How does that give you a better mosquito net? Vaccines? Sewage treatment? Did you even read the questions he was asking? So, yeah…really. Scroll up and look over his list, and don’t cherry pick one that might work, sort of kind of if you squint. 
My proposed solution is not manned spaceflight, but pursue the doors that science has opened for us. One of those doors opened just happens to be manned spaceflight. So it helps because it helps us ultimately understand more. (and yes this could lead to space colonies where new solutions are developed out of necessity there which may be adapted back to earth and be superior to current ‘solutions’)
Pursuing a open door which actually does things to advance us is better then pursuing a door that is blocked shut (in this case politically). Putting all the effort in one door and ignoring others also I believe is counterproductive.
I don’t think you are recognizing the size of the ultra-lux tourist market. We are talking about many billions of dollars per year spent on luxury goods and travel.
From the Financial Times, in 2014 the global market for ‘luxury experiences’ was estimated to be 980 billion dollars! (luxury experiences being defined as cars, art, home, tech, dining, hotels, travel, spas, yachting, etc.) The ‘luxury goods’ market is an additional $390 billion. They don’t say over what time frame - I have a hard time believing it’s annual - but in any case it’s huge and a premier luxury experience like a week in orbit could be insanely profitable.
Furthermore, we assume that space ventures must make a profit, but ‘hobby space’ does not. So long as SpaceX is private, Musk can go to Mars if he wants - it’s his money. Charles Simonyi spent $40 million dollars to spend a couple of weeks on the ISS - twice. I don’t think it’s inconceivable that lunar exploration or some other space venture could become a rich person’s hobby rather than a quest for profit, it the price of it can be lowered to the range of a billion dollars or so. Hell, the Sultan of Brunei spent $100 million on his personal jet. Think he’d balk at spending $500 million to walk on the moon?
Then consider the research market. At 1/10 the cost for space launch, a Mars rover mission could be undertaken for tens of millions instead of hundreds of millions. Maybe even cheaper. That makes such missions available to a much larger marketplace of smaller countries, private research, rich philanthropists, etc. A Europa mission becomes eminently feasible.
Paul Allen contributed $30 million dollars to fund the Allen Telescope Array. Do you think he would hesitate to fund an observatory on the dark side of the moon if it could be built for, say, $100 million?
So long as the market is private, no one has to justify anything, any more than we have to justify climbing Mt. Everest, building a private submarine to explore the bottom of the Marianas Trench (as James Cameron has done), or building a SETI telescope array.
But frankly, I think the aspirational/educational/motivational aspects of manned space flight are all the justification we need. Mankind needs frontiers. When we stop looking outwards we start navel gazing and squandering our resources on comfort. We need people taking grand risks for spectacular achievement to inspire young people to stay in school and to achieve. We need heroes and role models who are not basketball players, actors, or American Idol winners.
As John Kennedy said, “We choose to do these things not because they are easy, but because they are hard.”
That’s funny, since I work in robotics and factory automation and information systems. I think I’ve got a pretty good handle on what this stuff can do - and what it can’t.
Autopilots are actually a fairly simple technology and have nothing to do with artificial intelligence. We had them before we had modern computers. I guess you can call an autopilot a ‘robot’, but its job is extremely simple compared to what you’re talking about. Google’s self-driving cars only work on roads that they have already mapped in detail, and so are better thought of as rail-less trains plying fixed routes. Not to say it isn’t a very impressive achievement, but it’s a long way from Google’s cars to a robot that can work autonomously in environments where it must use sophisticated human-like judgment.
Again, this is a very well defined job that involves limit judgment, or judgment that can be implemented with a simple rules engine. Get back to me when we can make a robot that can change a baby, automatically fix random failures of hardware in your home, cut your hair stylishly, make a dinner in your kitchen, or do any number of tasks that require the type of human judgment and dexterity that are very hard to automate.
In terms of space, I’m confident we can make robots that do fixed, well defined tasks. I know this because we already have done so. But if you want to explore unknown areas and do complicated things there that aren’t known in advance, robots today can’t do it. Look at the Philae lander on comet 67p - an incredible achievement to be sure, but it looks like it was crippled simply because it landed in shade. It had no capabilty to deal with that.
We recently found the Beagle 2 sitting on Mars - a robotic lander that vanished from radio contact shortly after departing from the ESA’s Mars orbiter. It’s sitting on the surface, apparently fully intact. So why didn’t it communicate? The best evidence so far is that one of its solar petals didn’t fully deploy, leaving its antenna pointing at a slight angle. That’s all it took to destroy the value of a $120 million dollar lander - something a human could have fixed in minutes.
Remote control works fine on earth, and maybe even on the moon. But once you get in the deep solar system, the speed of light delay, energy cost of transmitting constant real-time data and other issues make remote control very hard.
Yes, and trains run on fixed tracks, and all train traffic is monitored in central locations. This is a completely different class of problem.
I think it’s you showing the deep lack of knowledge here. I don’t doubt that we would automate Lunar mining once the parameters and procedures are well known. But before we can do that it will take humans to prove out processes and do detailed exploration in a timely fashion.
Take those Lava Tubes I’m talking about. We don’t know what’s inside that big black maw I posted. Send humans, and they can rappel down into it, explore passages, figure out their way around obstructions, etc. Send a robot down there blind, and the whole mission could be ruined by a 50lb rock blocking access to an intriguing tunnel.
Apollo 15’s biggest discovery would not have been made by a robot. It was made by an astronaut trained by a geologist to look for certain rocks, and finding them almost by accident.
