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Is this Star Trek 101? Surely if the time comes to leave this planet it will arrive as suddenly as Katrina or 9/11. I can’t see man landing on the moon wayyyyyyyyy back when I was a wee young thing as any help to the planet.
Because Stephen Hawking agrees with you…where should I go when the world is doomed?
Kiwi that ye may be, but scarcely tranquil art thou. :dubious:
As for your question, re: “What the fuck use was it…Who the fuck cares…Why does space shit matter??” and so forth:[ul]
[li]There is a vast, virtually unlimited (for the foreseeable future) wealth of material resources in space. This doesn’t require going to Mars, or Jupiter, or the Asteroid Belt; there are near-earth asteroids which likely contain more iron, nickel, copper, rare earths, et cetera than could be mined in a decade of open-pit strip mining on Earth. The opportunity cost of such an effort may be high, but the rewards are enormous.[/li][li]Closer to home, the space race and spaceflight has led to advances in reliability of launch vehicles, which in turn has allowed for industries to spring up using orbital satellites for communications, observation, climate monitoring, et cetera. The technology has become so prevelent and transparent that you probably have no idea how many times a day it affects your life. [/li][li]While we’re unlikely to migrate off planet en masse, the eventual continuance of the human race (or its successors) essentially requires moving off-planet. [/li][li]Moving polluting industries off-planet reduces environmental contamination. It’s easy to ship stuff downhill; it takes little energy to degenerate your payload orbit into a re-entry track. The big trick is to keep it from burning up.[/li][li]Eventually we’re going to face some threat of a major meteor impact; if we haven’t developed the ability to modify the trajectory of large objects and monitor the paths of low-albedo objects we’re going to be at the mercy of any rock that falls.[/li][li]While I detect in your statement a disdain for science and the pursuit of knowledge of the natural world for its own sake, the truth is that abstract knowledge usually ends up paying for itself in the end. One could scarcely envision from the researches of Girolamo Cardano and Otto von Guericke how electricity would revolutionize our lives. Even our few, brief, and mostly unscientific missions to the Moon have provided geologists and planetologists a wealth of information about the early state of the Earth, which gives other fields much valuable information in pursuit of their areas of knowledge.[/ul] [/li]There are plenty of good, non-phallic reasons to explore and exploit space, both in the form of unmanned interplanetary probes and manned missions and habitats. The STS and the ISS are an example of a program that was politically-motivated and directionless from the start, hence its stagnation, lack of utility, and abeyance of technical problems, but that doesn’t mean space exploration has to be done that way, or that all we can accomplish is to plunk a flag down on the Moon and bring back a bag of rocks.
Stranger
And that, IMHO, is rapidly going to be the driving force behind the space program. Already, the nations which have signed the Kyoto Accords, are discovering that there’s some savage economic costs with trying to meet the targets, and many are admitting that they won’t be able to meet them. As the developing nations like India and China begin to reach First World standards of living, it’s going to force the next rounds of Kyoto Accords to be even more restrictive. It won’t be long before it doesn’t matter how clean an industry is, if it puts out a greenhouse gas, it’ll be in violation of the treaty, and the only solution will be to move the industry off-Earth.
[QUOTE=Stranger On A Train]
Hey it is 2am! Point 1; I am mostly calm! 
and then…
[QUOTE=Stranger On A Train]
[li]There is a vast, virtually unlimited (for the foreseeable future) wealth of material resources in space. This doesn’t require going to Mars, or Jupiter, or the Asteroid Belt; there are near-earth asteroids which likely contain more iron, nickel, copper, rare earths, et cetera than could be mined in a decade of open-pit strip mining on Earth. The opportunity cost of such an effort may be high, but the rewards are enormous.[/li][/QUOTE]
I’m sorry, I didn’t think we had started pillaging Antartica or even finished with the Amazon yet. You are right. It is absolutelty worth billions of dollars to find out if we can make trillions of dollars in space. Of course after we have have fucked up this planet in the name of money it is our absolute duty to fuck up other places.
[QUOTE=Strange
[QUOTE=Stranger On A Train]
[li]While we’re unlikely to migrate off planet en masse, the eventual continuance of the human race (or its successors) essentially requires moving off-planet. [/li]
Yes. I have also watched space crap movies. What you mean is that “one day” a select few may leave the planet (!?!) I just hope I am not around for the day when several billionof us don’t get to go (JEEEEEEEEEEEZ Star Trek has some answering to do)
[li]Moving polluting industries off-planet reduces environmental contamination. It’s easy to ship stuff downhill; it takes little energy to degenerate your payload orbit into a re-entry track. The big trick is to keep it from burning up.[/li]This is the absolute worst reason to advocate space expoloration. The human species can not control it’s own waste on it’s own planet yet you advocate spreading our shit?
