well as drive up demand for those fields with government projects). I think we could be forgiven our other flights of fancy if we just got that basic premise right.
It’s agonizing at times to know how great the future will be (barring a dark age of some kind), but be stuck in the 21st century. Space exploration isn’t something a person can do, or even a country, or even the whole world in a generation. It may not even be something a terrestrial species can do without becoming something else entirely. That’s the problem of living in a universe as vast as this. The Earth’s explorers could go anywhere in the world within a year, assuming you could walk there. With most boats and a little pluck, you could get pretty much anywhere in under a year. The universe (or even just our nearby stellar neighborhood in this galaxy) is just so vast it cannot be attempted (let alone conquered) on the scale of individual lifetimes. Of course we should prioritize the development of ion engines and fusion reactors, but that doesn’t mean we have to abandon our fruitless gestures, as well. For 21st century people, fruitless gestures may be all we have.
Indeed. How will we perfect space propulsion if we don’t continually leapfrog over the next advancement, starting now? How will we achieve breakthroughs in spacefaring if we don’t probe deeper into the mysteries of the universe and perhaps discover new ways of exploiting energies that were thought to remain elusive, unfeasable, or perhaps unknown. How might fresher minds be inspired to think about a problem in a different light to solve a novel obstacle without an obstacle to solve?
It’ll take a long time, but to dismiss our paltry technology compared to our insatiable curiosity at this point, is to not lay down a few humble stepping stones of our own, which someone, somewhen will have to lay down.
Before we even think about interstellar probes, we have to build a real infrastructure and go to the other planets. If we would put our resources into establishing a genuine space station not the cobbled together ISS, but something on the order of a real habitat that could house a few hundred people then we would have a very good idea of what it would take to make it further. Our goals are either too high or too low. We think in terms of Star Trek and act in terms of balsa wood gliders. Sometimes it saddens me or even makes me angry.
This is the 21st Century, dang it! This is the future! We should already have a real space station, a rotating wheel that provides low but sustainable artificial gravity. We even have what it takes to make a space elevator, and if we get that then we are halfway to everywhere in the solar system. But, we won’t get that and we will almost certainly get in such a rut that we will NEVER make it back out there. Then, when the next random asteroid comes plummeting down and wipes out civilization, the survivors will have no place else to go.
That is the real reason to colonize space; the survival of our species. I fear we are a tipping point right now and if we don’t get off our hands and move, then we probably deserve eventual extinction.
See, I feel the exact opposite way: if we can’t even manage to live on our own planet without thrashing it, overpopulating it, cooking it etc…, we have no business colonizing other planets.
Science and technology have outstripped our moral & cultural development I’m afraid.
IMHO, the smart money is on looking around, recognizing we have a resource, land and climate problem, and coming up with the best, non-drakonian solutions we can. Space equals resources and land x infinity. To me it seems like such an easy an automatic decision.
Well, they are scientists, which I think by definition makes them geeks. We’re lucky they don’t come up with telescopes and missions that spell out FART or something.
I think a deliberate pattern would suggest life, and maybe intelligence. Because it’s different and stands out, once they develop to the point where they can sit around and ponder things, someone would guess it might be alive. It would spur study into the things that would help them figure it out, which could nudge them towards science maybe. Of course, we might not want to do that. Prime Directive and all.
The galaxy isn’t uniform. I was looking at this"picture" of our galaxy the other day. Our star is located in a dense-ish active spur of material that is sandwiched mostly evenly between the Milky Way’s two main arms, which themselves are dense, rich, active regions of the galaxy. It could be that the conditions in our specific spot in the galaxy were conducive to life, so we’ll actually find more of it nearby than in the galaxy at large. Or vice versa.