On Apollo 17, the rover’s fender broke - if it had been an automated mission and the fender broke, it could have destroyed the results of experiments by throwing moondust all over the equipment. Because astronauts were there, they fashioned a quick fix with some duct tape and some maps.
“Cheaper” has to be qualified as “Cost vs performance”. Of course it’s more expensive in absolute terms to send humans. But if it costs 10X as much but you get 20X the benefit, then humans are ‘cheaper’. As the cost of space launch drops, the additional cost of sending humans declines.
I agree, but I’m not sure if it’s for the same reasons. Mars is actually harder to colonize than the moon, even if they were both the same distance away. Mars’ soil is full of reactive perchlorates, the atmosphere is too thin to be of much help to humans but thick enough to cause dust to get blown everywhere, the heavier gravity means stronger structures are required, and so it goes. Also, the vacuum of the moon has more possibilities for commercial manufacturing and various forms of research. It should be our first target for a manned base.
As I recall, the cost of the ocean crossings was much more expensive than the Apollo missions as a percentage of national wealth. I seem to recall that Spain was almost broken by some failed explorations. The ocean crossings were at least as dangerous as space exploration, and probably much more so. And the distances were similar in terms of time and resource management.
As a classical liberal and believer in markets myself, I think you’re giving them short shrift. I remember when personal computers first arrived, the common refrain was, “Oh, they’re cool, but they aren’t good for anything.” The applications people envisioned were extrapolations of existing industry. We could imaging them used for bookkeeping or desktop publishing, but no one would have guessed that there would be billion dollar industries dedicated to multiplayer games, or amazon.com, or ebay, or Netflix.
We really have no idea what industries will emerge once space access is cheap enough. We can identify a few that we think will help it stay alive in the early days (space tourism, etc), but once the technology starts iterating and coming down in cost and going up in safety, there will be applications we can’t even fathom today. Hell, maybe there will be a billion dollar industry specializing in sport skimming of the upper atmosphere, parachute jumps from near space, and other extreme sports. Maybe the ability to strap on wings and ‘fly’ in large caverns on the moon will spawn a multi-billion dollar sports industry. We really have no idea at this point.
Cherry picking solutions and applying them to specific problems is what a sane engineer does. He does not dismiss anything but a universal panacea. The smallpox vaccine is not worthless just because it didn’t also purify your water for you.
And manned space flight isn’t worthless because it doesn’t build us a better mosquito net. Yeah, I know. Thanks for re-iterating my original iteration after jerking knee at my response. If you have an issue with the logic of not making smallpox vaccines because we need a new water purifier and superior mosquito net then take that up with Ají de Gallina, not me.
[QUOTE=Sam Stone]
We really have no idea what industries will emerge once space access is cheap enough. We can identify a few that we think will help it stay alive in the early days (space tourism, etc), but once the technology starts iterating and coming down in cost and going up in safety, there will be applications we can’t even fathom today. Hell, maybe there will be a billion dollar industry specializing in sport skimming of the upper atmosphere, parachute jumps from near space, and other extreme sports. Maybe the ability to strap on wings and ‘fly’ in large caverns on the moon will spawn a multi-billion dollar sports industry. We really have no idea at this point.
[/QUOTE]
Exactly. It’s like saying back in the early 70’s that the whole concept of the internet thingy will be worthless and we should spend those resources on something tangible, like better water purification in the 3rd world because that will really fix all our problems. Sure, it would save a few people to do that…but, really, the internet and everything that’s come out of it has helped 3rd world people orders of magnitude more by providing jobs and capital than any fixed focused program like that would ever have. We don’t know the future, and we have no idea what, if any economic benefits manned space exploration will or won’t have at this point. I think it could be a fundamental shift that would usher in a new era for human civilization, but who knows? What it will do for sure though is expand our understanding of the universe, or at least our solar system, which, to me, is benefit enough right there.
It’s easy to pick winners in hindsight.
How much human energy was wasted on alchemy? It was a spectacularly good and useful idea, it just didn’t work. How many bright people were inspired by Freud to delve into the human psyche, only to find that classical psychotherapy was basically bunk? Remember when eugenics was the most important innovation in human history? That was supposed to save the human race and lead to a bright and beautiful new future.
We go down the wrong path all the time, often with perfectly good ideas that make a lot of sense at the time. Of course, some learning is still generated by these investigations, but if generations of proto-chemists had been a little less focused on turning lead into gold, and instead focused on following up on the really cool parts of existing research rather than focusing on one very specific and very distant dream, they would have probably been a lot better off. Indeed, the more “perfect” the dream that science is trying the achieve, the more likely there is to be some flaw in that dream.
The internet happened in slow stages, with each step informing the next one. Remember when pets.com crashed and burned? Now people buy pet supplies on the internet all the time. We just had a lot to learn about online commerce before we could make it work, and no amount of money or genius was going to make pets.com work before all of those other pieces were there.
Not every path pays off. That’s no reason we shouldn’t explore them, however. We wouldn’t KNOW that alchemy was bogus if we hasn’t poured in energy to explore it. And, even though it was bogus, a lot of what we know of as chemistry came out of all of the hogwash.
It was possible that the European explorations across the sea looking for a better trade route to China and the orient wouldn’t pay off. And a lot of bad things resulted in them, especially for the native peoples. But overall, it was a good thing and has been another path that has lead us to the world we now have. Perhaps manned exploration of space will do something similar, ushering in a new era of prosperity as we use the unimaginably vast resources in our solar system. Or, maybe it will be a bust from an economical perspective after all, and we’ll never be able to utilize those resources. But whether we can or can’t, we will learn SO much more so much faster if we spend that money and do that exploration, even if ultimately it’s simply to pave the way for future magic robots.