[li]While I detect in your statement a disdain for science and the pursuit of knowledge of the natural world for its own sake, the truth is that abstract knowledge usually ends up paying for itself in the end. One could scarcely envision from the researches of Girolamo Cardano and Otto von Guericke how electricity would revolutionize our lives. Even our few, brief, and mostly unscientific missions to the Moon have provided geologists and planetologists a wealth of information about the early state of the Earth, which gives other fields much valuable information in pursuit of their areas of knowledge.[/list] [/li]There are plenty of good, non-phallic reasons to explore and exploit space, both in the form of unmanned interplanetary probes and manned missions and habitats. The STS and the ISS are an example of a program that was politically-motivated and directionless from the start, hence its stagnation, lack of utility, and abeyance of technical problems, but that doesn’t mean space exploration has to be done that way, or that all we can accomplish is to plunk a flag down on the Moon and bring back a bag of rocks.
See your last point is your clearest and your most “human”. It is built into the human to explore. I may challenge the reasons for space exploration but I understand that others do not. The human condition requires we explore. It also means some of us fear the results of that exploration.
I’m not sure that any alien we would run into would be impressed with us!
CRAP! My coding alone tells me it is way past my bedtime.
If we want to reach the 22nd century we’re going to have to do it, there’s simply no way around it, unless you can discover a zero pollution way of manufacturing. Besides, there’s no life on Mars (I’m going out on a limb here, but I seriously doubt we’ll find life on Mars), so it doesn’t matter if we fuck that planet up, we won’t be poisoning the water supply of wild animals or destroying their habitat. In fact, putting greenhouse producing industries on Mars would make the planet warmer, and thus suitable for human life.
You can’t pollute space. There is no pollution if there is no life.
I don’t think Kiwi realizes how big space is. As hard as we try, we couldn’t pollute space in a million years.
Seriously - a million years. Do the math.
Seems to me that the Shuttle was made to service the ISS…and now that the ISS is introuble, there is no way to keep the ancient shuttles flying (economically). We should take a good hard look at the ISS-and maybe decide that the money is better spent on robotic probes. The immense cost of each shuttle mission is staggering-so let the Russians supply the ISS with their Soyuz-we can go on to better things.
Sorry if it’s already been mentioned, but the most pressing reason for maintaining and increasing presence in space is to be ready to deflect near-earth asteroids and meteors. Many such objects cross paths with the earth, and could be regionally or globally catastrophic if they hit us. I’d say it’s worth the collective governments of Earth spending $100 billion a year on space if, 300 years down the road, an actual collision is averted.
Or to paraphrase Doug Adams: You may think it’s a long way to the chemist’s, but that’s just peanuts to space.
And now I see Arnold Schwarzenegger and Maria Conchita Alonso writhing around on the red sand, gasping for air and clawing at their necks. Thanks for that.
Agreed, and never for a moment did I believe we should put money into space exploration *to the exclusion * of those things that will keep Earth livable. But, if you never START down the road of exploration, you’ll NEVER reach it.
Rachel Ticotin. You’re thinking of The Running Man.
Well, we can and are “polluting” Near Earth Orbit by leaving a bunch of debris out there, but in the sense of polluting to mean harming ecosystems, defiling natural resources, et cetera, it’s really a non-issue. Even if you decide not to exploit planetary bodies (and frankly there’s not a lot of reason that you’d want to haul stuff our of one gravity well just to dump it into another) there are an almost boundless amount of mineral and carbonaceous resources available in presumably lifeless asteriods. Methinks the objections from the halcyon produce have little to do with the technical feasibility or fear of pollution than with an ingrained rancor toward anything technological.
Heck, we should have done that eight years ago, before we deorbited the perfectly usable Mir station. The fact is that the ISS exists primarily as a place for the Shuttle to go to; without it, there are few missions that require the capabilities (and demand the expense) of an STS launch. Unfortunately, the ISS has been scaled back such that it can’t really serve as an expansion platform for future mission, and lacking the deleted propulsion module it can’t modify its orbit. But we have committments–ones that we’ve badgered other nations into–that will require the Shuttle, or something with similar capability, to complete, and lacking a backup plan we’re committed to keeping the STS flying or default on the whole business.
As for unmanned probes, there’s no question that from a science and knowledge standpoint they offer an outstanding return on investment compared to manned ISS missions. This doesn’t mean that we should eliminate manned spaceflight, but we certainly shouldn’t be cutting the budget on decades-long unmanned missions to pay for manned flight programs with ambiguous goals and scientifically modest (to say the least) results.
The STS was always a political program first; a way of keeping NASA in business in the post-Apollo environment while claiming to do something new and different. As such, it ended up a compromise that satisfied no one (its main intended customer, the Air Force, has had little use for it, after spending billions to refurbish and upgrade the SLC-6 launch facilitity out at VAFB) and has ended up costing a magnitude of order more per pound-to-orbit than originally projected. But the worst was what it did to our space industry; it put it in a chokehold. Either you worked Shuttle, or you didn’t work. There were little funds for advanced research, next generation vehicle programs, et cetera. Congress even mandated against the Air Force developing a new disposable heavy booster, insisting that the Shuttle would meet all needs, which it did not even before the loss of Challenger. CEV threatens to do the same, but to an even greater extent in its impact upon non-manned exploration programs.
We can and should do better, in both the manned and unmanned arena. But as long as the shots are being called by politicians whose first interest is in bringing money and jobs back to their constituancies but lacking any technical understanding of the effort and risks, we’re going to continue to do what’s “safe”…even if it isn’t all that safe.
Stranger