I was watching The 20th Century, a 1960s news show with Walter Cronkite that focused on technology and the future (which is fascinating to watch in 2012) and saw an episode focusing on NASA and space exploration.
Remembering that this was produced a few years before we even went to the moon, it was amazing to listen to the Walter interview space crews in training and the NASA flight director talk about the official “Mars Mission” that was planned for 1986!
This not only got me thinking about how far off the “best scientific minds” of the 60s were but makes me wonder how far we still are from the Colonization of Mars.
So I ask, in what year (if ever) do you think that the first child will be born not of this planet? Mars is still the most probable (only?) destination for the future of the human species, but when will it happen?
As a side question, does anyone know where one could get (digitally, DVD, etc) this show? I was I had recorded it and would love to watch the whole series!
Call me pessimistic this morning, but I think the only circumstance under which a child will be born off the Earth will be a gimmick. Put a pregnant woman in orbit, deliver the baby, re-entry.
I just don’t see us (a collective ‘us’) getting an ambitious enough space program together.
And yes, I know that doctors generally recommend waiting 6 weeks after the birth until re-entry.
I think we’re at a point with the space program where our limits have more to do with feasibility than capability. If the entire world committed every spare penny to a Mars colony, I think we’d have one within a couple of decades. The issue is that it’s so enormously expensive and dangerous, with virtually no upside.
This is not Columbus going to a new world full of resources that can be tapped - it’s a big expense that promises nothing but more expenses for the foreseeable future.
Technology should eventually make colonization more feasible but we’re a long way from that happening - hundreds of years, probably.
Come to think of it, we don’t even know how to get to Mars at all yet, at least if we’re talking about a return journey. IIRC the possibility of a one-way mission was floated not long ago, and I was rather astonished by that. Not being able to return home from the moon or some nearby planet was always a staple plot device of early science fiction stories. The story would usually have the main character gazing at the Earth in the sky–so close and yet so far.
The problem seems to be far more complicated than planning a massively scaled-up version of the lunar missions.
Technological progress was screaming along in the 60’s, so it wasn’t too much of a stretch thinking we’d make it to Mars in twenty years or so.
As for babies, I’d expect to hear about an off-planet conception almost any day now. I think we’re just about at the point where we have enough men and women in orbit long enough.
However, I don’t see a doctor ever recommending a woman give birth off planet until it’s been thoroughly studied. What if the fetus developed into a ball? We’d have to see monkeys and pigs giving birth a lot first.
Werner von Braun suggested sending six ships to aid each other if needed.
I’ve heard of sending food, fuel and return vehicles first. The difficulty would be the time spent weightless. How long have astronauts spent on the space station, the cosmonauts on extended orbit?
There are a couple of scenarios under which we might develop a serious space capability.
The first is that we simply become wealthy enough that we can afford to do it at a price we’re willing to pay. The market today will support investments of billions of dollars in pure entertainment. A single motion picture can cost on the order of a billion dollars now, and still make a profit.
If human wealth continues to increase, at some point we’ll just decide to do it for fun.
The other is if it becomes profitable to expand our space-going capability. Asteroid mining, vacations, exploitation of some yet-discovered valuable resource - if we find space valuable, we’ll expand into it. If not, we won’t.
A Mars colony is a very romantic notion, but in the end it’s an expensive thing to maintain, and we’ll have to find a very compelling reason for doing it. A one-time flight there and back might happen within our lifetimes, rationalized out of pure human curiosity. But a permanent presence needs an ongoing rationalization. Essentially, it has to be profitable.
I don’t know why anyone would want to live on Mars. Isn’t Earth the best planet for life in our solar system? Anyway, it seems useless and a waste of money to want to try to establish colonies in our own solar system when the sun is going to burn out eventually. We should try to find why to colonize other galaxies.
Please, please tell me that you are a freshman in high school.
Do you know how far it is to Mars, on the closest approach? Do you know how far it is to the nearest star other than the Sun? Do you know that the Sun is actually a star? Do you know that all stars eventually either blow up or burn out? Do you really and truly think that humanity can survive long enough, as a species, for us to have to worry about even our Sun “burning out”?
I know it would take a long time, but I don’t see the point of living on Mars. If something happened to make living on Earth bad, I’m pretty sure living on Mars wouldn’t be a good choice either. I’m not against visiting Mars, but I don’t understand why anyone would want to live on Mars.
“A long time” doesn’t begin to cover it. Currently, we don’t have faster than light travel. We don’t have anything that even approaches the speed of light. To get to another star other than the very, very closest, we would probably have to use generation ships. That is, we’d have to build huge starships that carried enough people to run it for generations, and the people who started out in the ships would raise families, get old, and die before the ship reached its destination. The trip would take at least several generations.
That’s ASSUMING that we could find a habitable planet around another star. I don’t keep track of astronomical news as much as I used to, but so far we’re mostly finding gas giants and super giants around other stars, which we can’t use in our current bodies. The gravity is too high for us. I’ll grant you, it’s far easier to find giant extrasolar planets than it is to find planets that are more in line with Earth’s size. However, a planet might be the size of Earth, but not habitable for other reasons.
Galaxies are so incredibly far away that travel to another galaxy isn’t worth thinking about, at this point.
So far, Mars is our best bet. It’s close. Venus is closer, but it has more problems. Mars is the most Earthlike of the planets in the Solar System. And it would be a good idea to try to colonize a planet within the Solar System first, to work out the bugs. It would be a terrible thing to find out that we need the equivalent of thallium oxide for our tree of life, for instance, or else we all revert to breeders.
As for wanting to live on Mars…well, it’s the same urge as wanting to live in any new place, only more so. I’m getting to be the age where living somewhere with a lower gravity is definitely appealing.
What happens to the dear departed on a generation ship? Do the mourners just have a burial in space, where they eject the body out into the void? Or would that be considered a monstrous waste of precious materials? Would the dead bodies be recycled somehow?
(Bold added.) I don’t get this statement – this seems to refer to things outside my knowledge base. Please fight ignorance here.
Solving the problem of getting to another solar system is the same a solving the problem of needing to live on planets. If we can get there, we will no longer need to.
